What is it's durability in wellbore conditions? 10 years, 20 years or 30 years?
What is it's particle size - how much will be filtered out between leak site and sampling site? Will the ratio of the components be affected, leading to misattribution of blame?
How big is the namespace? You'll need to be able to mark some millions of wells.
Your business plan has some holes in it. There's an aircraft carrier fleet passing through one of them.
Most (all?) of the landers were sterilized carefully before packaging for launch. Which doesn't make it impossible to get contamination there, but does make it a lot harder.
OTH, we can send a crew to Mars with a greenhouse, a base, etc.
You're volunteering to test the first prototype? On Earth, in space, or on Mars.
Hint : if you test the first prototype in mid-winter, high-altitude Antarctica, we might be able to help you if something doesn't work as expected. If you're on Mars... we'll include suicide pills in the medical pack.
You're making the excessively common mistake of spelling "when" with only two letters, "i" and "f". If it's not impossible (cataclysmic events on Earth clearly are not impossible ; Palaeocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum ; KTB ; Permo-Triassic crisis, whatever it was ; and at least two other major mass extinctions ; Snowball Earth has become consensus in the last decade or so), then "if" is simply a mis-spelling of "when".
Earth's core could be teaming with life for all we know. I personally doubt it, given the expected conditions,
At (conservatively expected conditions) 3-5kK I personally doubt it extremely much.
What temperature does DNA (a fair proxy for "life as we know it, Jim") start to pyrolize? Less than 1kK? Less that 0.5kK? Somewhere between the two?
I could stretch my credibility to 1kK, just.
CH4 + [UV photon] -> H* + CH3* ("*" standing for an unpaired electron, i.e. a free radical)
The free radicals then go on to react with other atmospheric species until you have a free hydrogen atom (or molecule) which can escape to space, while the carbon-containing free radical eventually makes it's way back down to the surface (driven by the relative density of carbon-containing molecules compared to hydrogen-containing ones) where the carbon will eventually react with an oxygen-containing species (metal oxide, perchlorate, or water) to release CO2.
A carbon-containing free radical could also react with a nitrogen molecule to form cyanides, which then can react with perchlorates (found at the Phoenix location) again releasing carbon dioxide eventually.
There are other possible reactions ; I've seen those two cited.
Incidentally, this same process is also likely active in the gas giants, leading to the formation of carbon chain molecules which are thought to colour the belts of Jupiter and Saturn. But being further from the Sun, the UV intensity is lower.
According to my oil relatives in Louisiana, it takes a good barge full of oil or water based drilling mud to fill a hole that deep,
True, with caveats below.
and all our current drilling technology on earth relies on that drilling mud to [various tasks]
There are several technologies that use air as a "working fluid" rather than liquids. There are also other liquid working fluids in use - ethylene glycol, for example - but you still need substantial volumes of them.
[various tasks]cool and clean the cutting bit which would otherwise approximately instantly jam, overheat, lose its temper/hardness and thereafter fail to cut.
Again, there are other technologies, and the "jamming" isn't instantaneous. It sounds like they are talking about tricone (or bicone) drilling bits Image rather than the (more expensive) PDC style of bit Image. Both type of bit ("roller-cone" versus "fixed-cutter") can be designed to work with "air" as a working fluid, and both can survive a time of rotating on bottom without circulation. But it sure doesn't enhance the bit's longevity.
There are more speculative techniques such as drilling with lasers. Which is going to be interesting for directional drilling (say, you have a shallow deposit of water-rich rock... but it's under a crater rim mountain, and you can drill a shorter hole from inside the crater, but have to drill directionally). But these, like the cable-tool drilling you also mention, need some sort of "working fluid" to clear the rock cuttings out of the hole. Even if the rock is vapourised by a laser, it's still going to condense out as dust somewhere. You don't want it to pack-off around the drill string, do you?
No, you want to drop a power plant into it that burns the fuel to power a laser pumping energy to a satellite in orbit.
You need to attend your employers remedial fire safety training course. you know, the one that teaches you (in slow words and large letters) to hit the alarm before doing anything else. And then goes on to extinguishing by breaking the "fire triangle" of fuel, oxidising agent and heat.
Remember it? If you don't, you're a danger to yourself and your colleagues.
You may (should) have done it in fire training at school ; certainly in your chemistry courses. You did do basic chemistry when you were 12 to 14, didn't you, even if you then retired to the programming basement?
that almost certainly won't happen again any time soon
Until the next time, which is likely to be nearer in the future than the previous such event was in the past.
Or haven't you heard of climate change?
Even if you're American, you're going to be paying the costs of climate change as your insurance companies increase premiums to account for these "unpredictable" events (which they're predicting to become actuarially more frequent in the future).
Nooo bubbles here. Social 1.0 isn't a fad or a bubble at all. Bet your grandchildren on it.
One of our local banks is running adverts that emphasise it's founding in 1695. They conveniently overlook that this was part of the Darien fiasco, which became a bubble and eventually bankrupted the country to the extent that it had to merge with the neighbouring larger country.
The jury is most definitely out on the question of whether a "Giant Impact" is essential to the development of life, but that a "Giant Impact" did happen is very much the consensus.
Having said that, there are lots of things which were probably involved in the origin of life and which the presence of a Moon, tides, etc may have enhanced. But since we don't know exactly how life did form, we can't be very didactic about it. Not that that will stop people from saying "This did happen!" without any qualification.
One thing to remember : when life was originating, the Moon was considerably closer to the Earth, orbiting it a lot faster and the days were shorter. Therefore, the tides would have been both higher and more frequent, making things considerably more vigorous. We know that from the fact that the Moon is still receding from us (direct measurement, courtesy of Apollo-placed reflectors)and modelling of the interaction between the Earth's rotation, the development of ocean and solid-Earth tides, and some basic physics. Precisely how fast the Earth was spinning, and how many days there were per month, and how far the Moon was from the Earth, are uncertain at most precise points in time, because we don't know how much friction there was between the water of the oceans and the seabed, which is the main mechanism for torquing angular momentum from the Earth's spin into the Moon's orbit. There are certain fossils (e.g. wood and the shells of some marine organisms) which record daily growth cycles and tidally-influenced cycles, which give us (the last time I counted) about 4 reasonably accurate "set points" on the day-length versus time curve. From that, we can be sure that the curve is not linear, and is not simple. A priori, there is no reason to expect that the curve would be simple, because the changes in global coastline lengths and orientations, as well as the depth to seabed, are definitely not simple and similar at all times. The simple process of forming and breaking apart a super-continent (which has happened at least 3 times), is going to drastically change the amount of tidal coastline.
The duty of the juror is to listen to the evidence presented (including the demeanor of the defendant, how convincing the witnesses are, etc). If jurors are paid for attending in your jurisdiction, then that is what they are being paid for : to pay attention, to be awake.
At the very least, the juror should have forfeited his right to his attendance allowance (whatever it's called) for the days that he tweeted. Potentially, if he'd been ordered (along with the rest of the jury) to pay attention, to say nothing about the case outside the jury room, to put aside his prejudices , to disregard anything about the case he hears outside the court room (and jury room) etc etc ad nauseam, and he then didn't do what he'd been told, then he's guilty of contempt of court. Which attracts unlimited fines and/ or unlimited jail time (at least, it does in this jurisdiction). Although I don't think it would go that far unless the buffoon in question was to compound his contempt - which he's getting close to from the reporting of the case that I've heard.
Someone else (probably some-several else) asked why all the juror's mobile phones etc weren't confiscated on entering the court room. Which is a damned good question. If (when) I get called for jury duty again (last time I was sent abroad, which is an acceptable excuse in this precise area because there are a lot of people who work all over the world ; OTOH, I'm back on the list for duty), I'd certainly volunteer my phone (or just the battery) before being asked, in order to make it difficult for the other jurors to decline.
EM in some cases is better described by waves in the classical sense, [...] Though often EM is better described as photon particles,
Our concepts of "wave" and "particle" are not terribly good fits for what photons are. Photons are photons and need to see no psychoanalysts about their identity problems ; we have problems matching the reality of photons to our concepts of "wave" and "particle", but that's our problem, not the photon's problem.
My school physics labs included a series of experiments in how semiconductors and LEDs work (emitting the "particle" aspect of photons with well-defined energies), how EM waves propagate in series of inductors and capacitors (then, with the inductance and capacitance of the vacuum, the speed of light), and how waves interfere with each other. All perfectly good physics experiments, well presented. Then we did an experiment that slightly puzzled me at the time : setting up a dim (red) LED in a dark room and doing a double-slit experiment, then turning down the drive current on the LED to see what the dimmest setting was that we could detect the interference pattern. It turned out to be essentially a test of people's quality of vision (not a surprise, really).
Then we did the calculations : from the drive current and the characteristics of the LEDs, we could calculate how often the "particle" aspect of the photons were being generated ; the speed of light told us the spacing between the photons (on average) ; and the interference pattern showed us that the "wave" aspect of the photons were interfereing between the "particle" aspects. The trouble was... our spacing between photons was on the order of 10-15m (depending on the vision quality of the experimenters)... but our apparatus was barely 2 metre between LED and eye. So, each photon was interfering with either the photon before it (which had already been absorbed by the eye), or the photon following it (which had not been emitted yet). Huh?
10 years later, I realised that this had been the climax of the 2-year long course. And I can now say, with certainty, "I have seen the wave-particle duality problem with these here [points] eyes."
Temperature, entropy and something else - I understand the physics, but I don't know the mathematical conventions. "U" standing for total energy of the system?
actually at the energies involved it is pretty damn hot.
The motion of the particles in the beam is mostly collimated, so doesn't count as thermal energy. To be considered "thermal" energy, it's the random motion of the particles about the object's centre of mass that is considered, not the net motion of the particles as a whole.
Consider this thought experiment : prepare a couple of Dewar flasks, one filled with liquid helium at a couple of Kelvin, and the other containing liquid zinc at about 600K. Sitting on the bench in the lab, they have their particular temperatures. Now, I put them onto a plane and accelerate them to 1000km/kr in some direction. Does the helium heat up? I slow the plane down ; does the zinc freeze?
Just because it's well understood science, doesn't mean that thermodynamics is either easy or self-evident.
4. Carve your message into the casing of the iPad.
5. with a roller (or a pad of leather, such as an iPad case), dab ink evenly over the message.
6. Press the iPad to a clean sheet of paper to reproduce your message. Repeat as often as desired.
7. Sell "uniquely customised" iPad (sounds like a menstruation product) and use funds to repurchase Android device.
8....
9. Profit (for someone)
"Mysthenia Gravis" or "Lambert-Eaton syndrome" are simply beyond what many people can tell their future doctors, and they have even a rougher time trying to spell them for Google.
I almost hate to say this, and certainly hesitate before typing this, but "Darwin Award, anyone?"
Remove (from your gene pool) the ones with spelling and/or writing problems (or thinking problems, to not realise this might be a problem in the future), and eventually the number of people with such problems will decrease. If we were breeding Drosophila or Equus, we'd call it a cull, but people seem to treat (some) hominids differently.
In other news, scientists discover a way to form gypsum in the absence of water.
It's not common that you'll hear a scientist say this, but that is absolutely impossible. It is not possible under any circumstances to form gypsum in the absence of water. Gypsum is a hydrous mineral - it contains molecules of water in it's structure. So even if you took Feynman's trip "all the way to the bottom", you'd have to assemble an atom of sulphur and four of oxygen (to form a sulphate ion ; you're in Feynman territory, so don't worry about the charges), then add a calcium atom (now you can balance the charges if you want. Then add two molecules of water (as atoms, or as molecules ; it doesn't matter)... and that's your anhydrous synthesis contaminated with substantial quantities of water. And we haven't even got onto getting the ions and molecules into the right positions (also essential for it to be "gypsum" and not anything other mineral).
Where is my packet of dehydrated DHMO? Ah, under the tin of tartan paint.
If you think advertisers donâ(TM)t care about your nationality, I think you donâ(TM)t know anyone in the field.
Fortunately you're right. Or, if I do know anyone in that field (most people I know from non-work environments, I don't ask what their jobs are. Why would one?) they're smart enough to realise that I'm likely to be very un-impressed. Conning people out of money they can't afford for things they don't need is not an honourable profession.
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What is it's durability in wellbore conditions? 10 years, 20 years or 30 years?
What is it's particle size - how much will be filtered out between leak site and sampling site? Will the ratio of the components be affected, leading to misattribution of blame?
How big is the namespace? You'll need to be able to mark some millions of wells.
Your business plan has some holes in it. There's an aircraft carrier fleet passing through one of them.
My wife was working in the orchards about 100km down-wind of Chernobyl for the week when and after it blew. I'll ask her.
(Actually, touch wood, nothing much, yet. Probably.)
Most (all?) of the landers were sterilized carefully before packaging for launch. Which doesn't make it impossible to get contamination there, but does make it a lot harder.
You're volunteering to test the first prototype? On Earth, in space, or on Mars.
Hint : if you test the first prototype in mid-winter, high-altitude Antarctica, we might be able to help you if something doesn't work as expected. If you're on Mars ... we'll include suicide pills in the medical pack.
You're making the excessively common mistake of spelling "when" with only two letters, "i" and "f".
If it's not impossible (cataclysmic events on Earth clearly are not impossible ; Palaeocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum ; KTB ; Permo-Triassic crisis, whatever it was ; and at least two other major mass extinctions ; Snowball Earth has become consensus in the last decade or so), then "if" is simply a mis-spelling of "when".
At (conservatively expected conditions) 3-5kK I personally doubt it extremely much.
What temperature does DNA (a fair proxy for "life as we know it, Jim") start to pyrolize? Less than 1kK? Less that 0.5kK? Somewhere between the two?
I could stretch my credibility to 1kK, just.
("*" standing for an unpaired electron, i.e. a free radical)
The free radicals then go on to react with other atmospheric species until you have a free hydrogen atom (or molecule) which can escape to space, while the carbon-containing free radical eventually makes it's way back down to the surface (driven by the relative density of carbon-containing molecules compared to hydrogen-containing ones) where the carbon will eventually react with an oxygen-containing species (metal oxide, perchlorate, or water) to release CO2.
A carbon-containing free radical could also react with a nitrogen molecule to form cyanides, which then can react with perchlorates (found at the Phoenix location) again releasing carbon dioxide eventually.
There are other possible reactions ; I've seen those two cited.
Incidentally, this same process is also likely active in the gas giants, leading to the formation of carbon chain molecules which are thought to colour the belts of Jupiter and Saturn. But being further from the Sun, the UV intensity is lower.
True, with caveats below.
There are several technologies that use air as a "working fluid" rather than liquids. There are also other liquid working fluids in use - ethylene glycol, for example - but you still need substantial volumes of them.
Again, there are other technologies, and the "jamming" isn't instantaneous. It sounds like they are talking about tricone (or bicone) drilling bits Image rather than the (more expensive) PDC style of bit Image. Both type of bit ("roller-cone" versus "fixed-cutter") can be designed to work with "air" as a working fluid, and both can survive a time of rotating on bottom without circulation. But it sure doesn't enhance the bit's longevity.
There are more speculative techniques such as drilling with lasers. Which is going to be interesting for directional drilling (say, you have a shallow deposit of water-rich rock ... but it's under a crater rim mountain, and you can drill a shorter hole from inside the crater, but have to drill directionally). But these, like the cable-tool drilling you also mention, need some sort of "working fluid" to clear the rock cuttings out of the hole. Even if the rock is vapourised by a laser, it's still going to condense out as dust somewhere. You don't want it to pack-off around the drill string, do you?
You need to attend your employers remedial fire safety training course. you know, the one that teaches you (in slow words and large letters) to hit the alarm before doing anything else. And then goes on to extinguishing by breaking the "fire triangle" of fuel, oxidising agent and heat.
Remember it? If you don't, you're a danger to yourself and your colleagues.
You may (should) have done it in fire training at school ; certainly in your chemistry courses. You did do basic chemistry when you were 12 to 14, didn't you, even if you then retired to the programming basement?
Is this just for music MP3s? Because that would explain why I'd never noticed the "feature".
Or is it a bug?
That was predicted for years before the event.
Until the next time, which is likely to be nearer in the future than the previous such event was in the past.
Or haven't you heard of climate change?
Even if you're American, you're going to be paying the costs of climate change as your insurance companies increase premiums to account for these "unpredictable" events (which they're predicting to become actuarially more frequent in the future).
If that is really your belief, then you seriously need to go back and RTFM.
One of our local banks is running adverts that emphasise it's founding in 1695. They conveniently overlook that this was part of the Darien fiasco, which became a bubble and eventually bankrupted the country to the extent that it had to merge with the neighbouring larger country.
Bubbles? Tell us news, not history.
The jury is most definitely out on the question of whether a "Giant Impact" is essential to the development of life, but that a "Giant Impact" did happen is very much the consensus.
Having said that, there are lots of things which were probably involved in the origin of life and which the presence of a Moon, tides, etc may have enhanced. But since we don't know exactly how life did form, we can't be very didactic about it. Not that that will stop people from saying "This did happen!" without any qualification.
One thing to remember : when life was originating, the Moon was considerably closer to the Earth, orbiting it a lot faster and the days were shorter. Therefore, the tides would have been both higher and more frequent, making things considerably more vigorous. We know that from the fact that the Moon is still receding from us (direct measurement, courtesy of Apollo-placed reflectors)and modelling of the interaction between the Earth's rotation, the development of ocean and solid-Earth tides, and some basic physics. Precisely how fast the Earth was spinning, and how many days there were per month, and how far the Moon was from the Earth, are uncertain at most precise points in time, because we don't know how much friction there was between the water of the oceans and the seabed, which is the main mechanism for torquing angular momentum from the Earth's spin into the Moon's orbit. There are certain fossils (e.g. wood and the shells of some marine organisms) which record daily growth cycles and tidally-influenced cycles, which give us (the last time I counted) about 4 reasonably accurate "set points" on the day-length versus time curve. From that, we can be sure that the curve is not linear, and is not simple. A priori, there is no reason to expect that the curve would be simple, because the changes in global coastline lengths and orientations, as well as the depth to seabed, are definitely not simple and similar at all times. The simple process of forming and breaking apart a super-continent (which has happened at least 3 times), is going to drastically change the amount of tidal coastline.
At the very least, the juror should have forfeited his right to his attendance allowance (whatever it's called) for the days that he tweeted. Potentially, if he'd been ordered (along with the rest of the jury) to pay attention, to say nothing about the case outside the jury room, to put aside his prejudices , to disregard anything about the case he hears outside the court room (and jury room) etc etc ad nauseam, and he then didn't do what he'd been told, then he's guilty of contempt of court. Which attracts unlimited fines and/ or unlimited jail time (at least, it does in this jurisdiction). Although I don't think it would go that far unless the buffoon in question was to compound his contempt - which he's getting close to from the reporting of the case that I've heard.
Someone else (probably some-several else) asked why all the juror's mobile phones etc weren't confiscated on entering the court room. Which is a damned good question. If (when) I get called for jury duty again (last time I was sent abroad, which is an acceptable excuse in this precise area because there are a lot of people who work all over the world ; OTOH, I'm back on the list for duty), I'd certainly volunteer my phone (or just the battery) before being asked, in order to make it difficult for the other jurors to decline.
Our concepts of "wave" and "particle" are not terribly good fits for what photons are. Photons are photons and need to see no psychoanalysts about their identity problems ; we have problems matching the reality of photons to our concepts of "wave" and "particle", but that's our problem, not the photon's problem.
My school physics labs included a series of experiments in how semiconductors and LEDs work (emitting the "particle" aspect of photons with well-defined energies), how EM waves propagate in series of inductors and capacitors (then, with the inductance and capacitance of the vacuum, the speed of light), and how waves interfere with each other. All perfectly good physics experiments, well presented. Then we did an experiment that slightly puzzled me at the time : setting up a dim (red) LED in a dark room and doing a double-slit experiment, then turning down the drive current on the LED to see what the dimmest setting was that we could detect the interference pattern. It turned out to be essentially a test of people's quality of vision (not a surprise, really). ... our spacing between photons was on the order of 10-15m (depending on the vision quality of the experimenters) ... but our apparatus was barely 2 metre between LED and eye.
Then we did the calculations : from the drive current and the characteristics of the LEDs, we could calculate how often the "particle" aspect of the photons were being generated ; the speed of light told us the spacing between the photons (on average) ; and the interference pattern showed us that the "wave" aspect of the photons were interfereing between the "particle" aspects. The trouble was
So, each photon was interfering with either the photon before it (which had already been absorbed by the eye), or the photon following it (which had not been emitted yet). Huh?
10 years later, I realised that this had been the climax of the 2-year long course. And I can now say, with certainty, "I have seen the wave-particle duality problem with these here [points] eyes."
Well-designed course. Nuffield Foundation. Recommended.
Temperature, entropy and something else - I understand the physics, but I don't know the mathematical conventions. "U" standing for total energy of the system?
OK, so she passes one of the more basic geek tests. Fails the gender test, of course.
The motion of the particles in the beam is mostly collimated, so doesn't count as thermal energy. To be considered "thermal" energy, it's the random motion of the particles about the object's centre of mass that is considered, not the net motion of the particles as a whole.
Consider this thought experiment : prepare a couple of Dewar flasks, one filled with liquid helium at a couple of Kelvin, and the other containing liquid zinc at about 600K. Sitting on the bench in the lab, they have their particular temperatures. Now, I put them onto a plane and accelerate them to 1000km/kr in some direction. Does the helium heat up? I slow the plane down ; does the zinc freeze?
Just because it's well understood science, doesn't mean that thermodynamics is either easy or self-evident.
4. Carve your message into the casing of the iPad. ...
5. with a roller (or a pad of leather, such as an iPad case), dab ink evenly over the message.
6. Press the iPad to a clean sheet of paper to reproduce your message. Repeat as often as desired.
7. Sell "uniquely customised" iPad (sounds like a menstruation product) and use funds to repurchase Android device.
8.
9. Profit (for someone)
Send them a Beowulf cluster of Watsons ... or does IBM have a patent about doing that?
I almost hate to say this, and certainly hesitate before typing this, but "Darwin Award, anyone?"
Remove (from your gene pool) the ones with spelling and/or writing problems (or thinking problems, to not realise this might be a problem in the future), and eventually the number of people with such problems will decrease. If we were breeding Drosophila or Equus, we'd call it a cull, but people seem to treat (some) hominids differently.
Next question?
It's not common that you'll hear a scientist say this, but that is absolutely impossible. It is not possible under any circumstances to form gypsum in the absence of water. Gypsum is a hydrous mineral - it contains molecules of water in it's structure. So even if you took Feynman's trip "all the way to the bottom", you'd have to assemble an atom of sulphur and four of oxygen (to form a sulphate ion ; you're in Feynman territory, so don't worry about the charges), then add a calcium atom (now you can balance the charges if you want. Then add two molecules of water (as atoms, or as molecules ; it doesn't matter) ... and that's your anhydrous synthesis contaminated with substantial quantities of water. And we haven't even got onto getting the ions and molecules into the right positions (also essential for it to be "gypsum" and not anything other mineral).
Where is my packet of dehydrated DHMO? Ah, under the tin of tartan paint.
Fortunately you're right. Or, if I do know anyone in that field (most people I know from non-work environments, I don't ask what their jobs are. Why would one?) they're smart enough to realise that I'm likely to be very un-impressed. Conning people out of money they can't afford for things they don't need is not an honourable profession.