I'm really glad to hear that the hydraulic fracturing industry is the only one in history completely devoid of incompetence, negligence, and corruption
I didn't claim that, and you know I didn't.
No-one plans to do these things badly. And given the amount of regulatory hurdles before you get to put bit to rock, such errors are extremely rare.
At least, that's the case in the countries where I've worked. If you live in such a corrupt society, people by incompetent and cheaply-brought politicians and incapable regulatory agencies, elected by a population with the wool pulled over their eyes or paid a pittance for their silent compliance, then maybe you should look to dealing with your country's political problems. But don't blame a technical process for the failings of your body politic. Unless, of course, you have some vested interest in maintaining a corrupt body politic in your country.
If Germany is anything like the UK - and statistically, it likely is - then there will have been several hundred wells drilled in Germany and fractured already. Including particularly wells for producing drinking water.
The first well fractured in Britain that we can find records of was in the early 1950s (a lot of records from the early onshore production were lost in world war 2 however). Given the amount of exploration work done along the edge of the Zechstein basin, trying to find analogues of the Groningen gas super-giant field and the Schoonebeek oil field in the Netherlands, then I'd be utterly astonished if there weren't dozens to hundreds of wells fractured along that trend.
But what would I know, after 30 years in the business including several years working for Shell in the Netherlands?
The premise behind the fracking fluid polluting groundwater requires you to believe that the fluid can permeate several km up through the rock, while simultaneously water is incapable of draining down several km.
You're forgetting the point (which is also forgotten by almost all the people who know nothing and talk a lot) that the particular rocks that you're trying to fracture are below a sequence of rocks of low enough permeability that hydrocarbons (oil and/ or gas) have been trapped in them, despite considerable natural pressure (due to density difference) pushing the hydrocarbons to travel through the rocks.
If pollution from fracking were possible, the bigger issue in the news would be fracking causing cracks at the impermeable rocks at the bottom of the aquifer, causing the entire aquifer to drain further underground.
That would only be the case if the deeper rock formations were charged with gas ; generally not the case. Surprisingly since most sediments are deposited at the bottom of rivers, lakes or the sea, they are mostly filled with water from day one. You could do this if you wanted to destroy your gas field, but profit does not lay that way.
However, the dramatic videos you've seen of people lighting their tap water on fire leave out one important question - could they do that before the fracking?
A common way of creating this situation is to have a leaking slurry pond from a cattle feed lot or pig farm, when the shit-laden water gets down into the aquifer, then rots in the absence of oxygen. producing biogenic methane. This has a distinctly different carbon-13 to carbon-12 ratio than thermogenic natural gas. Distinguishing the two is trivial (if you've got a mass spectrometer). Which is when the lawsuit evaporates as the farmer reailses that they're making evidence against themselves for their pollution of their neighbours aquifers.
Nearly two centuries ago we discovered why having a water well next to a leaking cess pit is a bad idea. Some people still haven't learned.
We've accidentally stumbled upon a method to mitigate the danger of large earthquakes (which so far we've been unable to predict),
That is certainly not impossible, but would be pretty fraught. As you say, predicting earthquakes is an extremely difficult task. The liability issues would be... well, I'm not going to try that unless you're paying the liability insurance, and probably not even then.
OTOH, in the aftermath of a substantial quake, starting a fracking programme to continue releasing strain... that's much more feasible. My 2â, at least.
I also see a lot of overlap between fracking opponents and supporters of other forms of pseudoscience, such as homeopathy, anti-vaccine arguments, etc., which doesn't do much to convince me.
Yeah, I see that too. (I'm a professional in the oilfield.)
Horizontal drilling is also a fairly old technique, though the technology for doing it has been getting more reliable and more affordable over the nearly 30 years that I've been working in drilling. You can certainly fracture horizontal wells, just as well as vertical ones. It's all a question of length of exposed reservoir and permeability of that reservoir. When I'm steering a horizontal well, we've typically got a target of [so many] milliDarcy * feet to achieve the well's production requirements. (milliDarcy - unit of permeability ; times the length of exposed wellbore). Production requirements are set by the flow rate required by the surface processing equipment.
It is also my understanding that this is the reason the gas can potentially vent out of random, unpredictable places in the ground, not just out of the well hole itself.
Completely not. That would be highly counter-productive. The whole point of planning and drilling a well is to produce hydrocarbons at the wellhead, not to have them squirting out of the ground where you can't sell them.
Just to put things into perspective, a typical well (whether or not fractured) would be at a depth of 4 to 6 thousand feet below the ground. The volumes of water (and additives) pumped into the ground in order to produce fractures is very carefully monitored as you're running the pump (literally, you count the number of strokes of the pump, and each stroke is typically 4-6 gallons) is in the hundreds of gallons, which is sufficient to make one fracture some hundreds of feet long - or many shorter fractures. This is actually designed (i.e. - it's not an accident) so that you only spend money (remember that stuff?) on fracturing rocks that may yield a profitable amount of gas (or oil), not on fracturing useless rock. It also means that your activities are far below aquifers which people use for drinking or industrial water.
There is so much bullshit talked and written about fracturing by people who literally do not know what they are talking about.
Most helium is not separated from the gas stream and it goes on into the pipeline to [wherever]. Process streams for gas start off by drying the gas - for which compression followed by cooling is sufficient (you've got to be careful with the cooling heat exchanger - people have tried re-using that heat elsewhere, and found that they've introduced an unexpected pathway for flammables into other parts of the process plant. People have died in consequence.) At this point, you also get your "condensate" out, if your reservoir contains the appropriate components - propane through to hexanes - so you need a separator, receiver and appropriate pipework to handle that. "Condensate" is valuable stuff. Then, if there is significant co-produced CO2, that is extracted by passing the gas through a mix of liquid amines on a counter-current principle. The CO2 dissolves in the amines at process pressure (2-3 kpsi) and the liquid amine-CO2 mix can then be passed through a depressurising valve at which point the CO2 comes out. If you're on the Sleipnir platform or a number of others where CO2 emissions are taxed, you can inject the CO2 back into the reservoir ; otherwise, vent to atmosphere. Because CO2 is non-flammable, it adversely affects the calorific value of the produced gas. If you have piped natural gas, your provider should tell you what their gas's calorific value is, though they meter the gas by volume, what you're actually paying for is energy. So the tax man gets involved at that point too.
If you're pumping the gas into a transmission pipeline, that's the end of processing. Anything that came out of the ground which isn't removed by those bits of pipework (and they're big bits of pipework - 30in OD by 1in wall thickness ; tens of thousands of tonnes of topsides weight, if you've ever seen a gas processing plant being lifted onto a rig), goes into the export pipeline and eventually out of the gas fitting in your house/ factory.
It's only if you're preparing gas for LPG export that you go any further, when you compress and cool further to liquefy the methane. At that point, you'll concentrate any helium into the headspace gas and it's worth thinking about capturing. Which is why Qatar is potentially a source of helium. I don't know about Algeria, but they're big in LPG export too. I've never worked on an LPG installation, so I don't know much about that end of the process chain. And I'm just wondering what SASOL are doing at their soon-to-open gas-to-liquids plant they're feeding from that big strike in Mozambique. I'll try to remember to ask next time I'm talking to someone there.
Sorry - you've worked on how many gas production and process plants? I've only been on about a dozen, totalling several years aboard and having to understand each section of the plant to be able to choose routing for cables - which have real implications for explosion risk management. So what the fuck would I know about how gas process plants are built?
There is nothing in the Earth's orbital region which is large enough to significantly alter the Earth's orbit. Unless you know something which the rest of the world don't know about.
The solar system as a whole is a dirty place. No planet has "cleared it's orbit" in the sense you appear to be using. However, by definition, there is no planet which has co-orbiting bodies which are large enough to significantly alter it's orbit.
You might consider the Moon to be large enough to count. At 1.2% of the Earth's mass, it's not. The Moon could disappear tomorrow and the Earth would barely notice. (Incidentally, I remain unconvinced by the popular trope that the Moon is essential to life on Earth. It's certainly possible - the tidal mixing in the early gigayear of the Earth would have been dramatic - but whether that was essential is a different question. It's difficult to do statistics on a sample of one.
Dubbed movies - see them all the time. Sub-titled ones too. It's not a big problem.
Video conferencing always goes out of sync, regardless of the hardware in use. Network latency is always a problem.
If I need to listen to an audiobook on an MP3 player - I use an MP3 player.
Wireless headphones and speakers are fine, not great.
So? After all, it's a phone - bandwidth limited to about 4 kHz. It's not like it's a hi-fi system for playing music on. You're listening to something against the background noise in the office, building or street.
Paypal has no need of knowing anything about the hosting side of things.
PAtpal don't need to know that. Their overseers (in the whip-cracking sense) at the NSA and MPAA do, however need to know that. Likely, the State Department and or international commerce branches of government will also be interested to know if there is something worth stealing in there.
Obviously, someone in German needs to set up a work-alike for Paypal, but which kow-tows to the EU TLAs, not to the American TLAs.
What we need is a license plate cover that allows the plate to be read by humans but masks it against being read by cameras
That's not physically possible, since the human eye has a limited range of sensitivity and we have long had sensors that overlap that range of sensitivity. Anything that the human eye can read, those sensors can read ; anything image that can be read is an image that can be OCR'd and it's content extracted.
That is why ANPR is a commodity product, and barely regulated.
They'd sell more mega-sized drinks, because people wouldn't have to be afraid of spending half the movie either desperately having to pee or missing 5-10 minutes running to the restroom after drinking a half-gallon of Diet Coke.
one consumer analyst warns the newspaper that "hackers will remain a risk,
Of course they will, for the first 10 to 20 years of adoption. By the time I'd consider getting one, these problems will have been sorted out. No doubt some people will die in the process, but that's their contribution to making the future safe for other people.
Does the location that you're talking about have a unique solution for north. In the natural world, there are places where the direction of the magnetic field changes by 50deg of azimuth in 100m of ground travel. I would be unsurprised if you didn't get the same thing on steel-structured bridges, near power lines, etc.
Personally, I start with either the Sun + clock, or stars when I'm trying to work out where north is. Works both sides of the equator, of course.
But let me be in charge of it and able to selectively delete entries, reduce the resolution of the data, or easily erase it altogether.
Alternatively, only turn on location services when you need your phone/ device to tell you your location. Which for most people isn't more than a few minutes a month. Otherwise... well you know where you are.
A riddle of Unobtanium, wrapped in a mystery of more Unobtanium, inside an enigma of Unobtanium-plated Unobtanium, all sprinkled with with gold-plated garnishes of florets of unobtanium.
I'm perfectly fine with SF. But if you're going to try to connect it to the real world, well, a connection to the real world is somewhat necessary.
Being familiar with long range sci-fi extrapolations
That's an... interesting assertion. I mean, you're implying that there are real-world measurements (extrapolations) that you can make about fictional entities.
Creating a material that can survive the problems of pressure and heat of the planets core without melting or collapsing is the big problem.
Agreed. To be slightly more precise, you need something that will retain adequate torsional and tensile strength at high temperatures. Current materials and drilling gets to the region of 200C before everything goes - well any shape other than what you originally wanted the piece to be. Electronics can go higher, but if you're pumping fluid through the drill pipe (to displace cuttings from the wellbore to the surface), you need to contain the pressure differential between inside and outside of the pipe. And that strength at temperature is the problem.
Its the kind of problem that might be solved using force fields.
Unobtanium.
Even if you did have a device that can "project" a force field, you're going to need to have it work through tens of kilometres of variably conductive rock. That's a tall step up from something that works with lasers over ranges of millimetres with forces of nano-Newtons.
eah, I removed the Flash plugin from my computer maybe a year ago.
As late as that? I think I'd already shit-canned Flash when I was first given a machine with Vista on it. 2010? Something like that?
Never missed it. Video doesn't play? So fucking what? Page doesn't have sound track? So fucking what? Advert doesn't display dancing penguins? So fucking what?
Very few schools treat students at the school any more.
And nor should they, for anything more complicated than applying sticking plaster, extinguishing burning flesh, diluting topical corrosive chemicals, applying pressure bandages to major bleeds, and using the defibrillator. Everything else, it's either parent collects child from school, or school takes child to emergency room, where parent collects child. Apart from the sticking plaster, the rest would probably require police and ambulance to the school anyway.
Maybe the disease is actually an evolutionary 'final checkpoint' that stops faulty DNA from being passed down to the next generation. To be clear, this is just a hypothesis. It hasn't been tested experimentally,
Except that the experiment has been done. Several hundred million years before humans evolved, but that's no reason to not use the information available.
It is fairly well known that the non-fish gnathostome vertebrates (elasmobranchs, a.k.a. sharks and rays ; humans, birds and frogs are al indistinguishable from the rest of the fish at this level of classification) do not suffer from cancer. Which tells us one of two things - either our knowledge of the biology of elasmobranchs is seriously lacking (quite plausible, with an obvious path for further research), or the differences between the elasmobranch immune and/ or developmental control system and the corresponding systems of fishes (including humans) are ripe targets for understanding hw things go wrong in human tumours.
I'm taking it that the several hundred diseases lumped as "cancer" are in large part failures of the control systems inherent in differentiation, growth and control of tissues - including their death.
Personally, I suspect that the (several hundred) "cure(s) for cancer" will be found some time after we have fusion power on an industrial scale.
a "canary in the coal mine scenario". When the bird croaks, it's time shut it all down.
That's not how it worked. When the bird stopped singing, or made any signs of distress was when it was time to leave, taking the living bird with you. The bird was your work party's way of determining that you need to go along this way instead of that cross-way to work your way around where ever the source of the asphyxiating gas is. The threats for which you used a canary were "coal damp" (carbon dioxide, which would suffocate the canary before it suffocated the miners) and "fire damp" (mostly methane), which is a mild anaesthetic at levels below those that it would propagate flame from the miner's candles for lighting. Particularly in the latter case, you needed to watch the LIVE canary very carefully to avoid going from a 2% methane atmosphere (flame does not propagate) to a 4.5% methane atmosphere - which is almost at the lower explosive limit of methane in air, and you're on the verge of triggering a fire damp explosion and dieing.
When Davy invented the "miner's safety lamp" in 1815, it would address the fire damp (CH4) issue, but would give no warning against the coal damp (CO2) issue, so the canary was still needed.
Sorry - spent too many years of my life dealing with industrial hazards of working in flammable or explosive atmospheres. Canaries in coal mines are more complex than most people think, rather like the hundreds of diseases lumped together as "cancer".
Anyway this is a moot point, we have the technology now to edit and fix bad genes.
We have tools to do it. Whether we have enough knowledge to do it safely, particularly since biochemistry is an extremely complex network, is a different, but probably more important question.
My thought is that cancer at its core is a bit error that is disabling apoptosis (cell suicide in response to its neighbors telling it to).
That's true for several dozen types of cancer - maybe 3 to 5% of the total.
Most apoptosis is a cell destroying itself (by flooding itself with poisonous destructive oxy--gen processing chemicals from the mitochondria) in response to internal cues, not due to interaction with neighbors. Sometimes it's a "quorum" decision as you suggest, but that's relatively rare AIUI. (Further comments below.)
[ metastasis, at least you know more biology than most commentators.] the fertilized egg migrated from a free floating organism in the fallopian tubes to attach itself to the uterine wall. Cancer uses those routines.
Probably true for several percent more of cancers (but will probably overlap with some of the first group.
Once at the uterine wall, the fertilized egg sends out signals to the uterus to build a blood network to feed the egg. Cancer uses those routines.
It can do, but those processes are also part of growth and wound repair. So... you could try disabling those routines in a patient, to find that they start to slough their gut lining (continually being replaced) and skin (same). Tricky set of targets - you need to hit some and definitely not hit others.
Apoptosis is a pruning mechanism that keeps cells from varying too much from their neighbors.
That is one function for apoptosis, but as I say above, more often it is something the cell triggers itself, in response to internal "checks and balances".
Consider what you say about apoptosis preventing a cell from differing too much from it's neighbours. How then, would you develop, grow or maintain a membrane - such as the meembranes surrounding individual muscles, or the one-cell-thick membranes that constitute the walls of capillary blood vessels. Or the myelin sheaths (distinct cells) that surround and insulate a nerve fibre (one cell type) from the surrounding muscle, or connective tissue.
The processes of tissue development are very complex. Certainly apoptosis is one of the mechanisms that is involved, but it's far more complex than just that.
(I should have at least one more post, picking arguments with TFS's basic idea.)
Slashdot Mirror
I'm going to make a guess that the ones with real ability ... errr, stay at home instead of going abroad for work.
I didn't claim that, and you know I didn't.
No-one plans to do these things badly. And given the amount of regulatory hurdles before you get to put bit to rock, such errors are extremely rare.
At least, that's the case in the countries where I've worked. If you live in such a corrupt society, people by incompetent and cheaply-brought politicians and incapable regulatory agencies, elected by a population with the wool pulled over their eyes or paid a pittance for their silent compliance, then maybe you should look to dealing with your country's political problems. But don't blame a technical process for the failings of your body politic. Unless, of course, you have some vested interest in maintaining a corrupt body politic in your country.
The first well fractured in Britain that we can find records of was in the early 1950s (a lot of records from the early onshore production were lost in world war 2 however). Given the amount of exploration work done along the edge of the Zechstein basin, trying to find analogues of the Groningen gas super-giant field and the Schoonebeek oil field in the Netherlands, then I'd be utterly astonished if there weren't dozens to hundreds of wells fractured along that trend.
But what would I know, after 30 years in the business including several years working for Shell in the Netherlands?
You're forgetting the point (which is also forgotten by almost all the people who know nothing and talk a lot) that the particular rocks that you're trying to fracture are below a sequence of rocks of low enough permeability that hydrocarbons (oil and/ or gas) have been trapped in them, despite considerable natural pressure (due to density difference) pushing the hydrocarbons to travel through the rocks.
That would only be the case if the deeper rock formations were charged with gas ; generally not the case. Surprisingly since most sediments are deposited at the bottom of rivers, lakes or the sea, they are mostly filled with water from day one. You could do this if you wanted to destroy your gas field, but profit does not lay that way.
A common way of creating this situation is to have a leaking slurry pond from a cattle feed lot or pig farm, when the shit-laden water gets down into the aquifer, then rots in the absence of oxygen. producing biogenic methane. This has a distinctly different carbon-13 to carbon-12 ratio than thermogenic natural gas. Distinguishing the two is trivial (if you've got a mass spectrometer). Which is when the lawsuit evaporates as the farmer reailses that they're making evidence against themselves for their pollution of their neighbours aquifers.
Nearly two centuries ago we discovered why having a water well next to a leaking cess pit is a bad idea. Some people still haven't learned.
That is certainly not impossible, but would be pretty fraught. As you say, predicting earthquakes is an extremely difficult task. The liability issues would be ... well, I'm not going to try that unless you're paying the liability insurance, and probably not even then.
OTOH, in the aftermath of a substantial quake, starting a fracking programme to continue releasing strain ... that's much more feasible. My 2â, at least.
Yeah, I see that too. (I'm a professional in the oilfield.)
Completely not. That would be highly counter-productive. The whole point of planning and drilling a well is to produce hydrocarbons at the wellhead, not to have them squirting out of the ground where you can't sell them.
Just to put things into perspective, a typical well (whether or not fractured) would be at a depth of 4 to 6 thousand feet below the ground. The volumes of water (and additives) pumped into the ground in order to produce fractures is very carefully monitored as you're running the pump (literally, you count the number of strokes of the pump, and each stroke is typically 4-6 gallons) is in the hundreds of gallons, which is sufficient to make one fracture some hundreds of feet long - or many shorter fractures. This is actually designed (i.e. - it's not an accident) so that you only spend money (remember that stuff?) on fracturing rocks that may yield a profitable amount of gas (or oil), not on fracturing useless rock. It also means that your activities are far below aquifers which people use for drinking or industrial water.
There is so much bullshit talked and written about fracturing by people who literally do not know what they are talking about.
Most helium is not separated from the gas stream and it goes on into the pipeline to [wherever]. Process streams for gas start off by drying the gas - for which compression followed by cooling is sufficient (you've got to be careful with the cooling heat exchanger - people have tried re-using that heat elsewhere, and found that they've introduced an unexpected pathway for flammables into other parts of the process plant. People have died in consequence.) At this point, you also get your "condensate" out, if your reservoir contains the appropriate components - propane through to hexanes - so you need a separator, receiver and appropriate pipework to handle that. "Condensate" is valuable stuff. Then, if there is significant co-produced CO2, that is extracted by passing the gas through a mix of liquid amines on a counter-current principle. The CO2 dissolves in the amines at process pressure (2-3 kpsi) and the liquid amine-CO2 mix can then be passed through a depressurising valve at which point the CO2 comes out. If you're on the Sleipnir platform or a number of others where CO2 emissions are taxed, you can inject the CO2 back into the reservoir ; otherwise, vent to atmosphere. Because CO2 is non-flammable, it adversely affects the calorific value of the produced gas. If you have piped natural gas, your provider should tell you what their gas's calorific value is, though they meter the gas by volume, what you're actually paying for is energy. So the tax man gets involved at that point too. If you're pumping the gas into a transmission pipeline, that's the end of processing. Anything that came out of the ground which isn't removed by those bits of pipework (and they're big bits of pipework - 30in OD by 1in wall thickness ; tens of thousands of tonnes of topsides weight, if you've ever seen a gas processing plant being lifted onto a rig), goes into the export pipeline and eventually out of the gas fitting in your house/ factory. It's only if you're preparing gas for LPG export that you go any further, when you compress and cool further to liquefy the methane. At that point, you'll concentrate any helium into the headspace gas and it's worth thinking about capturing. Which is why Qatar is potentially a source of helium. I don't know about Algeria, but they're big in LPG export too. I've never worked on an LPG installation, so I don't know much about that end of the process chain. And I'm just wondering what SASOL are doing at their soon-to-open gas-to-liquids plant they're feeding from that big strike in Mozambique. I'll try to remember to ask next time I'm talking to someone there. Sorry - you've worked on how many gas production and process plants? I've only been on about a dozen, totalling several years aboard and having to understand each section of the plant to be able to choose routing for cables - which have real implications for explosion risk management. So what the fuck would I know about how gas process plants are built?
There is nothing in the Earth's orbital region which is large enough to significantly alter the Earth's orbit. Unless you know something which the rest of the world don't know about. The solar system as a whole is a dirty place. No planet has "cleared it's orbit" in the sense you appear to be using. However, by definition, there is no planet which has co-orbiting bodies which are large enough to significantly alter it's orbit. You might consider the Moon to be large enough to count. At 1.2% of the Earth's mass, it's not. The Moon could disappear tomorrow and the Earth would barely notice. (Incidentally, I remain unconvinced by the popular trope that the Moon is essential to life on Earth. It's certainly possible - the tidal mixing in the early gigayear of the Earth would have been dramatic - but whether that was essential is a different question. It's difficult to do statistics on a sample of one.
Dubbed movies - see them all the time. Sub-titled ones too. It's not a big problem. Video conferencing always goes out of sync, regardless of the hardware in use. Network latency is always a problem. If I need to listen to an audiobook on an MP3 player - I use an MP3 player.
So? After all, it's a phone - bandwidth limited to about 4 kHz. It's not like it's a hi-fi system for playing music on. You're listening to something against the background noise in the office, building or street.
PAtpal don't need to know that. Their overseers (in the whip-cracking sense) at the NSA and MPAA do, however need to know that. Likely, the State Department and or international commerce branches of government will also be interested to know if there is something worth stealing in there. Obviously, someone in German needs to set up a work-alike for Paypal, but which kow-tows to the EU TLAs, not to the American TLAs.
That's not physically possible, since the human eye has a limited range of sensitivity and we have long had sensors that overlap that range of sensitivity. Anything that the human eye can read, those sensors can read ; anything image that can be read is an image that can be OCR'd and it's content extracted.
That is why ANPR is a commodity product, and barely regulated.
Drink drink.
Put bucket under seat.
When bladder full, piss in bucket.
Simples.
Of course they will, for the first 10 to 20 years of adoption. By the time I'd consider getting one, these problems will have been sorted out. No doubt some people will die in the process, but that's their contribution to making the future safe for other people.
Does the location that you're talking about have a unique solution for north. In the natural world, there are places where the direction of the magnetic field changes by 50deg of azimuth in 100m of ground travel. I would be unsurprised if you didn't get the same thing on steel-structured bridges, near power lines, etc.
Personally, I start with either the Sun + clock, or stars when I'm trying to work out where north is. Works both sides of the equator, of course.
Alternatively, only turn on location services when you need your phone/ device to tell you your location. Which for most people isn't more than a few minutes a month. Otherwise ... well you know where you are.
When they started to use inattentive customers as grinder-fodder.
I'm perfectly fine with SF. But if you're going to try to connect it to the real world, well, a connection to the real world is somewhat necessary.
That's an ... interesting assertion. I mean, you're implying that there are real-world measurements (extrapolations) that you can make about fictional entities.
Agreed. To be slightly more precise, you need something that will retain adequate torsional and tensile strength at high temperatures. Current materials and drilling gets to the region of 200C before everything goes - well any shape other than what you originally wanted the piece to be. Electronics can go higher, but if you're pumping fluid through the drill pipe (to displace cuttings from the wellbore to the surface), you need to contain the pressure differential between inside and outside of the pipe. And that strength at temperature is the problem.
Unobtanium.
Even if you did have a device that can "project" a force field, you're going to need to have it work through tens of kilometres of variably conductive rock. That's a tall step up from something that works with lasers over ranges of millimetres with forces of nano-Newtons.
As late as that? I think I'd already shit-canned Flash when I was first given a machine with Vista on it. 2010? Something like that?
Never missed it. Video doesn't play? So fucking what? Page doesn't have sound track? So fucking what? Advert doesn't display dancing penguins? So fucking what?
And nor should they, for anything more complicated than applying sticking plaster, extinguishing burning flesh, diluting topical corrosive chemicals, applying pressure bandages to major bleeds, and using the defibrillator. Everything else, it's either parent collects child from school, or school takes child to emergency room, where parent collects child. Apart from the sticking plaster, the rest would probably require police and ambulance to the school anyway.
Except that the experiment has been done. Several hundred million years before humans evolved, but that's no reason to not use the information available.
It is fairly well known that the non-fish gnathostome vertebrates (elasmobranchs, a.k.a. sharks and rays ; humans, birds and frogs are al indistinguishable from the rest of the fish at this level of classification) do not suffer from cancer. Which tells us one of two things - either our knowledge of the biology of elasmobranchs is seriously lacking (quite plausible, with an obvious path for further research), or the differences between the elasmobranch immune and/ or developmental control system and the corresponding systems of fishes (including humans) are ripe targets for understanding hw things go wrong in human tumours.
I'm taking it that the several hundred diseases lumped as "cancer" are in large part failures of the control systems inherent in differentiation, growth and control of tissues - including their death.
Personally, I suspect that the (several hundred) "cure(s) for cancer" will be found some time after we have fusion power on an industrial scale.
That's not how it worked. When the bird stopped singing, or made any signs of distress was when it was time to leave, taking the living bird with you. The bird was your work party's way of determining that you need to go along this way instead of that cross-way to work your way around where ever the source of the asphyxiating gas is. The threats for which you used a canary were "coal damp" (carbon dioxide, which would suffocate the canary before it suffocated the miners) and "fire damp" (mostly methane), which is a mild anaesthetic at levels below those that it would propagate flame from the miner's candles for lighting. Particularly in the latter case, you needed to watch the LIVE canary very carefully to avoid going from a 2% methane atmosphere (flame does not propagate) to a 4.5% methane atmosphere - which is almost at the lower explosive limit of methane in air, and you're on the verge of triggering a fire damp explosion and dieing.
When Davy invented the "miner's safety lamp" in 1815, it would address the fire damp (CH4) issue, but would give no warning against the coal damp (CO2) issue, so the canary was still needed.
Sorry - spent too many years of my life dealing with industrial hazards of working in flammable or explosive atmospheres. Canaries in coal mines are more complex than most people think, rather like the hundreds of diseases lumped together as "cancer".
We have tools to do it. Whether we have enough knowledge to do it safely, particularly since biochemistry is an extremely complex network, is a different, but probably more important question.
That's true for several dozen types of cancer - maybe 3 to 5% of the total. Most apoptosis is a cell destroying itself (by flooding itself with poisonous destructive oxy--gen processing chemicals from the mitochondria) in response to internal cues, not due to interaction with neighbors. Sometimes it's a "quorum" decision as you suggest, but that's relatively rare AIUI. (Further comments below.)
Probably true for several percent more of cancers (but will probably overlap with some of the first group.
It can do, but those processes are also part of growth and wound repair. So ... you could try disabling those routines in a patient, to find that they start to slough their gut lining (continually being replaced) and skin (same). Tricky set of targets - you need to hit some and definitely not hit others.
That is one function for apoptosis, but as I say above, more often it is something the cell triggers itself, in response to internal "checks and balances".
Consider what you say about apoptosis preventing a cell from differing too much from it's neighbours. How then, would you develop, grow or maintain a membrane - such as the meembranes surrounding individual muscles, or the one-cell-thick membranes that constitute the walls of capillary blood vessels. Or the myelin sheaths (distinct cells) that surround and insulate a nerve fibre (one cell type) from the surrounding muscle, or connective tissue.
The processes of tissue development are very complex. Certainly apoptosis is one of the mechanisms that is involved, but it's far more complex than just that. (I should have at least one more post, picking arguments with TFS's basic idea.)