Sorry, if you think it's about saving the planet, you're wrong. The earth is fine and will be fine, regardless what temperature it becomes on the surface.
Well, strictly until the temperature gets into the high 2000s (Kelvin, Centigrade, who cares?) at which point the vapour pressure of silicates becomes appreciable.
In practice, because of the effect of the major greenhouse gas on the Earth (hint : it's not CO2) then once surface temperatures get to average in the 40s or 50s (Centigrade ; this time it matters) you'll get rapidly accelerating greenhouse effect from the atmospheric water, and then it's game over for water-based metabolism.
- Separate your hard drive from your laptop and take the hard drive as carry on. This will be easier if it's an SSD drive.
Errr, this point needs elaboration. Just how would it be significantly easier changing an SSD in (say) 2.5in SATA form factor than it would be changing a RR (rotating rust) drive in 2.5in SATA form factor. OK - I'll admit that I've never seen an SSD drive, but all the adverts specify that they're a drop-in replacement for a RR drive. So there should be no difference in their installation or maintenance.
Technical fail : do you realise that GPS decoders need to be able to receive radio signals from at least four satellites to work. And those signals don't penetrate through metal sheet very well. Try using your GPS inside a warehouse one day.
IF your phone has a barometer, then that might be a workable trigger.
And the same laptop in luggage can't be remotely triggered from the cabin with a cell?
Oh, I get it. You actually don't know how mobile phone technology works. Or you're still thinking of some bizarre early 1990s pre-GSM analogue concoction you power from a couple of motorcycle batteries.
Sounds to me like you need to investigate the comparative cost of posting your goods as fully insured packages. And, of course, a suitable flight case.
Or if your laptop becomes damaged then you're screwed, no way to move your data, and Apple stores won't help you extract data, not for a million bucks.
If only there were a simple alliterative mantra espousing the benfits of regularly backing up your data on a schedule so that any losses from hardware failure are easily remedied. Something like "backup early ; backup often ; back up soon."
Or something like that.
I mean, we've been touting the necessity of a backup schedule for home computers for what is it - 40 years now?
As long as the seats have ~40w USB-C outlets you should be able to power most-all laptops
That'll be business/ first class only then. Certainly not in cattle class seats.
Just how much would you be prepared to pay for this. Or, more precisely, how much additional do you think the beancounters in the Transport Office of your employer will be prepared to reimburse you? I bet it'll be approximately a big fat zero.
Cyanide would be such a drug. Before birth, administer to adult, after birth, administer to offspring.
s/"Before birth"/"Before conception"
Basic failure of biological parsing.
Actually, there's a between-conception-and-birth option for using (inorganic water-soluble) cyanide (salts) to achieve this end. Fiddlier to get the dose and delivery right to kill the foetus without killing the baby carrier, but I'm sure it's do-able.
Anyone need 10 Gigatonnes of CO2? How many big tanks would it take to store? Or will it be cleverly stored underground, somewhere we can be absolutely sure it will never suddenly re-emerge into the atmosphere?
It'll get put into the ground, in rock formations in appropriate shapes and with appropriate porosity-permeability vertical profiles to keep it there for a few million years, and a sufficiently saline pore water that in those several million years, it'll mostly be converted to carbonate minerals which will stay there for hundreds of millions more (mountain building and asteroids excepted).
And who'll identify, assess and prioritise those rock formations, and manage drilling the wells to deliver the gases into them at rates they can sustain? Probably people with decades of making exactly the same assessments. I.E. oilfield geologists such as myself.
Asteroid belt. But that's fairly uniform. How about a large body (say a small planet or moon) coming close to a much larger body and getting ripped apart?
Interestingly (amusingly), just as this dimming was happening, a paper was being published proposing a mild periodicity in the dimmings which was interpreted as an occultation by a planet, then a dimming due to the planet's trailing Trojan cloud (do I need to explain Trojans in an astronomical sense? No? good.) then the secondary eclipse of the planet (planet occulted by star, from our PoV). At which point, they were predicting a Trojan secondary eclipse in about 2021.
Bzzzt! Sorry guys. Beautiful hypothesis slaughtered by an ugly fact in the very days of it's birth.
But I was just doing some back-of-a-thumbnail calculations on the amount of "Trojan" material (some tens of Jupiter masses), and the planet itself (some hundreds of Jupiter masses. Neither is credible to me, but the hundreds of Jupiter mass "planet" would be comfortably (x2, x3) above the thermonuclear turn-on mass, so wouldn't be a "cold" planet but a small star. Bzzzt! Sorry guys. Dead idea.
Backed up by paperwork. Plus, the paperwork can be traced back to reference samples from that batch from the packaging plant, and those reference samples will be available when people are investigating your operation in 50 years from now.
Find a a shallow water off-shore geologic subduction zone
That's a contradiction in terms. If it's subducting, then the weight of the descending oceanic slab will pull the surface of the ocean down into a trench. You're looking at drilling into 10,000ft or deeper water - doable, but not routine.
I believe the materials stored in liquid form are medium to high-level waste, not the low-level waste. They have all sorts at Hanford (and at Sellafield/ Seascale/ Windscale/ Calder Hall, where I was trying to get work some years ago). And part of the proposal for Yucca mountain was specifically to store higher-level material from Hanford.
... why did the random spontaneous generation of "life" apparently only occur 1 time in the history of the known universe.
We have only closely examined one planetary system (actually, the one we live in), which gives us a 100% hit rate for planetary systems being hosts to life.
DNA analysis seems to indicate a common genesis for all known Terran life forms,
It seems to, yes. But since we've only been looking for other systems for at best a couple of (scientist) generations, it remains possible that there are other life forms which we've not detected. Or maybe which we have detected, but not recognised or understood. The store rooms of museums are full of specimens which await detailed analysis.
why has there been no discovery of evidence for another bio-genesis event here on Earth?
Maybe there was only one biogenetic event. Maybe there were two, but in the 100 million years after the appearance of our DNA/ RNA, all of the evidence of the previous system was eaten, then everything buried for 35 time longer before we started to bang rocks together. As a geologist, I know of no law of nature that requires all organisms to leave fossil traces, or indeed, for all fossils to be found before being eroded away, or indeed, for fossils found by palaeontogists to be identified as something interesting before the rock is thrown away. When I went fossil hunting for mere billion-year old fossils, it took me a good half-hour to "get my eye in", and I'm a lot more experienced at this than most people.
Is the known RNA/DNA based life the only possible form of life?
It is the only form we know. But that doesn't mean that other forms are impossible, just that we don't know. Anyone who implies that we do know is either over-speaking the evidence, or being incautious with their phrasing (the latter does not yet carry the death penalty, though it might get buns thrown at you and a sharp intake of breath).
The AC is just spouting from the Creationist Big Book of Unthinking Responses. It (AC, or CBBUR) has utterly failed to consider that there may have been a metabolism/ information system that preceded the appearance of the RNA system (itself probably pre-dating the DNA system).
Higher pressure and temperature require less catalysis. Temperature gradients abound. Worth a look at least.
At the very least the Carnegie Lab in Washington are conducting regular experiments in this field. Possibly others, but I don't follow it closely either. I'd be pretty surprised if they were alone, but given that hint, you should be able to get the current researchers by reading the reference lists in a handful of their researcher's papers.
Serious professional physicists have publicly disagreed with Hawking - and Hawking has admitted to them being right (I'm thinking of the case a couple of years ago where he settled a bet about information destruction in black holes with an encyclopedia of some sort ; I forget his challenger's name), without the "h8r" card being played.
Then all you've done is move the location for the origin of life from here (where we've got a modest chance of figuring out what happened) to an unknown location which was "nearby" 3.5 billion years or more ago. I.e. you've made the problem far, far harder, and delayed any realistic chance of solving it until after we've assessed in detail (i.e. visited dozens (*) of other planetary systems).
That's the fundamental problem with all variants of panspermia (the idea you're promoting ; no, it's not a new idea, except possibly to you) : you move the real problem off the table to somewhere where it's going to be much harder to examine, without contributing anything helpful to the solution of the problem.
(*) How many planetary systems? I'd say until it's been several generations since a new type of planetary system has received fieldwork. Which would be the 3rd or 5th example of each type. With what we're still learning from the likes of Kepler, that'd be upwards of 30 to 50 planetary system examples needing examination, and the know our sample of known systems is still seriously biased towards "hot Jupiters" just by the nature of the observations we make. Think of a number to answer that, but anything less than several millennia would just provoke derisory laughter.
Also how much ecological damage does it's mining/extraction/refining do
It's strip mining the seabed, shaking everything up (to trigger depressurisation decomposition of the several % of hydrate in the mud), then dumping the debris behind the strip-mining tool.
But because it's out of sight (kilometres below sea level), that attracts less attention than doing the same thing to (for example) Canadian forests.
Every day some 16,000 cubic meters (565,000 cubic feet) of gas, almost all of which was methane, were extracted from the test field, exceeding goals for production mining.
If that were a conventional gas well onshore, it would be pretty marginal for commercial viability - it would all depend on the availability of infrastructure to get it to market. For a well in deep water (it must be deep to have a low enough seabed temperature for methane hydrates to be stable), it would be an economic failure, because of those self-same infrastructure costs.
This is expected to help cut down China's coal-induced pollution greatly
This one project, no. If scaled up a lot (10^5 if not more), it might be significant. Which will take a considerable period of time because of the need to build that infrastructure. There are only so many deep water pipelay barges in the world.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, strictly until the temperature gets into the high 2000s (Kelvin, Centigrade, who cares?) at which point the vapour pressure of silicates becomes appreciable.
In practice, because of the effect of the major greenhouse gas on the Earth (hint : it's not CO2) then once surface temperatures get to average in the 40s or 50s (Centigrade ; this time it matters) you'll get rapidly accelerating greenhouse effect from the atmospheric water, and then it's game over for water-based metabolism.
It's been downhill since Tom Baker hung up the scarf. and the second loop of the scarf. And the third loop.
COMEFROM ?
Errr, this point needs elaboration. Just how would it be significantly easier changing an SSD in (say) 2.5in SATA form factor than it would be changing a RR (rotating rust) drive in 2.5in SATA form factor. OK - I'll admit that I've never seen an SSD drive, but all the adverts specify that they're a drop-in replacement for a RR drive. So there should be no difference in their installation or maintenance.
Technical fail : do you realise that GPS decoders need to be able to receive radio signals from at least four satellites to work. And those signals don't penetrate through metal sheet very well. Try using your GPS inside a warehouse one day.
IF your phone has a barometer, then that might be a workable trigger.
Oh, I get it. You actually don't know how mobile phone technology works. Or you're still thinking of some bizarre early 1990s pre-GSM analogue concoction you power from a couple of motorcycle batteries.
Sounds to me like you need to investigate the comparative cost of posting your goods as fully insured packages. And, of course, a suitable flight case.
If only there were a simple alliterative mantra espousing the benfits of regularly backing up your data on a schedule so that any losses from hardware failure are easily remedied. Something like "backup early ; backup often ; back up soon."
Or something like that.
I mean, we've been touting the necessity of a backup schedule for home computers for what is it - 40 years now?
That would be ... ummm .... China, Russia ... Sweden ... and of course the peace-loving Swiss.
Well we know which one of those has a pawn residing in the White House.
That'll be business/ first class only then. Certainly not in cattle class seats.
Just how much would you be prepared to pay for this. Or, more precisely, how much additional do you think the beancounters in the Transport Office of your employer will be prepared to reimburse you? I bet it'll be approximately a big fat zero.
s/"Before birth"/"Before conception"
Basic failure of biological parsing.
Actually, there's a between-conception-and-birth option for using (inorganic water-soluble) cyanide (salts) to achieve this end. Fiddlier to get the dose and delivery right to kill the foetus without killing the baby carrier, but I'm sure it's do-able.
I knew he was weird. Well, both of them were weird. But not that weird.
It'll get put into the ground, in rock formations in appropriate shapes and with appropriate porosity-permeability vertical profiles to keep it there for a few million years, and a sufficiently saline pore water that in those several million years, it'll mostly be converted to carbonate minerals which will stay there for hundreds of millions more (mountain building and asteroids excepted).
And who'll identify, assess and prioritise those rock formations, and manage drilling the wells to deliver the gases into them at rates they can sustain? Probably people with decades of making exactly the same assessments. I.E. oilfield geologists such as myself.
Interestingly (amusingly), just as this dimming was happening, a paper was being published proposing a mild periodicity in the dimmings which was interpreted as an occultation by a planet, then a dimming due to the planet's trailing Trojan cloud (do I need to explain Trojans in an astronomical sense? No? good.) then the secondary eclipse of the planet (planet occulted by star, from our PoV). At which point, they were predicting a Trojan secondary eclipse in about 2021.
Bzzzt! Sorry guys. Beautiful hypothesis slaughtered by an ugly fact in the very days of it's birth.
But I was just doing some back-of-a-thumbnail calculations on the amount of "Trojan" material (some tens of Jupiter masses), and the planet itself (some hundreds of Jupiter masses. Neither is credible to me, but the hundreds of Jupiter mass "planet" would be comfortably (x2, x3) above the thermonuclear turn-on mass, so wouldn't be a "cold" planet but a small star. Bzzzt! Sorry guys. Dead idea.
The paper is on Arxiv.
Backed up by paperwork. Plus, the paperwork can be traced back to reference samples from that batch from the packaging plant, and those reference samples will be available when people are investigating your operation in 50 years from now.
That's a contradiction in terms. If it's subducting, then the weight of the descending oceanic slab will pull the surface of the ocean down into a trench. You're looking at drilling into 10,000ft or deeper water - doable, but not routine.
I believe the materials stored in liquid form are medium to high-level waste, not the low-level waste. They have all sorts at Hanford (and at Sellafield/ Seascale/ Windscale/ Calder Hall, where I was trying to get work some years ago). And part of the proposal for Yucca mountain was specifically to store higher-level material from Hanford.
We have only closely examined one planetary system (actually, the one we live in), which gives us a 100% hit rate for planetary systems being hosts to life.
It seems to, yes. But since we've only been looking for other systems for at best a couple of (scientist) generations, it remains possible that there are other life forms which we've not detected. Or maybe which we have detected, but not recognised or understood. The store rooms of museums are full of specimens which await detailed analysis.
Maybe there was only one biogenetic event. Maybe there were two, but in the 100 million years after the appearance of our DNA/ RNA, all of the evidence of the previous system was eaten, then everything buried for 35 time longer before we started to bang rocks together. As a geologist, I know of no law of nature that requires all organisms to leave fossil traces, or indeed, for all fossils to be found before being eroded away, or indeed, for fossils found by palaeontogists to be identified as something interesting before the rock is thrown away. When I went fossil hunting for mere billion-year old fossils, it took me a good half-hour to "get my eye in", and I'm a lot more experienced at this than most people.
It is the only form we know. But that doesn't mean that other forms are impossible, just that we don't know. Anyone who implies that we do know is either over-speaking the evidence, or being incautious with their phrasing (the latter does not yet carry the death penalty, though it might get buns thrown at you and a sharp intake of breath).
The AC is just spouting from the Creationist Big Book of Unthinking Responses. It (AC, or CBBUR) has utterly failed to consider that there may have been a metabolism/ information system that preceded the appearance of the RNA system (itself probably pre-dating the DNA system).
RNA (and DNA) do not contain amino acids. But yes, several amino acids have been found by spectroscopy of molecular clouds.
At the very least the Carnegie Lab in Washington are conducting regular experiments in this field. Possibly others, but I don't follow it closely either. I'd be pretty surprised if they were alone, but given that hint, you should be able to get the current researchers by reading the reference lists in a handful of their researcher's papers.
You don't get the bowls of petunias ("Oh no! Not Again") without the accompanying mounds of whale meat.
Serious professional physicists have publicly disagreed with Hawking - and Hawking has admitted to them being right (I'm thinking of the case a couple of years ago where he settled a bet about information destruction in black holes with an encyclopedia of some sort ; I forget his challenger's name), without the "h8r" card being played.
That's the fundamental problem with all variants of panspermia (the idea you're promoting ; no, it's not a new idea, except possibly to you) : you move the real problem off the table to somewhere where it's going to be much harder to examine, without contributing anything helpful to the solution of the problem.
(*) How many planetary systems? I'd say until it's been several generations since a new type of planetary system has received fieldwork. Which would be the 3rd or 5th example of each type. With what we're still learning from the likes of Kepler, that'd be upwards of 30 to 50 planetary system examples needing examination, and the know our sample of known systems is still seriously biased towards "hot Jupiters" just by the nature of the observations we make. Think of a number to answer that, but anything less than several millennia would just provoke derisory laughter.
It's strip mining the seabed, shaking everything up (to trigger depressurisation decomposition of the several % of hydrate in the mud), then dumping the debris behind the strip-mining tool.
But because it's out of sight (kilometres below sea level), that attracts less attention than doing the same thing to (for example) Canadian forests.
If that were a conventional gas well onshore, it would be pretty marginal for commercial viability - it would all depend on the availability of infrastructure to get it to market. For a well in deep water (it must be deep to have a low enough seabed temperature for methane hydrates to be stable), it would be an economic failure, because of those self-same infrastructure costs.
This one project, no. If scaled up a lot (10^5 if not more), it might be significant. Which will take a considerable period of time because of the need to build that infrastructure. There are only so many deep water pipelay barges in the world.