Would all that extra water give fish massive new homelands in which to replenish their dwindling stocks?
Not a lot. Bearing in mind that they're running into problems when they're already got the area of the continental shelves to inhabit, then adding a few more tens of miles of shallow water along current coasts wouldn't help a lot.
Also, effectively, there would be some loss of usable habitat. Most of the open ocean is the watery equivalent of a desert because it is so far from inputs of minerals from rivers. In theory and first-year biology, phytoplankton only need water, sunlight and carbon dioxide (from the air) to grow. In practice and second year and later biology, they also need phosphates (because DNA includes phosphorus to bond the deoxyribose element of the molecular "backbone" to the next one), iron (various enzymes)... These minerals get into the oceans primarily from rivers, secondarily from sub-sea volcanos, and thirdly from wind transported dust. If an area of ocean doesn't have one of those inputs it becomes a very low productivity zone. you'll probably have heard of attempts to "fertiize" the oceans as a way of absorbing atmospheric CO2 ; that's the mineral shortages they're trying to alleviate.
By moving the coastline inland, then some areas of the ocean will become further from coastal inputs of minerals and lose productivity.
Short version then is that changes in ocean productivity from a rise in sea level will be complex, and you really need to look at the details to work out what is likely to happen. A broad brush won't really work.
Or maybe the melting freshwater glaciers would dilute the salt too much.
However, that is a question amenable to a broad brush. The oceans are, on average, 4km deep, at 28 to 35 parts per thousand of salts. Adding 3.3m (about the 11ft mentioned) to that would change the average salinity by 0.024 to 0.029 parts per thousand. OK, that'll take something like 50,000 years to get mixed through, and while the glacier melt isn't well mixed, the effects will be larger. So you need to specify your model for the rate and location of ocean mixing to model the actual salinity effects. But from the other end of the telescope, marine life can generally deal with the natural variation of salinity mentioned above (28 to 35 parts per thousand, range ~7ppt), so if your 3.3m of fresh water is diluted with more than about 15m or sea water, then the resulting change in salinity is going to be within the normal variation of sea water.
You have a perfectly reasonable question, but I don't think it'll be a big effect.
The ads will inform Americans TV viewers that "More people die every year from smoking than from murder, AIDS, suicide, drugs, car crashes, and alcohol, combined,"
So, does that make "coffin nails" (to use a local nickname for ready-rolled cigarettes), more or less effective population controllers in America than guns?
If it turns out that cigarettes kill more people than guns, will the Great American Guntotin' Public step up to the challenge and start killing more people?
I don't know if anyone noticed, but London was a war zone during Ramadan.
London was also a war zone before and after Ramadan too. The place is a shit hole at the best of times, and a worse shit hole at the non-best of times.
Personally, I'd vote for thermonuclear revocation of planning consent. We can do it during Trump's visit, perhaps, and kill two stones with one bird.
Implying that the iPhon autoIncorrect doesn't learn it's user's preferences? (I wouldn't know - I've never owned an iPhone, and never borrowed one either. I got rid of my Mac in about 2010, disliking the interface.)
it can now autocorrect the word 'fuck' for me.
Instead of making it "duck" or "luck" ; yeah my S7 learned that within a couple of weeks of me getting it.
Is Linus still involved in non-OS operating systems? I recall he was working for several years in the firmware of some software-controlled hardware platform, but I don't know what the current state is.
1) Fusion rockets are a thing. You don't worry about complete magnetic confinement in a very specific way, and the result is that you get a particle stream that provides thrust.
So it's a completely regular rocket, although having a fusion power source, not hampsters in a cage. Meh. You still have to provide reaction mass of some sort - in this case, refined hydrogen/ deuterium/ tritium mix - which gets thrown out of the back end of the spacecraft and in the process produces momentum forwards. A rocket. You'll need to provide it with reaction mass all the time, which you then throw away. Newton's third law, pure and simple.
On a long mission, your main resource consumed will be the reaction mass. If you can make the drive run on the crew's shit, or ice from a comet nucleus you pick up en route, then you make that mass serve double duty, but you still have to accelerate it with your payload, then throw it away backwards.
You can get the efficiency of use of your reaction mass higher by increasing the exhaust velocity. But that's capped at c. Which also applies to throwing photons out the back of your rocket, but they have the advantage of being created at use, and you don't need to accelerate a shipload of photons alongside your payload.
[Fusion rockets] an actual thing
When did someone make a fusion reactor and fly it to demonstrate it's drive efficiency? Got a DOI for the engineering report on the flight?
In that case, you' be sitting on the warmer of the well-attested mantle plumes on Earth. The wife and I were discussing holidaying in Iceland, the other plume, a few weeks ago - she saying I could go and freeze on on my own while she went to somewhere warm, and me agreeing.
One of the aspects of the plume concept that just doesn't seem right is the longevity. The Iceland plume has been stewing merrily away for about 60 million years (it produced warping at the surface before patent eruption of volcanics about 58 Myr), during which time it has migrated about 500km relative to the spreading centre, but since then the Atlantic has spread by some 1500km, with the "plume" nailed solidly to the spreading ridge. But the theoretical description would have it stationary during all that time without the initial wandering. The Hawaii plume OTOH seems to have remained stationary as the Pacific plate drifts above it (no spreading centre involved there, simplifying matters) for some 85 Myr. It just doesn't seem right to have such stability at the same time as also having evident dynamism in the same system.
Since you're so het up about it, I take it that you've issued lawyer-backed instructions to delete your iCloud account and brick your iPhone the minute they comply with any of these legal moves.
Alas, we still use paper ballots, so no machines to hack there.
You're unimaginatively thinking within the box.
So, it's a paper ballot. So, people make marks on a pre-printed form, which are then scanned by human eyeballs running the version-0 analogue eyeball to collate a vote count by moving the pieces of paper into piles, which are then counted by other wetware. Attack surfaces... the wetware are attackable, and always have been. Unfortunately, people have been installing checks and balances into the counting process. So, that leaves the paper.
I'm off to develop printing processes on paper made with oxidisable organic electronic pressure sensors, so that the paper can sense where the voter has placed their mark (using a soft, carbon-rich pencil may mean you can use contact pads and resistance instead of pressure. Meh.) ; when the mark is made, after a short delay the inks used on the paper are instructed to change their configuration to put your target candidate name beside the mark. So the ballots correct themselves in the ballot box, without any need for tedious bribing counters or stuffing boxes.
There's a strategy for correcting inconvenient paper ballots by hacking the printing process. Or even more simply, the ballot delivery process. Print your special ballots where you want, then hack UPDHL's (other delivery services are available) so the government approved ballots are delivered to you, and yours to the polling stations. Simples! And a pleasantly high-tech solution to a simplistic "mark on paper" technology.
Oh, I forgot - you'd need to front end your work by a (fake news!) campaign about how some people just vote because they see Candidate X name at the 3rd position on the ballot in an advert on TV. So ballots will need to be printed in random candidate order. That'll deal with inconvenient statistics from the tellers at the count.
In terms of cubic metres of environment per gigajoule of investment, living inside rotating space stations (or lunar stations) will be ridiculously more efficient - and many millennia quicker to achieve - than terraforming anything. Even assuming that sufficient materials for your terraforming project exist in your planetary system, which is not subject to any sort of guarantee.
What impact would tidal locking have on the habitability of the planet?
Good question. To which, nobody knows the answer. Discussions about the question have been tossing from the world of science fiction to atmospheric physics and beyond for decades, with on average neutral results. Nobody knows, still.
0.1c should be achievable with a fusion drive that doesn't require any incredible new scientific discoveries.
A fusion power plant would provide far larger amounts of energy to a spacecraft (at the expense of considerably increasing size and mass). It would do nothing about providing propulsion. For that we've got a choice of throwing reaction mass out the back (or sides) of the vessel - the rocket principle and it's reaction mass problem - or throwing photons out the back (sides) to achieve the same transfer of momentum.
The only non-reaction drive around is the putative NASA EM-cavity drive, and the physics of that are definitely not sure while the engineering is tiny forces in large mechanisms, and a long way from convincing.
Food from the 1850's tasted better than today's gmo products.
Except that it was on the verge of rotting by the time it got to your kitchen. Which is fine if you like that sort of thing. (I'm trying to get a kefir culture going to make my milk go sour.)
When I see bad spelling, I do judge the writer on it. I take sloppy spelling as a sign of soppy thinking and inattention to detail, and take it as a fair inference that the rest of the writer's thinking and analysis is equally sloppy.
If you want your argument to be taken seriously, do your copy-editing before you hit the "submit" button.
To distinguish it from a bridleway and from a footpath.
If you're on a right of way, on foot, no one can deny you use of the footpath. But if you're on a footpath on horseback you can be ordered off the footpath and told to go onto a bridleway. Similarly if you're using your carriage on a bridleway you can be ordered off it to take your carriage onto a carriageway.
The usage was established a century or so before those terrorists in the American colonies started to demand seats in Parliament.
But brick lost favor once automobiles could go fast enough for the average brick surface to be too rough.
It's not particularly about surface roughness, but about toughness and resilience. Brick (and also flagstones, as mentioned upthread) is brittle and inflexible, and the rate of change of stress resulting from the loading and unloading of the brick/ stone by the wheel driving onto it and off it results in the brick/ stone fracturing very rapidly when traversed by a fast-moving vehicle. After which, the road rapidly starts to break up, and needs to be re-laid at considerable expense and inconvenience.
The asphalt in tarmacadam allows the load-bearing aggregate stones to flex slightly, accommodating such flexure and maintaining a smoother surface for longer.
Cobbles accommodate the flexure by setting each cobblestone ("sett") in about a cm-thickness of sand.
Road surfaces are much more complicated things than most people think. Choosing the correct rock types to provide the appropriate properties of strength, toughness and dry- and wet- friction is a big part of economic geology. And then there are the requirements for aggregate to go into concrete.
Known to some as "tar macadam", hence the word "tarmac". (macadam refers to the gravel part)
MacAdam was the Scot who invented the mixture of aggregate (crushed stone) and asphalt.
When originally introduced, the product considerably increased the demand for crushed stone, and so for a considerable part of the Victorian period, a routine hard labour task for prisoners and the poor in the workhouse was crushing stone by hand. The ideal size of stone for making pavement was described by MacAdam as being "small enough to fit into a child's mouth". So that's some of what the children in the hard labour yard of the workhouse were doing.
Slashdot Mirror
I stopped using it when I stopped using Windows ... oops - still got a copy buried in the depths of the MP3 pile.
Not a lot. Bearing in mind that they're running into problems when they're already got the area of the continental shelves to inhabit, then adding a few more tens of miles of shallow water along current coasts wouldn't help a lot.
Also, effectively, there would be some loss of usable habitat. Most of the open ocean is the watery equivalent of a desert because it is so far from inputs of minerals from rivers. In theory and first-year biology, phytoplankton only need water, sunlight and carbon dioxide (from the air) to grow. In practice and second year and later biology, they also need phosphates (because DNA includes phosphorus to bond the deoxyribose element of the molecular "backbone" to the next one), iron (various enzymes) ... These minerals get into the oceans primarily from rivers, secondarily from sub-sea volcanos, and thirdly from wind transported dust. If an area of ocean doesn't have one of those inputs it becomes a very low productivity zone. you'll probably have heard of attempts to "fertiize" the oceans as a way of absorbing atmospheric CO2 ; that's the mineral shortages they're trying to alleviate.
By moving the coastline inland, then some areas of the ocean will become further from coastal inputs of minerals and lose productivity.
Short version then is that changes in ocean productivity from a rise in sea level will be complex, and you really need to look at the details to work out what is likely to happen. A broad brush won't really work.
However, that is a question amenable to a broad brush. The oceans are, on average, 4km deep, at 28 to 35 parts per thousand of salts. Adding 3.3m (about the 11ft mentioned) to that would change the average salinity by 0.024 to 0.029 parts per thousand. OK, that'll take something like 50,000 years to get mixed through, and while the glacier melt isn't well mixed, the effects will be larger. So you need to specify your model for the rate and location of ocean mixing to model the actual salinity effects. But from the other end of the telescope, marine life can generally deal with the natural variation of salinity mentioned above (28 to 35 parts per thousand, range ~7ppt), so if your 3.3m of fresh water is diluted with more than about 15m or sea water, then the resulting change in salinity is going to be within the normal variation of sea water.
You have a perfectly reasonable question, but I don't think it'll be a big effect.
Clearly Musk did create Bitcoin.
So, does that make "coffin nails" (to use a local nickname for ready-rolled cigarettes), more or less effective population controllers in America than guns?
If it turns out that cigarettes kill more people than guns, will the Great American Guntotin' Public step up to the challenge and start killing more people?
London was also a war zone before and after Ramadan too. The place is a shit hole at the best of times, and a worse shit hole at the non-best of times.
Personally, I'd vote for thermonuclear revocation of planning consent. We can do it during Trump's visit, perhaps, and kill two stones with one bird.
Implying that the iPhon autoIncorrect doesn't learn it's user's preferences? (I wouldn't know - I've never owned an iPhone, and never borrowed one either. I got rid of my Mac in about 2010, disliking the interface.)
Instead of making it "duck" or "luck" ; yeah my S7 learned that within a couple of weeks of me getting it.
Yeah, I hadn't heard that "convention" before. Casts doubt on the rest of the comment.
For headsmen - in the "executioner" sense.
(Not sure if that's the name. The ex-Google idiot trying to blame his arsehole on being autistic. Or something similarly pathetic.)
Is Linus still involved in non-OS operating systems? I recall he was working for several years in the firmware of some software-controlled hardware platform, but I don't know what the current state is.
So it's a completely regular rocket, although having a fusion power source, not hampsters in a cage. Meh. You still have to provide reaction mass of some sort - in this case, refined hydrogen/ deuterium/ tritium mix - which gets thrown out of the back end of the spacecraft and in the process produces momentum forwards. A rocket. You'll need to provide it with reaction mass all the time, which you then throw away. Newton's third law, pure and simple.
On a long mission, your main resource consumed will be the reaction mass. If you can make the drive run on the crew's shit, or ice from a comet nucleus you pick up en route, then you make that mass serve double duty, but you still have to accelerate it with your payload, then throw it away backwards.
You can get the efficiency of use of your reaction mass higher by increasing the exhaust velocity. But that's capped at c. Which also applies to throwing photons out the back of your rocket, but they have the advantage of being created at use, and you don't need to accelerate a shipload of photons alongside your payload.
When did someone make a fusion reactor and fly it to demonstrate it's drive efficiency? Got a DOI for the engineering report on the flight?
As a variant on "waste of time", yes.
In that case, you' be sitting on the warmer of the well-attested mantle plumes on Earth. The wife and I were discussing holidaying in Iceland, the other plume, a few weeks ago - she saying I could go and freeze on on my own while she went to somewhere warm, and me agreeing.
One of the aspects of the plume concept that just doesn't seem right is the longevity. The Iceland plume has been stewing merrily away for about 60 million years (it produced warping at the surface before patent eruption of volcanics about 58 Myr), during which time it has migrated about 500km relative to the spreading centre, but since then the Atlantic has spread by some 1500km, with the "plume" nailed solidly to the spreading ridge. But the theoretical description would have it stationary during all that time without the initial wandering. The Hawaii plume OTOH seems to have remained stationary as the Pacific plate drifts above it (no spreading centre involved there, simplifying matters) for some 85 Myr. It just doesn't seem right to have such stability at the same time as also having evident dynamism in the same system.
Since you're so het up about it, I take it that you've issued lawyer-backed instructions to delete your iCloud account and brick your iPhone the minute they comply with any of these legal moves.
You're unimaginatively thinking within the box.
So, it's a paper ballot. So, people make marks on a pre-printed form, which are then scanned by human eyeballs running the version-0 analogue eyeball to collate a vote count by moving the pieces of paper into piles, which are then counted by other wetware. Attack surfaces ... the wetware are attackable, and always have been. Unfortunately, people have been installing checks and balances into the counting process. So, that leaves the paper.
I'm off to develop printing processes on paper made with oxidisable organic electronic pressure sensors, so that the paper can sense where the voter has placed their mark (using a soft, carbon-rich pencil may mean you can use contact pads and resistance instead of pressure. Meh.) ; when the mark is made, after a short delay the inks used on the paper are instructed to change their configuration to put your target candidate name beside the mark. So the ballots correct themselves in the ballot box, without any need for tedious bribing counters or stuffing boxes.
There's a strategy for correcting inconvenient paper ballots by hacking the printing process. Or even more simply, the ballot delivery process. Print your special ballots where you want, then hack UPDHL's (other delivery services are available) so the government approved ballots are delivered to you, and yours to the polling stations. Simples! And a pleasantly high-tech solution to a simplistic "mark on paper" technology.
Oh, I forgot - you'd need to front end your work by a (fake news!) campaign about how some people just vote because they see Candidate X name at the 3rd position on the ballot in an advert on TV. So ballots will need to be printed in random candidate order. That'll deal with inconvenient statistics from the tellers at the count.
In terms of cubic metres of environment per gigajoule of investment, living inside rotating space stations (or lunar stations) will be ridiculously more efficient - and many millennia quicker to achieve - than terraforming anything. Even assuming that sufficient materials for your terraforming project exist in your planetary system, which is not subject to any sort of guarantee.
Good question. To which, nobody knows the answer. Discussions about the question have been tossing from the world of science fiction to atmospheric physics and beyond for decades, with on average neutral results. Nobody knows, still.
A fusion power plant would provide far larger amounts of energy to a spacecraft (at the expense of considerably increasing size and mass). It would do nothing about providing propulsion. For that we've got a choice of throwing reaction mass out the back (or sides) of the vessel - the rocket principle and it's reaction mass problem - or throwing photons out the back (sides) to achieve the same transfer of momentum.
The only non-reaction drive around is the putative NASA EM-cavity drive, and the physics of that are definitely not sure while the engineering is tiny forces in large mechanisms, and a long way from convincing.
I assumed that you were linking to something original, not some imitation stealing the original work.
Except that it was on the verge of rotting by the time it got to your kitchen. Which is fine if you like that sort of thing. (I'm trying to get a kefir culture going to make my milk go sour.)
If you want your argument to be taken seriously, do your copy-editing before you hit the "submit" button.
If you're on a right of way, on foot, no one can deny you use of the footpath. But if you're on a footpath on horseback you can be ordered off the footpath and told to go onto a bridleway. Similarly if you're using your carriage on a bridleway you can be ordered off it to take your carriage onto a carriageway.
The usage was established a century or so before those terrorists in the American colonies started to demand seats in Parliament.
It's not particularly about surface roughness, but about toughness and resilience. Brick (and also flagstones, as mentioned upthread) is brittle and inflexible, and the rate of change of stress resulting from the loading and unloading of the brick/ stone by the wheel driving onto it and off it results in the brick/ stone fracturing very rapidly when traversed by a fast-moving vehicle. After which, the road rapidly starts to break up, and needs to be re-laid at considerable expense and inconvenience.
The asphalt in tarmacadam allows the load-bearing aggregate stones to flex slightly, accommodating such flexure and maintaining a smoother surface for longer.
Cobbles accommodate the flexure by setting each cobblestone ("sett") in about a cm-thickness of sand.
Road surfaces are much more complicated things than most people think. Choosing the correct rock types to provide the appropriate properties of strength, toughness and dry- and wet- friction is a big part of economic geology. And then there are the requirements for aggregate to go into concrete.
MacAdam was the Scot who invented the mixture of aggregate (crushed stone) and asphalt.
When originally introduced, the product considerably increased the demand for crushed stone, and so for a considerable part of the Victorian period, a routine hard labour task for prisoners and the poor in the workhouse was crushing stone by hand. The ideal size of stone for making pavement was described by MacAdam as being "small enough to fit into a child's mouth". So that's some of what the children in the hard labour yard of the workhouse were doing.
The second that you're looking for is more like "I helped my uncle get his horse off."
What's family unfriendly about it? You're obviously getting a semen sample. Good on you for owning such a valuable stallion.