But also not "the not true". It's mainstream. You can believe it. You can doubt it. Both positions are equally easy and don't need any thinking.
Actually dissecting which parts of mainstream knowledge is true (for a workable version of true) and which are not, is tedious work, and no single person will manage it during their lifetime completely.
I caution against the "I doubt it" as a way to profile oneself as critical thinker.
Doubt is just a version of belief, albeit a belief in the negative. As Henri Poincaré eloquently pointed out: believing everything and doubting everything are equally convenient ways to avoid the work of actual thinking.
A critical thinker has to be able to do both: list the pro- and the counter-arguments and weigh them against each other. A critical thinker has to be able to argue both sides, and to really understand the consequences of each hypothesis. And he has to be able to think of alternate third hypotheses to not fall into the false dilemma trap (e.g. there is not only Darwinism and Biblical Creationism, there is also the Flying Spaghetti Monster).
Basicly it's the same argument that caused high loss of airplanes in World War II. Whenever the british airplanes returned to their airfields, engineers were analyzing the places where the airplanes were hit, and reinforcing that part of the airplane. Sadly, the numbers of lost planes didn't go down.
No one realized that those parts of the airplanes weren't as important to protect because the planes still returned though they were hit there. Protecting the parts where the returning planes didn't get hit was much more important, as obviously, planes hit there never made it back.
This is called survivorship bias. And systems that try to predict crimes from past crime numbers suffer heavily from survivorship bias.
Actually, we have both. LIGO consists of two interferometers, and it cooperates with other interferometers to provide resolution and direction. A single interferometer couldn't make a difference between a truck driving around, an earthquake and a gravitational event far away. Just because there is a second one 2000 miles away allows to make a difference between a local event and a cosmic event and gives a first glance at direction. And with a third one on another continent, you can also triangulate the direction.
In general, the economical evaluation of planes has to look into many factors: Transport capacity is only one of them. Fuel efficiency, maximum distance, cost of servicing, cost of operating, cost of landing slots, expected number of passengers, expected price per ticket etc.pp.
The design of the Airbus A380 started, when oil was comparatively cheap, at the end of the 1990ies. At this time, cost for the flight crew and the landing slots were more important, causing the flight operators to look for the largest capacity possible to haul as much passengers with as few planes as possible. This was the heyday of the hub-and-spoke approach, where as many passengers as possible were carried to a few but large airports, which were connected to each other with very large vessels. In this environment, the A380 totally made sense, as the big plane to fly the backbone routes of the international flight network.
More fuel efficient planes made it economical to connect medium sized airports directly without going through a large hub. And here, you don't need the large capacities, slot prices are lower, so you can offset the higher crew cost of operating more planes. For those relations, the A380 is simply too large and not fuel efficient enough, and its demands on the airport infrastructure are too high. So the number of relation it can operate economically is shrinking. And higher oil prices caused the cost of fuel per seat to increase, and the more efficient planes are flying cheaper even when you need more crew for more planes. And with their lower operating costs on ground for service, they even compete successfully on the few remaining large capacity relations the A380 was designed for.
This is not the only problem. It has four engines instead of two like the 777 or the A350, which causes servicing to take longer and be more expensive and making it less fuel efficient.
Furthermore the wings are constructed to house more fuel tanks than actually used, making the wings unnecessarily complicated and heavy, decreasing efficency and increasing costs. In this case, preparation for an ultra long distance version which never was ordered created a problem for the versions in operation.
Solar sails are nice and dandy if you are mainly out of the gravitational fields and in interplanetary space. But to get there, you have to accelerate to 4.3 km/s (starting from the Space Elevator) or 11.2 km/s (starting at the Earth's surface). And vice versa, entering the gravitational pull of the Earth will accelerate any space object to 4.3 km/h until it reaches the geostationary orbit or up to 11.2 km/s when it reaches Earth itself. There is nothing complicated about it, just Newtonian Gravitation.
Today's price is about $300 per kg of UDMH (rocket fuel). We need 500 kg per ton of iron, or about $150,000. The price for steel is $700 per ton. So the prices have to change about 200fold to make Asteroid Belt mining at least break even -- given all the magic of the Space Elevator, and vessel-less transport of propellant and mined iron.
Lets say, we managed to create one piece of the magical technology and managed to build the Space Elevator. From there, the escape velocity is 4.3 km/s. As the Space Elevator rotates with the Earth, we already have 3.0 km/s of that. So we need to accelerate our transport ship to an additional 1.3 km/s to get to 16 Psyche, and a returning transport ship has to decelerate from 4.3 km/s to 3.0 km/s to land on the Space Elevator. If we use the Tsiolkovsky rocket equation, we get that ln (m_o/m_f) ~ 0.3 if we use a propellant which manages to get up to 4 km/s exhaust velocity. That means that to stop 1 ton of iron at the Space Elevator, we need at least 350 kg of propellant. And as 16 Psyche has no other resources than iron and nickel, we have first to transport that propellant to 16 Psyche, which needs another 100 kg of propellant. And that doesn't include any vessels. And it doesn't include any energy we need to stop and start at 16 Psyche. This is the bare minimum coming out of the basic physical equations: Every ton we get from the Asteroid Belt will cost at least half a ton of propellant.
Oil and gas from fracking comes in at $60 per barrel. As soon as the oil price falls below $60, fracking becomes too expensive. The only reason why fracking got some foothold was that for some time, the price for oil was above $80. From a market point of view, all fracking does is keeping the price of oil hovering at about $60 per barrel.
6 percent of the Earth's crust is iron (and another 0.3 percent is Nickel). That means that just in the Earth's crust, there is 500*10^15 tons of iron (and another 25*10^15 tons of Nickel). The whole mass of 16 Psyche is just 27*10^15 tons.
We have twenty times more iron and nickel within the first 20 km of the Earth's crust than the whole of 16 Psyche.
There will never be much space mining in the Asteroid Belt.
The whole mass of the asteroid belt is rather small, smaller than that of the Earth Moon.
The asteroid belt consists mainly of the same stuff than the Earth Moon and the Earth's crust anyway, and the later have more of it.
The energy required to move something from the Asteroid Belt to the Earth is so high that the cost will by far outnumber the possible revenue for selling the stuff. Even if you mine an asteroid consisting of pure gold or platinum, you will pay more for the fuel to get there and back than you can possible sell the gold and platinum for on Earth.
Still, you are confusing the power of the electromagnetic field with the energy transferred. That's the main reason why using the emissions of the local radio station to power anything is illegal now and considering energy theft.
If there is nothing surrounding the radio station and the receiver, then 100% of the power emitted would be transferred to the receiver. But in reality, we have lots of inductive materials in the environment (even wet soil), and each of it acts as a little antenna and uses up some of the emitted energy to get warmer, especially if you are using a variable electromagnetic field like the one created by alternating current. That's why power lines always come in threes: The three phases are shifted 120 to each other, and in summa, the fields they create nearly cancel out each other, thus the loss due to inadvertently inducing currents in random conductive objects around the power line is reduced to about 3%.
With Tesla's scheme, you can't use three phases, as you don't have three different parallel conductive layers. Thus you would either have lots of parasitic inductivities along the way eating up your efficiency, or you have to use direct current to wirelessly transmit power from one point to another -- which means that you actually have a large stream of charged particles moving from point A to point B.
You willfully misinterpret the article to simulate being insightful.
It says nowhere that insects have died out. So yes, you still will find insects everywhere. All the article says is that the amount of insects being around falls 2.5% every year. So if you turn a stone today, you will find only about 97.5% of the insects you would have found a year ago.
In the 1960ies, you cound find lots of descriptions and building schemes of radio receivers powered by the local radio station's emissions. According to your reasoning, they could never have worked.
But as they worked, there must be something wrong with your reasoning.
Yes, you could, but not in five years. The year 2024 could be an outlier in both directions. Maybe the global warming is much slower than predicted, but just the year 2024 could be exceptionally warm and be 1.5 C warmer than the average between 1951 and 1980, for instance because of a very strong El Nino. At the same time, both 2023 and 2025 could be quite cold, so the total warming would be less than 1.5 C, though 2024 would indicate otherwise. But still, the prediction would be wrong.
Or 2024 could be comparatively cold, being somewhat below the 1.5 C above the 1951-1980 average. But both 2023 and 2025 could be exceptionally hot, the hottest years on record or something. Then the prediction holds despite 2024 being less than 1.5 C warmer.
We had a similar case with the year 1998, which was exceptionally hot, and then you saw all the reports in the following years how global warming has stopped, as the next years were colder than 1998. But since the 2010s, all the following years were again warmer than even 1998, and the "No global warming" people don't quote trends with 1998 or 1997 as starting point anymore.
People tend to totally underestimate some time frames. The first usable steam engine was patented by Thomas Savery more than 320 years ago. The Newcomen engine found widespread usage 300 years ago. James Watt used to sit in front of a Newcomen engine and watch it running as a child, and Boulton & Watt, the company building the Watt steam engines in large numbers, was founded in 1775, nearly 250 years ago.
200 years ago was, when new methods to make steel were invented, when the United Kingdom began to built its railway system and the European countries followed. 200 years ago was, when settlers in the Americas cleared the forests. Don't underestimate the amount of industrialization that was going on 200 years ago! The first steam boat was built 215 years ago, and the first transatlantic cable was laid 155 years ago -- with a 700 feet long steel steamship, the SS Great Eastern, built 160 years ago.
That's why the article talks about the five hottest years on record (the last five years, with 2018 being the fourth hottest), and not about the weather of a few days.
On a planet with an ocean, you have an environment free from ionizing radiation: under water. On Earth, Life doesn't seem to have moved on land until enough free oxygen was in the atmosphere to create an ozone layer about 400 mio years ago. There has been another period on Earth with at least 10% of oxygen in the atmosphere about 2.1 billion years ago, causing iron in the Earth's crust to oxide and create large layers of reddish stone. It could have give rise to a first development of multicellular life, albeit the nature of the fossils is still in dispute.
You could learn some quite exotic language and write everything down in that language. This would be a semantic encryption, as there is no purely syntactic way to get to the English equivalent of the text. Actually, the U.S. forces used a similar "encryption" in World War II for their radio-traffic: The radio operators were of the Navajo tribe and talked to each other in the Navajo language. Thus you had a real time encryption/decryption scheme absolutely unintelligible for someone not being able to talk Navajo, e.g. nearly everyone outside the U.S.. Even to recognize that it is Navajo would need a specialist not likely to find outside the U.S..
Slashdot Mirror
Actually dissecting which parts of mainstream knowledge is true (for a workable version of true) and which are not, is tedious work, and no single person will manage it during their lifetime completely.
Doubt is just a version of belief, albeit a belief in the negative. As Henri Poincaré eloquently pointed out: believing everything and doubting everything are equally convenient ways to avoid the work of actual thinking.
A critical thinker has to be able to do both: list the pro- and the counter-arguments and weigh them against each other. A critical thinker has to be able to argue both sides, and to really understand the consequences of each hypothesis. And he has to be able to think of alternate third hypotheses to not fall into the false dilemma trap (e.g. there is not only Darwinism and Biblical Creationism, there is also the Flying Spaghetti Monster).
No one realized that those parts of the airplanes weren't as important to protect because the planes still returned though they were hit there. Protecting the parts where the returning planes didn't get hit was much more important, as obviously, planes hit there never made it back.
This is called survivorship bias. And systems that try to predict crimes from past crime numbers suffer heavily from survivorship bias.
Actually, we have both. LIGO consists of two interferometers, and it cooperates with other interferometers to provide resolution and direction. A single interferometer couldn't make a difference between a truck driving around, an earthquake and a gravitational event far away. Just because there is a second one 2000 miles away allows to make a difference between a local event and a cosmic event and gives a first glance at direction. And with a third one on another continent, you can also triangulate the direction.
The design of the Airbus A380 started, when oil was comparatively cheap, at the end of the 1990ies. At this time, cost for the flight crew and the landing slots were more important, causing the flight operators to look for the largest capacity possible to haul as much passengers with as few planes as possible. This was the heyday of the hub-and-spoke approach, where as many passengers as possible were carried to a few but large airports, which were connected to each other with very large vessels. In this environment, the A380 totally made sense, as the big plane to fly the backbone routes of the international flight network.
More fuel efficient planes made it economical to connect medium sized airports directly without going through a large hub. And here, you don't need the large capacities, slot prices are lower, so you can offset the higher crew cost of operating more planes. For those relations, the A380 is simply too large and not fuel efficient enough, and its demands on the airport infrastructure are too high. So the number of relation it can operate economically is shrinking. And higher oil prices caused the cost of fuel per seat to increase, and the more efficient planes are flying cheaper even when you need more crew for more planes. And with their lower operating costs on ground for service, they even compete successfully on the few remaining large capacity relations the A380 was designed for.
Furthermore the wings are constructed to house more fuel tanks than actually used, making the wings unnecessarily complicated and heavy, decreasing efficency and increasing costs. In this case, preparation for an ultra long distance version which never was ordered created a problem for the versions in operation.
That's what the developers in 1978 also assumed. There is an old saying in engineering: Nothing stays around as long as an interim solution.
Solar sails are nice and dandy if you are mainly out of the gravitational fields and in interplanetary space. But to get there, you have to accelerate to 4.3 km/s (starting from the Space Elevator) or 11.2 km/s (starting at the Earth's surface). And vice versa, entering the gravitational pull of the Earth will accelerate any space object to 4.3 km/h until it reaches the geostationary orbit or up to 11.2 km/s when it reaches Earth itself. There is nothing complicated about it, just Newtonian Gravitation.
Today's price is about $300 per kg of UDMH (rocket fuel). We need 500 kg per ton of iron, or about $150,000. The price for steel is $700 per ton. So the prices have to change about 200fold to make Asteroid Belt mining at least break even -- given all the magic of the Space Elevator, and vessel-less transport of propellant and mined iron.
Lets say, we managed to create one piece of the magical technology and managed to build the Space Elevator. From there, the escape velocity is 4.3 km/s. As the Space Elevator rotates with the Earth, we already have 3.0 km/s of that. So we need to accelerate our transport ship to an additional 1.3 km/s to get to 16 Psyche, and a returning transport ship has to decelerate from 4.3 km/s to 3.0 km/s to land on the Space Elevator. If we use the Tsiolkovsky rocket equation, we get that ln (m_o/m_f) ~ 0.3 if we use a propellant which manages to get up to 4 km/s exhaust velocity. That means that to stop 1 ton of iron at the Space Elevator, we need at least 350 kg of propellant. And as 16 Psyche has no other resources than iron and nickel, we have first to transport that propellant to 16 Psyche, which needs another 100 kg of propellant. And that doesn't include any vessels. And it doesn't include any energy we need to stop and start at 16 Psyche. This is the bare minimum coming out of the basic physical equations: Every ton we get from the Asteroid Belt will cost at least half a ton of propellant.
Oil and gas from fracking comes in at $60 per barrel. As soon as the oil price falls below $60, fracking becomes too expensive. The only reason why fracking got some foothold was that for some time, the price for oil was above $80. From a market point of view, all fracking does is keeping the price of oil hovering at about $60 per barrel.
6 percent of the Earth's crust is iron (and another 0.3 percent is Nickel). That means that just in the Earth's crust, there is 500*10^15 tons of iron (and another 25*10^15 tons of Nickel). The whole mass of 16 Psyche is just 27*10^15 tons.
We have twenty times more iron and nickel within the first 20 km of the Earth's crust than the whole of 16 Psyche.
If there is nothing surrounding the radio station and the receiver, then 100% of the power emitted would be transferred to the receiver. But in reality, we have lots of inductive materials in the environment (even wet soil), and each of it acts as a little antenna and uses up some of the emitted energy to get warmer, especially if you are using a variable electromagnetic field like the one created by alternating current. That's why power lines always come in threes: The three phases are shifted 120 to each other, and in summa, the fields they create nearly cancel out each other, thus the loss due to inadvertently inducing currents in random conductive objects around the power line is reduced to about 3%.
With Tesla's scheme, you can't use three phases, as you don't have three different parallel conductive layers. Thus you would either have lots of parasitic inductivities along the way eating up your efficiency, or you have to use direct current to wirelessly transmit power from one point to another -- which means that you actually have a large stream of charged particles moving from point A to point B.
It says nowhere that insects have died out. So yes, you still will find insects everywhere. All the article says is that the amount of insects being around falls 2.5% every year. So if you turn a stone today, you will find only about 97.5% of the insects you would have found a year ago.
But as they worked, there must be something wrong with your reasoning.
Actually, it isn't. Just the border wall has to be built a few miles away from the actual border at this point due to flooding considerations.
Or 2024 could be comparatively cold, being somewhat below the 1.5 C above the 1951-1980 average. But both 2023 and 2025 could be exceptionally hot, the hottest years on record or something. Then the prediction holds despite 2024 being less than 1.5 C warmer.
We had a similar case with the year 1998, which was exceptionally hot, and then you saw all the reports in the following years how global warming has stopped, as the next years were colder than 1998. But since the 2010s, all the following years were again warmer than even 1998, and the "No global warming" people don't quote trends with 1998 or 1997 as starting point anymore.
People tend to totally underestimate some time frames. The first usable steam engine was patented by Thomas Savery more than 320 years ago. The Newcomen engine found widespread usage 300 years ago. James Watt used to sit in front of a Newcomen engine and watch it running as a child, and Boulton & Watt, the company building the Watt steam engines in large numbers, was founded in 1775, nearly 250 years ago.
200 years ago was, when new methods to make steel were invented, when the United Kingdom began to built its railway system and the European countries followed. 200 years ago was, when settlers in the Americas cleared the forests. Don't underestimate the amount of industrialization that was going on 200 years ago! The first steam boat was built 215 years ago, and the first transatlantic cable was laid 155 years ago -- with a 700 feet long steel steamship, the SS Great Eastern, built 160 years ago.
That's why the article talks about the five hottest years on record (the last five years, with 2018 being the fourth hottest), and not about the weather of a few days.
On a planet with an ocean, you have an environment free from ionizing radiation: under water. On Earth, Life doesn't seem to have moved on land until enough free oxygen was in the atmosphere to create an ozone layer about 400 mio years ago. There has been another period on Earth with at least 10% of oxygen in the atmosphere about 2.1 billion years ago, causing iron in the Earth's crust to oxide and create large layers of reddish stone. It could have give rise to a first development of multicellular life, albeit the nature of the fossils is still in dispute.
The people I was talking about are called Code talkers.
You could learn some quite exotic language and write everything down in that language. This would be a semantic encryption, as there is no purely syntactic way to get to the English equivalent of the text. Actually, the U.S. forces used a similar "encryption" in World War II for their radio-traffic: The radio operators were of the Navajo tribe and talked to each other in the Navajo language. Thus you had a real time encryption/decryption scheme absolutely unintelligible for someone not being able to talk Navajo, e.g. nearly everyone outside the U.S.. Even to recognize that it is Navajo would need a specialist not likely to find outside the U.S..
The German automobile club ADAC has a list of real world tests in their database Eco-Test, albeit all the descriptions are in German.