To add to what Ishmaelflood says, the process was well described in Roman times in military manuals. These were manuals - i.e. instruction books - designed to give the officers reading the instructions no excuse for getting it wrong. You may be familiar with the instruction to "RTFM" - well centurions got the same.
What wasn't in the manuals - because "everyone knows that" is what the materials needed were. That got lost, as the Roman concrete industry collapsed around about 500-600 CE.
However a combination of historical research and chemical research in the 1800s identified the original quarries near Naples, and worked out the chemistry so that other deposits could be located and utilised. For example, when de Lesseps set about constructing the Suez canal, he needed a lot of "hydraulic cement" and opened up mines in the volcanic ash deposits of the Santorini island group, inadvertently unearthing the buried town of Akrotiri.
It may be news to you, but it was an industry in the 1850s.
Well despite you posting as an AC, you're asking a valid enough question.
Your premises are messed up. No-one is proposing that CCS would provide a long term (e.g., a single millennium, 1kyr) way to continue to use large amounts of fossil fuels. But let's consider the case that people do actually do it that way, and use approximately the current levels of carbon-based fuels.
Currently we're taking one mole of oxygen from the atmosphere for each mole of carbon that goes into CO2 (other products, e.g. water, are already present to excess in the atmosphere). Since we're talking about gases, then volumetric concentrations are close enough to equivalent to be valid ; so we can equate a 1ppm increase in CO2 to a 1ppm decrease in O2.
We're increasing CO2 at about 2ppm/ year. So if we captures and stored that much CO2 each year then we'd take about 2ppm of oxygen from the atmosphere per year.
The last time I used an oxygen meter to check the safety of a storage tank for entry (yes, you do that in industry ; people die every year because they don't do that), oxygen contents down to 18% were considered acceptable. That's 180000ppm.
The current atmosphere is 21% (210000ppm). Therefore, at 2ppm/ year we don't really have anything to worry about for ( (210000-180000)/2 years = 30000/2 = 15000 = ) 15kyr.
Yes it's a genuine question. The above suggests it is not a particularly urgent question, if we were to capture and store as much carbon as we're putting into the atmosphere at the moment.
If we stopped all CO2 output, natural weathering will cause the excess CO2 to get sequestered into limestone within a couple of thousand years,
The evidence from the PETM is more like 100-150 kyr.
the oceans will boil, introducing more water vapour into the atmosphere, which is a powerful greenhouse gas,
Increased [H2O(g)] will happen long before the oceans "boil" - and as you say, water in the vapour phase is a potent greenhouse gas. The calculations are tricky, and depend in large degree on the configuration of the continents in the foreseeable future (a couple of hundred million years), but it is expected that the average temperature on the Earth's surface will rise to the point that most proteins denature ("curdle" ; say 60-70degC for a number) will happen in between 500 and 1500 Myr. There's a lot of leeway on that date, because ife is good at developing and increasing the use of things like "heat shock proteins" to buffer their core biochemistry. But it is implausible that there will be life anywhere on Earth beyond 2000 Myr. Unless we (or the cockroaches' descendants) do something about it.
Over geological periods this also partially explains climate changes, sometimes the continents are laid out in such a way that there is lots of rainfall on land and CO2 levels drop.
Changes in the arrangement of the continents altering rainfall patterns, and therefore weathering and the carbon cycle, is certainly part of the bigger picture. But it is not a simple picture. For an example, about 30 million years ago, the Himalayas started rising due to the India-Asia collision, which led to a lot of weathering and a steady decline in atmospheric [CO2] levels, and so a decrease in overall global temperatures. BUT at the same time the Drake Passage was opening between the southern tip of South America and the West Antarctic Peninsula, allowing the Antarctic Current to develop and isolate Antarctica's weather from warming currents from the north. That allowed/ assisted/ encouraged the formation of the Antarctic ice caps and their consolidation into one cap.
Which was the bigger effect? that is, TTBOMK an unresolved question. But the two events were approximately contemporaneous.
perhaps all this limestone will revert back to CO2, and life will be fucked.
Unlikely. The loss of water to the atmosphere (and thence to space, by photo-dissociation) will reduce chemical weathering considerably. I'd expect there to be substantial gigatonnes of carbon in carbonate rocks when the last of the Earth's surface water disappears.
Getting paper of appropriate quality - and the foil films and holograms and transparent panels add to the complexity too. Or... do you use a plain paper currency? In these decades?
You mean, like, travel somewhere and play in a 60,000 seat stadium? It'd be far more convenient to do it from my home. I could sell 200,000 tickets a night in such a virtual arena and make more money!
Speed of light and the simultaneity problem get in the way if you want to go to really large audiences. But the same is true for "live" performance, just ask Hotblack Desiato, who couldn't even share a planet with his PA system.
And the prime doctrine was: "if anyone uses nuclear weapons against a civilian population: his planet gets annihilated", hence Paul Atreides used nukes only to destroy the shield wall to get the sand worms in.
It would have been quicker to re-classify them as "enemy non-combatants, to whom the Laws of War don't apply.
I used the eyepieces from my father's gas mask to make my first set of eclipse-watching goggles, and I still use the gas mask bag to carry my camera (because it looks scabby, tattered and not worth stealing). Is that close enough to "remembering" for you?
There are probably (it's still classified) some tens of thousands of tonnes of very old, tired, sweaty and unstable chemical munitions buried near where Dad (and the "eclipse mask") still lives - they used American troops to bury them on the ground tht they were less likely to hang around and talk later. And if the nuclear missile base had been megatonned, then the chemical weapons would not likely have been a big problem.
Remember all the gas masks that were issued during the London Blitz?
Which were actually issued around 2 years before the Blitz, which affected far more of the country than just London.
Yes, there were gas masks, issued to every man, woman and child (including babies) ; no, the issue only had an accidental temporal relationship with the "Blitzing" of London, Swindon, Southampton, Bristol, Coventry, Birmingham, Nottingham, Glasgow, and Edinburgh. (To name just the cities I know suffered heavy bombing. And I forgot Plymouth. And Belfast.)
The link went to where I thought it meant. The CIA-HTC-Glomar boondoggle.
The fact that that operation was somewhere in the grey area between fraud, "back operations" and milking foreign (American) tax payers for every penny they're worth does nothing to deny the fact that manganese nodules exist (first discoveries were on the UK's Challenger expedition in the 1870s to 80s), that they do have interesting chemistry, that they do exist in interesting quantities (though patchy in both abundance and contents), and that people are looking at the possibilities of exploiting them. Contracts were signed a couple of years ago for evaluation and possible exploitation of sites in the South-Central Pacific, and were discussed on Slashdot at the time. Don't you remember?
You know, if I lived in a country that conducted a lot of trade with a potentially hostile country with whom I shared an ocean borderline, I'd take their actions quite seriously. Which is exactly what I do - living on the Atlantic coast of Europe.
But after a while it becomes apparent that there are thousands of them, and they just get numbers.
Errr, no - so far 118 elements, with several thousand isotopes. Minor plants, well over 100 thousand so far, with about 10000 named ones. Three so far that have been closely inspected by robots (one still under inspection - Ceres).
Even nerds might know just one asteroid.
Didn't you read the sign above the door - "News for Nerds"? You obviously don't know many astronomy nerds.
but the "discovery" of #118 was indirect evidence of the death of just a few atoms, with a half-life of less than a millisecond.
Yes, I did read the papers at th time of discovery. Fascinating time-of-flight chemistry to confirm some of the chemical properties in the milliseconds available. And that makes their binary state (existent or non-existent) different somehow? They exist.
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs
And all vertebrates are fish?
All vertebrates (arguably excluding tunicates - very arguably) which have crania (skulls; excludes Amphioxus and possibly Haikouella and cognates), and jaws (excluding the hundreds of species of agnathan fish, including a handful of fossils in my collection from Achannaras, as well as the extant lampreys and hagfish), and true bone (as opposed to cartilage) as a structural support for their bodies, are fish. That includes, you, me, the dinosaurs in the trees and the whale-relatives walking the plains of the Serengeti and the coelacanths off the coasts of Madagascar and Indonesia. But not the sharks, skates and rays.
Even before you approach relativistic velocities (say, 0.1c), the energy requirements are wildly beyond our current technologies. Newtonian mechanics are adequate to prevent interstellar travel (and make solar system travel pretty difficult) until we have at least fission reactors in space. Which requires a slew of technologies we haven't really started on yet - such as environmental management.
You posit a pretty strange concept: that if there's a zillion advanced lifeforms out there, that literally NONE of them would find Earth, or humanity, interesting in the slightest.
Actually, I don't think that's the relevant question. No one I know for one second believes it likely that aliens would come to Earth (or any solar system that has humans in it - today, give or take a megayear) to study humans. "They" may study humans incidentally, as a sideline, while in the process of going somewhere that they consider interesting enough to go for their own purposes. Hell, they may even find us interesting to talk to. Or eat. Or eat while talking to (if you can grok that as being a good thing).
Unless Lt Scott does change the laws of physics, interplanetary travel is going to be a one-way (or less) trip for organic entities, so the first aliens to meet "us" will be going somewhere else, and are vanishingly unlikely to divert, and any subsequent meetings are also going to be of the same fleeting variety (with data from previous meetings sent back to the point of origin, so not "every contact is a First Contact" scenario.
Go home and revise your elementary cladistics. Or leave your parents basement and revise your elementary cladistics.
There's a reason that cladistics have completely replaced previous ways of describing phylogenies. It's because it works, unambiguously. It makes testable predictions.
It also has a jaw-breaking terminology which provides an effective barrier to dilettantes. [SHRUG]
I'm trying to remember when I last edited my signature - 5 years ago, or 10 years ago. I see no reason to edit it. Your incomprehension is not a good reason to edit it.
Whenever the topic gets to alien life forms, everyone assumes that the aliens must be advanced compared to us and have mastered interstellar, maybe even intergalactic, travel. Says who?
Evidently all the people you talk to. I tinker around the edges of the exo-life and OOL (origin of life) scientific communities, and few of those people make that assumption.
Our development from "duh, me make fire" to "duh, remote control is broken, need new TV" took about 10,000 years.
The archaeological evidence is that humanoids and fire have been associated for between a half-million and a million years. Our species is only about 200 to 250 kyr old. Whether that means that "mastery of fire" (a phrase to contemplate the next time a fire engine screams past your window at 3 am) is 250 kyr to 750 kyr older than our species, or that "mastery of fire" is a defining characteristic of our species is something to debate.
Within the laws of physics, we can conquer the galaxy in the next Myr or so. Unless we meet someone else (in which case, we conquer a half, a third, a quarter.. of the galaxy Big fucking difference.
Ummm, do you know why the disproportionate number of elements named from that Swedish village?
It's because they had a mine, which produced a mineral called yttria, of use in the early gas-mantle industry. You do know what gas mantles are, and I'm sure you've used plenty of them in the past. I think I've still got a couple in a drawer somewhere, as part of the caving gear.
They also had a series of top-notch mineralogists who identified variant mineral specimens, and chemists who identified variations within them.
If it weren't for that tiny Swedish village, then the same elements (in the sense of nuclei with a particular number of protons within them) would have names from either some tiny mining village in Montana, or some mining city in China. BFD.
Apart from trying to make a funny, do you have any grounds for disputing or refining the current definition of an "element" in a way that would leave these as not being "elements"?
Collecting? Almost certainly not - the only areas in the SCS that are this deep are relatively narrow trench zones, and most (by mass, or area of deposit) of the reserves of "manganese" nodules (other minerals and metals are present in the nodules) are on abyssal plains, not in the trenches.
On the other hand, developing the technology to work at those depths - perhaps for controlling robots at short range, possibly using ultrasonic links instead of optical fibre (because ultrasonics tangles less than tethers of any sort) - is a plausible purpose behind such a development.
Uber's behavior is certainly hypocritical, but it is likely legally unenforceable. Factual data cannot be copyrighted, and it is unlikely that it can be kept secret by TOS restrictions.
It certainly should be possible to extract the data e.g. by contacts from abroad (NOTE : I've never even seen an Ube App. I'm not sure if they even exist in my country, so I don't really know exactly how it works, or even what the data in question is), then post that data publicly where Uber's ToS are unenforceable. (Kim Jong Un, where are you when we need you?) Then the competitive companies scrape the distant website. They're not using Uber's API or data, so Uber's lawyers can go fuck themselves (sideways, dry).
There's a saying in the rescue community - "you can survive three months without food, three days without water but three minutes without oxygen". It's the lack of oxygen supply to the brain consequent on the failure of blood circulation that causes the major damage in heart attack, partiularly the neurological effects.
Unless Seattle has literally got defibrillators spaced at literally less than 100m spacing, then you'd get more benefit from an app (tied to on-body pulse sensor of some sort) which detected the heart attack ; flagged an alarm to the ambulance service to come to collect the corpse, then used it's loudspeaker to scream for any human within ear shot to come and help the victim, and would then give instructions to the first responder.
A depressingly high number of corpses will be recovered with the phone app still screaming away, having drained it's battery to an audience of people who "don't want to get involved".
Slashdot Mirror
What wasn't in the manuals - because "everyone knows that" is what the materials needed were. That got lost, as the Roman concrete industry collapsed around about 500-600 CE.
However a combination of historical research and chemical research in the 1800s identified the original quarries near Naples, and worked out the chemistry so that other deposits could be located and utilised. For example, when de Lesseps set about constructing the Suez canal, he needed a lot of "hydraulic cement" and opened up mines in the volcanic ash deposits of the Santorini island group, inadvertently unearthing the buried town of Akrotiri.
It may be news to you, but it was an industry in the 1850s.
Your premises are messed up. No-one is proposing that CCS would provide a long term (e.g., a single millennium, 1kyr) way to continue to use large amounts of fossil fuels. But let's consider the case that people do actually do it that way, and use approximately the current levels of carbon-based fuels.
Currently we're taking one mole of oxygen from the atmosphere for each mole of carbon that goes into CO2 (other products, e.g. water, are already present to excess in the atmosphere). Since we're talking about gases, then volumetric concentrations are close enough to equivalent to be valid ; so we can equate a 1ppm increase in CO2 to a 1ppm decrease in O2.
We're increasing CO2 at about 2ppm/ year. So if we captures and stored that much CO2 each year then we'd take about 2ppm of oxygen from the atmosphere per year.
The last time I used an oxygen meter to check the safety of a storage tank for entry (yes, you do that in industry ; people die every year because they don't do that), oxygen contents down to 18% were considered acceptable. That's 180000ppm.
The current atmosphere is 21% (210000ppm). Therefore, at 2ppm/ year we don't really have anything to worry about for ( (210000-180000)/2 years = 30000/2 = 15000 = ) 15kyr.
Yes it's a genuine question. The above suggests it is not a particularly urgent question, if we were to capture and store as much carbon as we're putting into the atmosphere at the moment.
The evidence from the PETM is more like 100-150 kyr.
Increased [H2O(g)] will happen long before the oceans "boil" - and as you say, water in the vapour phase is a potent greenhouse gas. The calculations are tricky, and depend in large degree on the configuration of the continents in the foreseeable future (a couple of hundred million years), but it is expected that the average temperature on the Earth's surface will rise to the point that most proteins denature ("curdle" ; say 60-70degC for a number) will happen in between 500 and 1500 Myr. There's a lot of leeway on that date, because ife is good at developing and increasing the use of things like "heat shock proteins" to buffer their core biochemistry. But it is implausible that there will be life anywhere on Earth beyond 2000 Myr. Unless we (or the cockroaches' descendants) do something about it.
Changes in the arrangement of the continents altering rainfall patterns, and therefore weathering and the carbon cycle, is certainly part of the bigger picture. But it is not a simple picture. For an example, about 30 million years ago, the Himalayas started rising due to the India-Asia collision, which led to a lot of weathering and a steady decline in atmospheric [CO2] levels, and so a decrease in overall global temperatures. BUT at the same time the Drake Passage was opening between the southern tip of South America and the West Antarctic Peninsula, allowing the Antarctic Current to develop and isolate Antarctica's weather from warming currents from the north. That allowed/ assisted/ encouraged the formation of the Antarctic ice caps and their consolidation into one cap.
Which was the bigger effect? that is, TTBOMK an unresolved question. But the two events were approximately contemporaneous.
Unlikely. The loss of water to the atmosphere (and thence to space, by photo-dissociation) will reduce chemical weathering considerably. I'd expect there to be substantial gigatonnes of carbon in carbonate rocks when the last of the Earth's surface water disappears.
And that sort of Space Patrol is the sort of authoritarianism of which Heinlein would have heartily approved.
Getting paper of appropriate quality - and the foil films and holograms and transparent panels add to the complexity too. Or ... do you use a plain paper currency? In these decades?
Turtles all the way down, and increasingly-unobtanium all the way up.
Speed of light and the simultaneity problem get in the way if you want to go to really large audiences. But the same is true for "live" performance, just ask Hotblack Desiato, who couldn't even share a planet with his PA system.
He loved fucking his daughters (in the novels) more than either.
Same here.
And you are correct - the plural of "forum" is "fora".
It would have been quicker to re-classify them as "enemy non-combatants, to whom the Laws of War don't apply.
There are probably (it's still classified) some tens of thousands of tonnes of very old, tired, sweaty and unstable chemical munitions buried near where Dad (and the "eclipse mask") still lives - they used American troops to bury them on the ground tht they were less likely to hang around and talk later. And if the nuclear missile base had been megatonned, then the chemical weapons would not likely have been a big problem.
Which were actually issued around 2 years before the Blitz, which affected far more of the country than just London.
Yes, there were gas masks, issued to every man, woman and child (including babies) ; no, the issue only had an accidental temporal relationship with the "Blitzing" of London, Swindon, Southampton, Bristol, Coventry, Birmingham, Nottingham, Glasgow, and Edinburgh. (To name just the cities I know suffered heavy bombing. And I forgot Plymouth. And Belfast.)
The fact that that operation was somewhere in the grey area between fraud, "back operations" and milking foreign (American) tax payers for every penny they're worth does nothing to deny the fact that manganese nodules exist (first discoveries were on the UK's Challenger expedition in the 1870s to 80s), that they do have interesting chemistry, that they do exist in interesting quantities (though patchy in both abundance and contents), and that people are looking at the possibilities of exploiting them. Contracts were signed a couple of years ago for evaluation and possible exploitation of sites in the South-Central Pacific, and were discussed on Slashdot at the time. Don't you remember?
You know, if I lived in a country that conducted a lot of trade with a potentially hostile country with whom I shared an ocean borderline, I'd take their actions quite seriously. Which is exactly what I do - living on the Atlantic coast of Europe.
Errr, no - so far 118 elements, with several thousand isotopes. Minor plants, well over 100 thousand so far, with about 10000 named ones. Three so far that have been closely inspected by robots (one still under inspection - Ceres).
Didn't you read the sign above the door - "News for Nerds"? You obviously don't know many astronomy nerds.
Yes, I did read the papers at th time of discovery. Fascinating time-of-flight chemistry to confirm some of the chemical properties in the milliseconds available. And that makes their binary state (existent or non-existent) different somehow? They exist.
All vertebrates (arguably excluding tunicates - very arguably) which have crania (skulls; excludes Amphioxus and possibly Haikouella and cognates), and jaws (excluding the hundreds of species of agnathan fish, including a handful of fossils in my collection from Achannaras, as well as the extant lampreys and hagfish), and true bone (as opposed to cartilage) as a structural support for their bodies, are fish. That includes, you, me, the dinosaurs in the trees and the whale-relatives walking the plains of the Serengeti and the coelacanths off the coasts of Madagascar and Indonesia. But not the sharks, skates and rays.
Didn't you learn any biology in school?
Even before you approach relativistic velocities (say, 0.1c), the energy requirements are wildly beyond our current technologies. Newtonian mechanics are adequate to prevent interstellar travel (and make solar system travel pretty difficult) until we have at least fission reactors in space. Which requires a slew of technologies we haven't really started on yet - such as environmental management.
Actually, I don't think that's the relevant question. No one I know for one second believes it likely that aliens would come to Earth (or any solar system that has humans in it - today, give or take a megayear) to study humans. "They" may study humans incidentally, as a sideline, while in the process of going somewhere that they consider interesting enough to go for their own purposes. Hell, they may even find us interesting to talk to. Or eat. Or eat while talking to (if you can grok that as being a good thing).
Unless Lt Scott does change the laws of physics, interplanetary travel is going to be a one-way (or less) trip for organic entities, so the first aliens to meet "us" will be going somewhere else, and are vanishingly unlikely to divert, and any subsequent meetings are also going to be of the same fleeting variety (with data from previous meetings sent back to the point of origin, so not "every contact is a First Contact" scenario.
There's a reason that cladistics have completely replaced previous ways of describing phylogenies. It's because it works, unambiguously. It makes testable predictions.
It also has a jaw-breaking terminology which provides an effective barrier to dilettantes. [SHRUG]
I'm trying to remember when I last edited my signature - 5 years ago, or 10 years ago. I see no reason to edit it. Your incomprehension is not a good reason to edit it.
Evidently all the people you talk to. I tinker around the edges of the exo-life and OOL (origin of life) scientific communities, and few of those people make that assumption.
The archaeological evidence is that humanoids and fire have been associated for between a half-million and a million years. Our species is only about 200 to 250 kyr old. Whether that means that "mastery of fire" (a phrase to contemplate the next time a fire engine screams past your window at 3 am) is 250 kyr to 750 kyr older than our species, or that "mastery of fire" is a defining characteristic of our species is something to debate.
Within the laws of physics, we can conquer the galaxy in the next Myr or so. Unless we meet someone else (in which case, we conquer a half, a third, a quarter .. of the galaxy Big fucking difference.
It's because they had a mine, which produced a mineral called yttria, of use in the early gas-mantle industry. You do know what gas mantles are, and I'm sure you've used plenty of them in the past. I think I've still got a couple in a drawer somewhere, as part of the caving gear.
They also had a series of top-notch mineralogists who identified variant mineral specimens, and chemists who identified variations within them.
If it weren't for that tiny Swedish village, then the same elements (in the sense of nuclei with a particular number of protons within them) would have names from either some tiny mining village in Montana, or some mining city in China. BFD.
Apart from trying to make a funny, do you have any grounds for disputing or refining the current definition of an "element" in a way that would leave these as not being "elements"?
Oh, it's Slashdot. Did I expect anything else?
On the other hand, developing the technology to work at those depths - perhaps for controlling robots at short range, possibly using ultrasonic links instead of optical fibre (because ultrasonics tangles less than tethers of any sort) - is a plausible purpose behind such a development.
It certainly should be possible to extract the data e.g. by contacts from abroad (NOTE : I've never even seen an Ube App. I'm not sure if they even exist in my country, so I don't really know exactly how it works, or even what the data in question is), then post that data publicly where Uber's ToS are unenforceable. (Kim Jong Un, where are you when we need you?) Then the competitive companies scrape the distant website. They're not using Uber's API or data, so Uber's lawyers can go fuck themselves (sideways, dry).
Never having seen a Windows 10 installation, I'll have to take your word for it.
There's a saying in the rescue community - "you can survive three months without food, three days without water but three minutes without oxygen". It's the lack of oxygen supply to the brain consequent on the failure of blood circulation that causes the major damage in heart attack, partiularly the neurological effects.
Unless Seattle has literally got defibrillators spaced at literally less than 100m spacing, then you'd get more benefit from an app (tied to on-body pulse sensor of some sort) which detected the heart attack ; flagged an alarm to the ambulance service to come to collect the corpse, then used it's loudspeaker to scream for any human within ear shot to come and help the victim, and would then give instructions to the first responder.
A depressingly high number of corpses will be recovered with the phone app still screaming away, having drained it's battery to an audience of people who "don't want to get involved".