The flip side of the coin - somewhere a budget analyst is kicking himself because he let the engineers talk the rover team into building in excess power margin based on a more pessimistic prediction on solar cell dust coverage. In a "perfect world" according to the budget people, they'd spend only enough to ensure that the rover dropped dead the day AFTER it completed the planned mission. It now looks like they apparently overbuilt the rovers based on what's happened with the 2 rovers at widely separated mission locations, and that's bad news for whoever controls the checkbook. Hopefully the next set of landers won't fail prematurely due to a redundancy or excess margin backlash because of how well these rovers have performed.
Nah. They knew the rovers would last longer than the primary mission (how much longer was anyone's guess). You cap the mission at a shorter timeframe so you can save on personnel costs, and then ask for that money later as an "extended mission".
It also is silly to budget for, say, 1 year of support staff for 2 rovers, when you're not sure if both the rovers are going to make it. Makes more sense to budget for a short initial mission, and then extend it afterwards for only the rover that survived. Keeps the cost of the mission down, and makes it look more attractive from a funding standpoint.
It may not seem like a lot of money to you (and it really isn't - the extended mission is only maybe $20 million or so) but it's a very common technique to shave money off of a proposal. Plus, as I said, it does make more fiscal sense to wait and see how much operations money you're going to need and ask for it then, rather than guessing beforehand.
Some of the environments the Rovers experience resemble conditions experienced in the Alaskan winters, or Antarctic nighttime lows. It makes sense to ask the experts, who may know a resource or two more than your NASA engineer.
To quote:
An atmospheric daytime high might be -3 Celsius (26 Fahrenheit), while a nighttime low might be -96 Celsius (-140 Fahrenheit).
and
Antarctica is the coldest and windiest spot on the planet. The lowest temperature ever recorded on Earth was recorded in Antarctica (-129.3F) and the mean winter temperatures range from -40 to -94F. Winds are commonly measured at up to 200 miles per hour.
Hefty difference between -94 F and -140 F. And those numbers for the rover were summer values. Winter values are even lower. I think NASA should stick to their own engineers - especially as the temperature difference in space is much worse.
After the Chicxulub crater was found (oddly enough - with a dating of 65 million years) most scientists were pretty convinced that an asteroid (10 km is not a meteorite) killed off the dinosaurs. There may have been other contributing effects, but a 10 km object slamming into the Earth would have done extremely bad things to the planet's biosphere.
But now, JPL is happy if they get a few extra months over their initial 3 month plan.
Do you even really know why all NASA missions are so short, and then they always have an "extended mission"? Do you really think it's because NASA's aspirations are so low?
The reason is simple. The cost of the hardware itself is cheap. The cost of the people analyzing data is far more expensive. NASA's missions are so short because when the mission planners present the budget for grant review, in order to keep the cost sane, they plan a very short mission, and then hope to get funding for the extended mission.
A billion bucks for 3 months of science...only Dr. Pangloss could be happy with that.
This is the cost of science nowadays, and it's not hardware - it's people. If you want longer missions, fund NASA better.
Instead of creeping inch by inch, the Rovers could have moved foot by foot or gasp - yard by yard!
If you run across terrain that you don't know, you'll trip. Likewise, if the rovers move quickly over terrain they don't know, they could flip. There's no way to build enough fault tolerance in them to manage every scenario. Instead, they just move slowly.
Perhaps they could have even found the remains of Beagle and figured out what went wrong with it.
This better have been a joke. Mars is a planet. It has as much land area as Earth does (yes, that's true, as Mars has no oceans). The only thing that could've found Beagle would've been a human expedition with a very long range vehicle. A robotic rover attempting to travel that far would've been orders of magnitude more expensive, and it probably would've failed along the way.
Late interest in children due to working mothers is one, another is lack of religon, lack of agriculture (no need for 10 kids to work the farm), de-valuation of the family unit, female liberation, increased acceptance of homosexuality, etc.
There's no way you're going to prove a causative relation between "lack of religion" and lower population growth. For one thing, I doubt there's any difference between the average number of children in people who are agnostic and people who have strong belief. Likewise for most of your other responses - increased acceptance of homosexuality may not decrease birth rate, because even if they were shunned, the males still wouldn't reproduce. In fact, increased acceptance of homosexuality could increase birth rate, as female homosexuals could be willing to have relationships and children, whereas in a less accepting society, they might not.
The one thing that is provable is that people are marrying later and having children later in industrialized nations as compared to third-world countries. That's demonstrable through absolute tons of statistics.
You can apply Occam's Razor to this case: do we need any other explanations to explain the drop in population growth other than this? Any explanations that lack supporting data are simply superfluous, and are therefore unlikely to be true. Most of the explanations you listed are actually of that type - difficult to prove causation.
And that was the point that I was trying to make - you do not need any other hypotheses to explain the drop in population growth other than "people are marrying and having children later in life", as fertility drops significantly past 40. If the average age of first child increases past the point of maximum fertility, the birth rate goes down.
Only for women.
Curiously enough, women are the ones who bear children. When we talk about age at first child, we're talking about the women. If women in industrialized countries on the average want children later in life than in third-world countries, then the corresponding birth rate will be lower due to decreased fertility. The male desire for children doesn't even matter as men have very little age related fertility issues.
The pushing back of desire for children is the only explanation needed to explain the decrease in birth rate. It's a perfectly plausible explanation, and therefore it's also perfectly plausible to believe that with increases in health care and fertility treatments, the birth rate may increase again. It's certainly naive to think otherwise.
You shouldn't be worried about overpopulation then, because people of european decent are dying out. Russians, Europeans, and Americans of European decent are all having less and less children.
This is as naive as the people who predicted a constant exponential growth - you're trying to predict a trend based on the last few data points. There's no reason to believe that industrialized nations cause themselves to die out. For one thing, the nations having the most problems (the Scandinavian countries) are beginning to push towards trying to encourage people to have more children (one of the countries suggested putting state sponsored porn on TV, if memory serves).
Reasons for less children are many, and they aren't going away.
And you also forgot another one - late interest in children. Here's a thought experiment for you - what if it's not that people don't want children, but that people want children later in life? Fertility drops off significantly in the 40s, so convolving the dropping fertility with a shift in the age at which people want children will naturally lead to a lower birth rate. The total number of average *desired* children might not be changing at all.
But then what happens when science is able to significantly improve the fertility of those in their 40s? A boom happens all over again.
Like I said, it's a little naive to say that the birth rate trend won't change. They thought this back in the 80s, as well. I'm sure they had just as impressive reasons as we have for believing that the birth rate will continue along its (relatively recent) trend. But despite our arrogance, we really haven't figured out human societal trends yet.
Exactly, the colony example is the closest I could come to explaining how a single-cell could go to multicell, but in the end we still run into the problem of how it "evolves into an organism that can development into different jobs." That's kind of like having a million citizens in a city and suggesting that, over time, we will eventually evolve into a single large organism. That's obviously not the case and I don't see why it would be the case on a cellular colony basis either.
A city isn't made up of a million identical citizens. If you put a million humans in one location, they will specialize, each filling a niche. This is what I'm talking about.
Now the reason that an organism develops is because multicellular organisms are more efficient at reproducing than colony organisms. Colony organisms require forming a "seed ball" - basically, a ball containing one of each type of the colony members. A multicellular organism needs only one stem cell, which can reproduce, and contains the capability to develop into any one of the colony members. Colony life - with differentiated members - still exists today. That's essentially what coral is. But the evolutionary "leap" that marked the shift from unicellular to multicellular life was the development of a stem cell.
So why doesn't an organism develop for humans? Well, it did - we call it human society. There is a standing body of knowledge which is sufficient to recreate a city's specialists, and therefore, a city (or a colony of humans) can reproduce by sending out settlers (very few settlers) and the knowledge required to build that society.
You look at physics and we can see that the universe is in motion according to these elegant rules... it's that evolution just still doesn't make sense to me. I want to believe it, but I haven't been able to reconcile my skepticism yet.
Physics isn't perfect. We haven't found the particle that generates mass, so all of particle physics, and therefore all of nuclear physics, and all of atomic physics, and all of physics is incomplete. Plus GR isn't a quantum theory, and contains infinities that are unexplainable in its framework. It's incomplete.
Yet those incomplete points don't say that either GR or the Standard Model is wrong - they just say that they're incomplete. In fact, the Standard Model is correct, in some respects. There's a vast body of data which the Standard Model supports. Whatever theory replaces the Standard Model, it must be equivalent to the standard model over the range of data that the Standard Model is supported over. The question then becomes "what about the areas where you don't have experimental data? What do you use to explain those?" The best thing to use that we currently have is the Standard Model. It could be wrong, yes, but it is the prediction that is most consistent with the rest of the data.
Exactly similarly, the evolution of gender (somewhat) and the development of multicellular life (moreso) don't say that evolution is necessarily wrong. They simply say that whenever the final answer to the development of life on Earth is found, it necessarily must be equivalent to evolution over the time period where evolution explains the data extremely well. It's true that (currently) the evolution of multicellular life and (less so) gender are poorly understood. However, just as the Standard Model would be your best bet to explain an unexplored region of particle physics, evolution is the best bet to explain the evolution of multicellular life and gender, because it's the most consistent with the rest of the experimental data at hand.
but the theory itself can't be wrong--that's a very close-minded viewpoint on a theory that doesn't explain all the data.
I think you're still not understanding the scientific method. Once a hypothesis has been verified using valid data, there are only two ways for the hypothesis to be replaced - either
Epicurus naively thought that taking evil from the world was possible.
Even a God cannot fix the statement "This statement is false." (The liar paradox - Eubulides of Miletus. Oddly enough, around the same time period. Also a version of the proof of Godel's Incompleteness Theorem.)
Human language is insufficient to create a consistent framework. Our concept of omnipotence must necessarily limit itself to power that exists within a consistent framework.
You apparently didn't read Epicurus enough. He didn't state there are no gods - he stated there are no "Epicurean omnipotent" gods, where Epicurean omnipotence clearly included powers that exceed a consistent framework. In other words, his concept of omnipotence could not exist by simple construction.
His definition of omnipotent was poor. Instead of "unlimited power" it should've been "all power that is possible." In that case, his answer was incomplete - the third option was "or, a world without evil is impossible."
Incidentally, this solution to the problem of evil is most of the time overlooked. People have long since acknowledged that a simple solution to the question of whether or not God is all knowing is that "God knows all that is knowable", but apparently "God is capable of all that is capable" was outside of their ability.
Actually, there's a much simpler response to the previous argument, which amounted to "if he's omnipotent, can't he do X?", where X is something that either did not happen, or could not happen.
One variant is "if he's omnipotent, can God create a rock that he can't lift?"
The answer to that is pretty simple, and lies in mathematics - human language is flawed. Just because we can state something doesn't mean that that statement is self-consistent. i.e., not all statements are meaningful.
Consider "This statement is false," which is the prime example of why mathematics needs axioms to build a self-consistent framework.
So the answer to "Why didn't God create humans that were perfect in the first place?" could easily be "Because no such thing can exist. Humans, by construction, are flawed objects." Here, 'by construction' means that the definition of the object includes the stated object - that is, the very definition of 'human' means that it must be flawed - in other words, capable of sin.
Just as a statement that is false and true is impossible, so a human incapable of sin is impossible.
And interestingly enough, through judicious definitions of the word "sin" and "human", one can easily construct a framework where this is deductively correct. One example would be "a human is a being capable of choosing to follow or not to follow God" and "sin is not following God" - therefore, "humans must be capable of sin" by substitution. Sigh. There's not enough precision in religion. Someone really should fix that.
(Note that that wouldn't preclude a Christ-like figure from existing - as you stated, capability and actuality are two different things.)
But it seems to me that an incomplete cell separation would just result in two cells that are stuck together, much like Siamese twins. Each cell would be completely self-contained but stuck to the other cell due to the incomplete division. If either cell tried to reproduce then why wouldn't it just reproduce successfully and off goes another single cell? I still don't see where an organism that works perfectly fine as a single cell is going to "evolve" into a multi-cell organism in such a way that further reproduction produces a new multi-cell organism.
I doubt the incomplete cell separation is the immediate predecessor to the shift to multicellular life. For one thing, multicellular organisms aren't all massively "stuck-together" cells. Probably colony organisms are better examples. Like coral, for instance.
You can imagine a colony of bacteria forming, and specialization of the bacteria inside that colony as they evolved. Natural selection works *inside* the colony, as well as outside, so genetic drift specializes each of the cells inside. Now the problem comes "how does that colony reproduce?" The colony itself is doing quite well, but its strengths come from the fact that they're relying on each other, so they can't drift too far. The only way the colony ends up reproducing is if one chunk gets separated, spreads a distance, and starts growing again. (Sound familiar? There are still plenty of multicellular organisms that can reproduce this way!)
Now comes the kicker. A colony made up of specialized cells that can't turn into each other would have a lot of problems reproducing. Imagine trying to replicate human society: if you randomly cut a section of a city out, and pulled it off into space, the chances that that section would have all the requisite skills to form a stable society is miniscule at best. So the colony organisms don't replicate that easily. Until one of them evolves an organism that can develop into different "jobs" inside the colony, depending on the external conditions. Then, that colony can reproduce easier, because the number of needed "cell types" is less, because you've now got a "wild card". Of course, natural extension of this would lead to the development of a stem cell - which is basically the beginning of "proper" multicellular life.
Yes, He could figure that out. But He could also conclude that the reproductive process has benefits for human bonding that go beyond the simple need for efficiency in reproduction.
But that's a why, not a how. The question wasn't "why did gender develop", but "how did gender develop?" They're two completely separate questions. The answer to one does not impinge upon the other.
If God realized "hmm, social beings will need to bond", great! How did He do it? By creating a Universe where organisms would need to evolve, as a species, faster than random chance would allow. If you have another suggestion as to how He did it, I'd love to hear it. So would many, many evolutionary biologists, I imagine.:)
The Bible is not a good description of how man, and the Earth, was created. Nor was it ever intended to be - it's not like mankind at the time - or even now - could possibly understand exactly how God created the Earth. I mean, really - what would he have said? "On the first day, I changed the framulstat ordinalyzer to seventy three, which created the conditions for the microballistic dinglehopper to begin the 'Universe creation' process." This, to people who probably hadn't invented the bow and arrow? The Bible is, however, a good description of why the Universe was created. It was created to be lived in, by beings like the Creator himself. And that is a very important fact. Especially when you look at other religions at the time, which don't state this. Many religions at the time said that the Universe was created for the gods' amusement, or some other reason, because life seemed very cruel. It actually seems strange that
And that in it God clearly states that He created heaven and earth in 6 days and rested the seventh.
What does "day" mean? Are you sure that it means the same thing to you as it did to the people who translated the Bible? And the people who transcribed it? And to the people that actually heard it?
For one thing, the Bible teaches that death came into God's creation with Adam and Eve's sin in eating of the forbidden fruit.
What does "death" mean? Is it death of the body? Or death of the spirit? Are you sure it means the same thing to you that it does to the people who heard it in the first place? Nowadays we know what death is - very specifically. Did they?
Are you sure even that what you think of as death and what the Bible refers to as death are the same thing? How can you be? When you read the word "love" in the Bible, it doesn't mean the same thing - the Christians at the time spoke a language that had three words for "love", yet it was transcribed into a language with only one word. How do you know which kind of "love" they meant at each statement?
To now claim to be a Christian and refute His claim to the Bible's authority and veracity is, frankly, bullshit. Such a person is a lier.
You really should add "in my opinion" there. Judge not, lest ye be judged.
Just because what you believe to be true doesn't agree with what someone else believes to be true doesn't mean that they're wrong, and you're right. It means that you disagree.
And anyway, "liar" is the wrong word for what you're looking for. They're not lying, which is deliberately saying something you know to be false - if you believe it's true, you're not lying. Calling them a liar is also against the teachings of Christ, isn't it? Let those without sin cast the first stone? They might be a hypocrite from your point of view, but even that's a stretch, because in their eyes, there's no contradiction. The best phrase for a person like that would be misguided.
And besides, just because the Bible isn't literally true according to some interpretation of the words in it doesn't mean that it's not accurate and true. Did Christ mean that you were only supposed to forgive people 490 times, and then you can give up on them? No, of course not. Reading is interpretation.
It is absolutely impossible to accept Jesus Christ's gift of salvation without believing the Bible.
There would have to be evidence that one creature evolved into another.
Dog breeding proves that you can have one creature breed into another creature with totally different phenotypic traits. You can even have them breed into creatures which can't mate with each other. That's the literal definition of "a different species", so, yes, there is evidence.
Plus there's the ton of evidence from biology labs, and examples of moths changing color due to changes in their environment in England. That's clear evidence that the same methods that we use in dog breeding work in nature, as of course they must.
The sticking point that you have is what constitutes a "new creature". If you say "that's not a new creature, just a different version of the old one", then you'll always be right that creatures can't evolve into different creatures, because you've *defined* it that way. However, given the scientific definition of species, it's certainly possible for creatures to speciate.
but to pretend to present a anti-Biblical explaination for life on earth.
The Bible isn't an explanation for life on Earth. There is nowhere near enough detail. Nor was it even possible to communicate at the time to the people a proper explanation, so we wouldn't expect one. There are vague phrases such as "separated the heavens and the earth", which people have construed to mean certain things, but then the explanation isn't coming from the Bible, it's coming from the people who are construing the ideas.
I could read the Bible, almost literally, and then write down a more detailed interpretation of what it says that would look exactly like evolution.
How did a simple but robust single-cell organism spontaneously "evolve" into a more complex multi-cell organism?
Because the multi-cell organism was better able to adapt to its environment. Just like human society is better able to adapt to challenges than a single human.
Probably some external stressor killed off all but the few in a colony that actually bonded together to provide some protection from the external stressor. Coral is a good example of an organism between single cell and multicell.
Why did organisms that reproduced asexually "evolve" into creatures that require a male and female component which is far less efficient?
Because sexual reproduction encourages genetic diversity. Genes scramble around much more. It's a "controlled" mutation, where you're not just improving by mutagens or poor transcription, but by simply reproducing. So sexual reproduction isn't less efficient - it's slightly more complicated, but much more efficient.
There are plenty of examples of organisms "inbetween" sexual and asexual reproduction. There are organisms that reproduce sexually, but have both male and female parts, so they can self-reproduce. Most likely that organism evolved first, and then over time, speciated into a version without both gonads.
Pumpkins, for instance, have both male and female parts.
And if one of those spontaneously evolved into something that required a mate, what's the probability that it just happened to bump into another similar organsim that also just spontaneously evolved into the opposite gender of this new mutation?
See the previous comment - probably originally, the organisms had both genders. Once you have an entire population that has both genders, one organism only having one gender doesn't have a lower chance of procreating - he'd be the only male among an entire population of females, for instance. So monogender would start creeping in, and if there are advantages to it, could take over.
Also there are organisms (some frogs) where the members of the species can change gender if the gender ratio of the community is too far off.
Evolution really can explain the way that life formed, simply because the timescale involved is so long. One can easily look at the DNA of humans, compare it to the DNA of, say, bacteria, and compute, given a known mutation rate, how long it would take to go from the bacteria to humans. If this timescale coincided with the exact time the fossil records show, then evolution would be very unlikely. But it's many, many orders of magnitude smaller than that time, so evolution is distinctly possible.
Skepticism is a good thing - it's quite possibly the healthiest thought pattern that any human can have, especially in the days of spoonfed information.
Absolutely. Politicians and actors teach that, by example, quite often. Having just seen the end of "American Sweethearts", that's ever so much more evident.
I think what the difference is is that, the grandparent stated what makes Christianity, Christianity, while the great grand parent stated what made a generic form of Mono-thiesm, mono-theism. Because the great grand parent describe about a dozen religions including Christianity.
And what I stated was that Christianity and those dozen other religions - including any generic monotheism - can be exactly the same thing, and it's important to remember that.
If you're strictly defining Christianity, then yes, the grandparent (well, you know what I mean) is correct. But considering so many people also have an idea about what people "have" to believe in, it's important to realize that Christianity is also the great-grandparent as well.
What he quoted here is not the core tenet of Christianity; this is just a nice way to live with God thrown in for good measure.
Well - actually what he's quoting is a rough paraphrase of Christ, from the Gospel of John, 13:34. Adding the "Love God above all others" would be something that Christ wouldn't say, directly - it was more implied by other statements.
What you've quoted is a set of beliefs - what he quoted was a set of actions. One of the great problems of Christianity recently is not realizing that these two can, in fact, be the same thing. John 13:35 - "This is how all will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another." Note the wording - if you have love for one another, people will know that you're Christ's disciple.
The core of Christianity is believing in Christ and being his disciple. What Christ said was that being his disciple means that you have love for one another - therefore, those who have love for one another are Christ's disciples.
Anyway, I don't want this to be an "attack" on your own beliefs. I'm just throwing this out as food for thought, and trying to point out that what you feel as the core tenets of Christianity need not be incompatible with what he said, as well.
The idea that a theory should be accepted as true until it's credibly proven false is ridiculous. Why shouldn't the burden of proof be on those who stand behind a theory?
Because the burden of proof was on them to prove that it fits the observed Universe. If it's a theory, it's already done that.
I mean, if we're going to play that game, then I have a theory that you're an idiot.
That's not a theory. It's a hypothesis. The next step would be to devise experiments to prove or disprove the hypothesis. If the experiments all prove valid, then the hypothesis becomes a theory. It's not a theory until it already has backing.
Once it's a theory, then it becomes a valid explanation for the way the world works. After this, of course people will still attempt to confirm it, but they can also use it to attempt to explain new things, because all the evidence that backs the original theory backs any new ones.
A "hypothesis" is an unvalidated assertion - a conjecture. A "theory" is a validated assertion - a conjecture that has a body of data behind it which would need to be explained equally well by any hypothesis competing with it.
I don't know when "theory" became synonymous with "hypothesis" in everyday speak. It isn't. A theory is disprovable, but with far more effort than a hypothesis. In order to disprove a theory, you need to either show the evidence was bad, or the theory was incomplete.
Taking the case of evolution, there's well more than enough evidence that the first suggestion isn't possible - the evidence is good. At this point, the only solution for evolution being wrong is if it's incomplete, akin to, for instance, Newton's Theory of Gravity.
Or, you could realize the Pope is only dictator of Catholicism; not the hundred or so other ways to believe in God and Christ. Get a clue.
Riight... so what part of that invalidates my argument? Unless you're saying the Pope doesn't believe in God and Christ?
And considering it isn't just Catholicism - it's at least Judaism as well. Lutherans seem to be a bit torn about it, but some branches say it's OK, whereas others say "... ehhhh...", UCC, as always, is church-local on it, Methodists say it's OK, Greek Orthodox as well. I could go on, and on... but it certainly seems that a lot of people who are Christians have no problem with evolution. As would anyone whose faith doesn't rest on the belief of a giant hand coming out of the sky.
But it doesn't. Just in case you missed it: Evolution does not fit your faith, if that faith is God and Christ. If one of the foundations (creationism) of your hypothesis (God and Christ are real) is wrong, then the whole thing is simply WRONG. You can't throw one away and replace it with another.
Cool. An anonymous coward knows more than the Pope about religion. Arrogant, aren't we?
The Pope stated sometime in the 1980s that christianity and evolution don't contradict, and that one can easily believe in both.
Or you can read the very well written commentary here, and get a clue. Using the same stubborn-headed aspect that you bedevil in others makes you just as bad.
Roast just means to cook in an oven. To broil something means to expose it to intense heat. It's the highest heat setting on an oven, and you're supposed to put the meat right beside the burners themselves.
Hmm, considering there's a dish called "London Broil", it just makes me wonder if that's not actually British, but yet another American bastardization...
Actually, it will more likely provide an apparatus for inducing oscillations, to avoid known orbital debris. But, of course, that can damp out unwanted vibrations as well.
When you pluck a guitar string, do you stretch your fingers from capo to bridge? Or is your pick just a tiny sliver compared to its full length? The latter, I think. Which should open your mind a little. Here's what to allow into it:
Sigh.
Plucking a string is not a resonant oscillation - you'd have to pluck the string, then pluck it again when string vibrated back to you, et cetera. Each time, the oscillation gets larger, and is fed by the plucking. Otherwise, the oscillation gets damped because of the fixed ends of the string. In this case, only one end is fixed, but it's got such a gigantic tension that this oscillation will damp very rapidly.
Plus, while you don't stretch your fingers across the full length, the only way you can get a resonant oscillation is if you're the only force across that full length. Anything else will damp out the vibrations, because it won't be perfectly in phase with the first induced pulse.
Since there will definitely be other sources of oscillation (such as the Earth's rotation), there's little danger of an accidental resonant oscillation.
The wind at the bottom will act more like a violin bow, and the harmonics of the primary mode of vibration (i.e., all the multiples of f=1/(7*3600) cycles/second) will be induced into the cable in the stable state.
Of course they will. So the ribbon will wave, very, very, very slightly. It's under megatons of tension, after all! But the modes won't grow, as they would in a resonant case, as they did with Tacoma Narrows. There's nothing along its entire length which has a period of 7 hours, so the induced vibrations (some of which will come from using the ribbon itself, which causes an oscillation!) will damp.
Induced oscillations would be a major worry, and unavoidable given an unavoidable and underestimated source of mechanical input in the atmosphere.
Underestimated? By who? By me? I never estimated anything. I just said people have done it already (and they did more than just calculate the fundamental modes, which you can do on a napkin). Underestimated by the people who've been looking into this? I doubt it. Read the reports. This has been modeled quite extensively. It's stable.
It's not like string dynamics are this exciting new branch of physics.
Yes, it does. And it did to the people who looked at the space elevator as well. The Tacoma Narrows bridge fell because the period of its resonant frequency happened to be close to a naturally occurring oscillation.
In order for resonance to be a serious problem, the induced oscillation has to occur over the entire object, and it has to be close in period to the natural frequency of the object.
The fundamental period of the space elevator is 7 hours. There's nothing which occurs on the full scale of the elevator (hundreds of thousands of kilometers) which is near to 7 hours.
So induced oscillations aren't a worry.
(Wind oscillations are a non issue if they don't rip the ribbon. The ribbon is huge. The atmosphere is just a tiny sliver compared to its full length.)
Steam turbines are really, really well researched technology.
And really, really bad. They're heat engines. They suck. They're limited by the temperature differential between the hot and cold baths, both of which are limited by the properties of water. You're going to be throwing away easily 30-40% of your energy just in thermal conversion inefficiencies, and typically it's more like 50-60%.
Compare that to hydroelectric, which is conversion of mechanical to electrical - it's virtually *perfect* energy conversion. The efficiency is in the 90% and higher range.
It would be very, very nice if someone could come up with a way to generate electrical energy from nuclear power without using heat transfer.
You're completely right, and I agree with you that solar thermal, if you only look at the short-term, might be viable - that is, as a stop-gap.
But my whole point throughout this was that photovoltaics, fundamentally, are a better technology. Half the reason I even replied was because the person recommended power towers as "better" at converting solar to electricity. Heat engines are just fundamentally impossible to make efficient, because of that darned Second Law of Thermodynamics. And so, eventually, any sane study of the two technologies would have to be in favor of solar panels in the long run, because they will (and currently do, from what I can calculate) generate more power per square meter than power tower designs. And fundamentally, in the end, land is the one thing that you can't hope for process technologies to improve upon - one square meter is one square meter. Solar panels might get cheaper, power towers might get cheaper, but since you're dealing with solar flux, ultimately, if you need to scale, land issues are going to come into play. And solar panels use land much more effectively than towers do.
It should also be noted, of course, that there's no reason you couldn't use mirrors with solar panels, either to increase their effective area, but there's an efficiency loss there as well.
Would seem to me to make sense to build an array of tracking solar panels with mirror extensions which can be replaced with solar panels when they drop down in price. That seems to me to be a perfect stopgap solution.
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The flip side of the coin - somewhere a budget analyst is kicking himself because he let the engineers talk the rover team into building in excess power margin based on a more pessimistic prediction on solar cell dust coverage. In a "perfect world" according to the budget people, they'd spend only enough to ensure that the rover dropped dead the day AFTER it completed the planned mission. It now looks like they apparently overbuilt the rovers based on what's happened with the 2 rovers at widely separated mission locations, and that's bad news for whoever controls the checkbook. Hopefully the next set of landers won't fail prematurely due to a redundancy or excess margin backlash because of how well these rovers have performed.
Nah. They knew the rovers would last longer than the primary mission (how much longer was anyone's guess). You cap the mission at a shorter timeframe so you can save on personnel costs, and then ask for that money later as an "extended mission".
It also is silly to budget for, say, 1 year of support staff for 2 rovers, when you're not sure if both the rovers are going to make it. Makes more sense to budget for a short initial mission, and then extend it afterwards for only the rover that survived. Keeps the cost of the mission down, and makes it look more attractive from a funding standpoint.
It may not seem like a lot of money to you (and it really isn't - the extended mission is only maybe $20 million or so) but it's a very common technique to shave money off of a proposal. Plus, as I said, it does make more fiscal sense to wait and see how much operations money you're going to need and ask for it then, rather than guessing beforehand.
To quote:
and
Hefty difference between -94 F and -140 F. And those numbers for the rover were summer values. Winter values are even lower. I think NASA should stick to their own engineers - especially as the temperature difference in space is much worse.
no really compelling evidence that exctinction was caused by a meteor as the mainstream media implies.
Barring the really gigantic impact crater in the south of Mexico?
After the Chicxulub crater was found (oddly enough - with a dating of 65 million years) most scientists were pretty convinced that an asteroid (10 km is not a meteorite) killed off the dinosaurs. There may have been other contributing effects, but a 10 km object slamming into the Earth would have done extremely bad things to the planet's biosphere.
But now, JPL is happy if they get a few extra months over their initial 3 month plan.
Do you even really know why all NASA missions are so short, and then they always have an "extended mission"? Do you really think it's because NASA's aspirations are so low?
The reason is simple. The cost of the hardware itself is cheap. The cost of the people analyzing data is far more expensive. NASA's missions are so short because when the mission planners present the budget for grant review, in order to keep the cost sane, they plan a very short mission, and then hope to get funding for the extended mission.
A billion bucks for 3 months of science...only Dr. Pangloss could be happy with that.
This is the cost of science nowadays, and it's not hardware - it's people. If you want longer missions, fund NASA better.
Instead of creeping inch by inch, the Rovers could have moved foot by foot or gasp - yard by yard!
If you run across terrain that you don't know, you'll trip. Likewise, if the rovers move quickly over terrain they don't know, they could flip. There's no way to build enough fault tolerance in them to manage every scenario. Instead, they just move slowly.
Perhaps they could have even found the remains of Beagle and figured out what went wrong with it.
This better have been a joke. Mars is a planet. It has as much land area as Earth does (yes, that's true, as Mars has no oceans). The only thing that could've found Beagle would've been a human expedition with a very long range vehicle. A robotic rover attempting to travel that far would've been orders of magnitude more expensive, and it probably would've failed along the way.
Late interest in children due to working mothers is one, another is lack of religon, lack of agriculture (no need for 10 kids to work the farm), de-valuation of the family unit, female liberation, increased acceptance of homosexuality, etc.
There's no way you're going to prove a causative relation between "lack of religion" and lower population growth. For one thing, I doubt there's any difference between the average number of children in people who are agnostic and people who have strong belief. Likewise for most of your other responses - increased acceptance of homosexuality may not decrease birth rate, because even if they were shunned, the males still wouldn't reproduce. In fact, increased acceptance of homosexuality could increase birth rate, as female homosexuals could be willing to have relationships and children, whereas in a less accepting society, they might not.
The one thing that is provable is that people are marrying later and having children later in industrialized nations as compared to third-world countries. That's demonstrable through absolute tons of statistics.
You can apply Occam's Razor to this case: do we need any other explanations to explain the drop in population growth other than this? Any explanations that lack supporting data are simply superfluous, and are therefore unlikely to be true. Most of the explanations you listed are actually of that type - difficult to prove causation.
And that was the point that I was trying to make - you do not need any other hypotheses to explain the drop in population growth other than "people are marrying and having children later in life", as fertility drops significantly past 40. If the average age of first child increases past the point of maximum fertility, the birth rate goes down.
Only for women.
Curiously enough, women are the ones who bear children. When we talk about age at first child, we're talking about the women. If women in industrialized countries on the average want children later in life than in third-world countries, then the corresponding birth rate will be lower due to decreased fertility. The male desire for children doesn't even matter as men have very little age related fertility issues.
The pushing back of desire for children is the only explanation needed to explain the decrease in birth rate. It's a perfectly plausible explanation, and therefore it's also perfectly plausible to believe that with increases in health care and fertility treatments, the birth rate may increase again. It's certainly naive to think otherwise.
You shouldn't be worried about overpopulation then, because people of european decent are dying out. Russians, Europeans, and Americans of European decent are all having less and less children.
This is as naive as the people who predicted a constant exponential growth - you're trying to predict a trend based on the last few data points. There's no reason to believe that industrialized nations cause themselves to die out. For one thing, the nations having the most problems (the Scandinavian countries) are beginning to push towards trying to encourage people to have more children (one of the countries suggested putting state sponsored porn on TV, if memory serves).
Reasons for less children are many, and they aren't going away.
And you also forgot another one - late interest in children. Here's a thought experiment for you - what if it's not that people don't want children, but that people want children later in life? Fertility drops off significantly in the 40s, so convolving the dropping fertility with a shift in the age at which people want children will naturally lead to a lower birth rate. The total number of average *desired* children might not be changing at all.
But then what happens when science is able to significantly improve the fertility of those in their 40s? A boom happens all over again.
Like I said, it's a little naive to say that the birth rate trend won't change. They thought this back in the 80s, as well. I'm sure they had just as impressive reasons as we have for believing that the birth rate will continue along its (relatively recent) trend. But despite our arrogance, we really haven't figured out human societal trends yet.
Exactly, the colony example is the closest I could come to explaining how a single-cell could go to multicell, but in the end we still run into the problem of how it "evolves into an organism that can development into different jobs." That's kind of like having a million citizens in a city and suggesting that, over time, we will eventually evolve into a single large organism. That's obviously not the case and I don't see why it would be the case on a cellular colony basis either.
... it's that evolution just still doesn't make sense to me. I want to believe it, but I haven't been able to reconcile my skepticism yet.
A city isn't made up of a million identical citizens. If you put a million humans in one location, they will specialize, each filling a niche. This is what I'm talking about.
Now the reason that an organism develops is because multicellular organisms are more efficient at reproducing than colony organisms. Colony organisms require forming a "seed ball" - basically, a ball containing one of each type of the colony members. A multicellular organism needs only one stem cell, which can reproduce, and contains the capability to develop into any one of the colony members. Colony life - with differentiated members - still exists today. That's essentially what coral is. But the evolutionary "leap" that marked the shift from unicellular to multicellular life was the development of a stem cell.
So why doesn't an organism develop for humans? Well, it did - we call it human society. There is a standing body of knowledge which is sufficient to recreate a city's specialists, and therefore, a city (or a colony of humans) can reproduce by sending out settlers (very few settlers) and the knowledge required to build that society.
You look at physics and we can see that the universe is in motion according to these elegant rules
Physics isn't perfect. We haven't found the particle that generates mass, so all of particle physics, and therefore all of nuclear physics, and all of atomic physics, and all of physics is incomplete. Plus GR isn't a quantum theory, and contains infinities that are unexplainable in its framework. It's incomplete.
Yet those incomplete points don't say that either GR or the Standard Model is wrong - they just say that they're incomplete. In fact, the Standard Model is correct, in some respects. There's a vast body of data which the Standard Model supports. Whatever theory replaces the Standard Model, it must be equivalent to the standard model over the range of data that the Standard Model is supported over. The question then becomes "what about the areas where you don't have experimental data? What do you use to explain those?" The best thing to use that we currently have is the Standard Model. It could be wrong, yes, but it is the prediction that is most consistent with the rest of the data.
Exactly similarly, the evolution of gender (somewhat) and the development of multicellular life (moreso) don't say that evolution is necessarily wrong. They simply say that whenever the final answer to the development of life on Earth is found, it necessarily must be equivalent to evolution over the time period where evolution explains the data extremely well. It's true that (currently) the evolution of multicellular life and (less so) gender are poorly understood. However, just as the Standard Model would be your best bet to explain an unexplored region of particle physics, evolution is the best bet to explain the evolution of multicellular life and gender, because it's the most consistent with the rest of the experimental data at hand.
but the theory itself can't be wrong--that's a very close-minded viewpoint on a theory that doesn't explain all the data.
I think you're still not understanding the scientific method. Once a hypothesis has been verified using valid data, there are only two ways for the hypothesis to be replaced - either
Epicurus naively thought that taking evil from the world was possible.
Even a God cannot fix the statement "This statement is false." (The liar paradox - Eubulides of Miletus. Oddly enough, around the same time period. Also a version of the proof of Godel's Incompleteness Theorem.)
Human language is insufficient to create a consistent framework. Our concept of omnipotence must necessarily limit itself to power that exists within a consistent framework.
You apparently didn't read Epicurus enough. He didn't state there are no gods - he stated there are no "Epicurean omnipotent" gods, where Epicurean omnipotence clearly included powers that exceed a consistent framework. In other words, his concept of omnipotence could not exist by simple construction.
His definition of omnipotent was poor. Instead of "unlimited power" it should've been "all power that is possible." In that case, his answer was incomplete - the third option was "or, a world without evil is impossible."
Incidentally, this solution to the problem of evil is most of the time overlooked. People have long since acknowledged that a simple solution to the question of whether or not God is all knowing is that "God knows all that is knowable", but apparently "God is capable of all that is capable" was outside of their ability.
Actually, there's a much simpler response to the previous argument, which amounted to "if he's omnipotent, can't he do X?", where X is something that either did not happen, or could not happen.
One variant is "if he's omnipotent, can God create a rock that he can't lift?"
The answer to that is pretty simple, and lies in mathematics - human language is flawed. Just because we can state something doesn't mean that that statement is self-consistent. i.e., not all statements are meaningful.
Consider "This statement is false," which is the prime example of why mathematics needs axioms to build a self-consistent framework.
So the answer to "Why didn't God create humans that were perfect in the first place?" could easily be "Because no such thing can exist. Humans, by construction, are flawed objects." Here, 'by construction' means that the definition of the object includes the stated object - that is, the very definition of 'human' means that it must be flawed - in other words, capable of sin.
Just as a statement that is false and true is impossible, so a human incapable of sin is impossible.
And interestingly enough, through judicious definitions of the word "sin" and "human", one can easily construct a framework where this is deductively correct. One example would be "a human is a being capable of choosing to follow or not to follow God" and "sin is not following God" - therefore, "humans must be capable of sin" by substitution. Sigh. There's not enough precision in religion. Someone really should fix that.
(Note that that wouldn't preclude a Christ-like figure from existing - as you stated, capability and actuality are two different things.)
But it seems to me that an incomplete cell separation would just result in two cells that are stuck together, much like Siamese twins. Each cell would be completely self-contained but stuck to the other cell due to the incomplete division. If either cell tried to reproduce then why wouldn't it just reproduce successfully and off goes another single cell? I still don't see where an organism that works perfectly fine as a single cell is going to "evolve" into a multi-cell organism in such a way that further reproduction produces a new multi-cell organism.
:)
I doubt the incomplete cell separation is the immediate predecessor to the shift to multicellular life. For one thing, multicellular organisms aren't all massively "stuck-together" cells. Probably colony organisms are better examples. Like coral, for instance.
You can imagine a colony of bacteria forming, and specialization of the bacteria inside that colony as they evolved. Natural selection works *inside* the colony, as well as outside, so genetic drift specializes each of the cells inside. Now the problem comes "how does that colony reproduce?" The colony itself is doing quite well, but its strengths come from the fact that they're relying on each other, so they can't drift too far. The only way the colony ends up reproducing is if one chunk gets separated, spreads a distance, and starts growing again. (Sound familiar? There are still plenty of multicellular organisms that can reproduce this way!)
Now comes the kicker. A colony made up of specialized cells that can't turn into each other would have a lot of problems reproducing. Imagine trying to replicate human society: if you randomly cut a section of a city out, and pulled it off into space, the chances that that section would have all the requisite skills to form a stable society is miniscule at best. So the colony organisms don't replicate that easily. Until one of them evolves an organism that can develop into different "jobs" inside the colony, depending on the external conditions. Then, that colony can reproduce easier, because the number of needed "cell types" is less, because you've now got a "wild card". Of course, natural extension of this would lead to the development of a stem cell - which is basically the beginning of "proper" multicellular life.
Yes, He could figure that out. But He could also conclude that the reproductive process has benefits for human bonding that go beyond the simple need for efficiency in reproduction.
But that's a why, not a how. The question wasn't "why did gender develop", but "how did gender develop?" They're two completely separate questions. The answer to one does not impinge upon the other.
If God realized "hmm, social beings will need to bond", great! How did He do it? By creating a Universe where organisms would need to evolve, as a species, faster than random chance would allow. If you have another suggestion as to how He did it, I'd love to hear it. So would many, many evolutionary biologists, I imagine.
The Bible is not a good description of how man, and the Earth, was created. Nor was it ever intended to be - it's not like mankind at the time - or even now - could possibly understand exactly how God created the Earth. I mean, really - what would he have said? "On the first day, I changed the framulstat ordinalyzer to seventy three, which created the conditions for the microballistic dinglehopper to begin the 'Universe creation' process." This, to people who probably hadn't invented the bow and arrow? The Bible is, however, a good description of why the Universe was created. It was created to be lived in, by beings like the Creator himself. And that is a very important fact. Especially when you look at other religions at the time, which don't state this. Many religions at the time said that the Universe was created for the gods' amusement, or some other reason, because life seemed very cruel. It actually seems strange that
And that in it God clearly states that He created heaven and earth in 6 days and rested the seventh.
What does "day" mean? Are you sure that it means the same thing to you as it did to the people who translated the Bible? And the people who transcribed it? And to the people that actually heard it?
For one thing, the Bible teaches that death came into God's creation with Adam and Eve's sin in eating of the forbidden fruit.
What does "death" mean? Is it death of the body? Or death of the spirit? Are you sure it means the same thing to you that it does to the people who heard it in the first place? Nowadays we know what death is - very specifically. Did they?
Are you sure even that what you think of as death and what the Bible refers to as death are the same thing? How can you be? When you read the word "love" in the Bible, it doesn't mean the same thing - the Christians at the time spoke a language that had three words for "love", yet it was transcribed into a language with only one word. How do you know which kind of "love" they meant at each statement?
To now claim to be a Christian and refute His claim to the Bible's authority and veracity is, frankly, bullshit. Such a person is a lier.
You really should add "in my opinion" there. Judge not, lest ye be judged.
Just because what you believe to be true doesn't agree with what someone else believes to be true doesn't mean that they're wrong, and you're right. It means that you disagree.
And anyway, "liar" is the wrong word for what you're looking for. They're not lying, which is deliberately saying something you know to be false - if you believe it's true, you're not lying. Calling them a liar is also against the teachings of Christ, isn't it? Let those without sin cast the first stone? They might be a hypocrite from your point of view, but even that's a stretch, because in their eyes, there's no contradiction. The best phrase for a person like that would be misguided.
And besides, just because the Bible isn't literally true according to some interpretation of the words in it doesn't mean that it's not accurate and true. Did Christ mean that you were only supposed to forgive people 490 times, and then you can give up on them? No, of course not. Reading is interpretation.
It is absolutely impossible to accept Jesus Christ's gift of salvation without believing the Bible.
Isn't it up to God to decide that?
There would have to be evidence that one creature evolved into another.
Dog breeding proves that you can have one creature breed into another creature with totally different phenotypic traits. You can even have them breed into creatures which can't mate with each other. That's the literal definition of "a different species", so, yes, there is evidence.
Plus there's the ton of evidence from biology labs, and examples of moths changing color due to changes in their environment in England. That's clear evidence that the same methods that we use in dog breeding work in nature, as of course they must.
The sticking point that you have is what constitutes a "new creature". If you say "that's not a new creature, just a different version of the old one", then you'll always be right that creatures can't evolve into different creatures, because you've *defined* it that way. However, given the scientific definition of species, it's certainly possible for creatures to speciate.
but to pretend to present a anti-Biblical explaination for life on earth.
The Bible isn't an explanation for life on Earth. There is nowhere near enough detail. Nor was it even possible to communicate at the time to the people a proper explanation, so we wouldn't expect one. There are vague phrases such as "separated the heavens and the earth", which people have construed to mean certain things, but then the explanation isn't coming from the Bible, it's coming from the people who are construing the ideas.
I could read the Bible, almost literally, and then write down a more detailed interpretation of what it says that would look exactly like evolution.
How did a simple but robust single-cell organism spontaneously "evolve" into a more complex multi-cell organism?
Because the multi-cell organism was better able to adapt to its environment. Just like human society is better able to adapt to challenges than a single human.
Probably some external stressor killed off all but the few in a colony that actually bonded together to provide some protection from the external stressor. Coral is a good example of an organism between single cell and multicell.
Why did organisms that reproduced asexually "evolve" into creatures that require a male and female component which is far less efficient?
Because sexual reproduction encourages genetic diversity. Genes scramble around much more. It's a "controlled" mutation, where you're not just improving by mutagens or poor transcription, but by simply reproducing. So sexual reproduction isn't less efficient - it's slightly more complicated, but much more efficient.
There are plenty of examples of organisms "inbetween" sexual and asexual reproduction. There are organisms that reproduce sexually, but have both male and female parts, so they can self-reproduce. Most likely that organism evolved first, and then over time, speciated into a version without both gonads.
Pumpkins, for instance, have both male and female parts.
And if one of those spontaneously evolved into something that required a mate, what's the probability that it just happened to bump into another similar organsim that also just spontaneously evolved into the opposite gender of this new mutation?
See the previous comment - probably originally, the organisms had both genders. Once you have an entire population that has both genders, one organism only having one gender doesn't have a lower chance of procreating - he'd be the only male among an entire population of females, for instance. So monogender would start creeping in, and if there are advantages to it, could take over.
Also there are organisms (some frogs) where the members of the species can change gender if the gender ratio of the community is too far off.
Evolution really can explain the way that life formed, simply because the timescale involved is so long. One can easily look at the DNA of humans, compare it to the DNA of, say, bacteria, and compute, given a known mutation rate, how long it would take to go from the bacteria to humans. If this timescale coincided with the exact time the fossil records show, then evolution would be very unlikely. But it's many, many orders of magnitude smaller than that time, so evolution is distinctly possible.
Skepticism is a good thing - it's quite possibly the healthiest thought pattern that any human can have, especially in the days of spoonfed information.
but you can have actions without faith
Absolutely. Politicians and actors teach that, by example, quite often. Having just seen the end of "American Sweethearts", that's ever so much more evident.
I think what the difference is is that, the grandparent stated what makes Christianity, Christianity, while the great grand parent stated what made a generic form of Mono-thiesm, mono-theism. Because the great grand parent describe about a dozen religions including Christianity.
And what I stated was that Christianity and those dozen other religions - including any generic monotheism - can be exactly the same thing, and it's important to remember that.
If you're strictly defining Christianity, then yes, the grandparent (well, you know what I mean) is correct. But considering so many people also have an idea about what people "have" to believe in, it's important to realize that Christianity is also the great-grandparent as well.
What he quoted here is not the core tenet of Christianity; this is just a nice way to live with God thrown in for good measure.
Well - actually what he's quoting is a rough paraphrase of Christ, from the Gospel of John, 13:34. Adding the "Love God above all others" would be something that Christ wouldn't say, directly - it was more implied by other statements.
What you've quoted is a set of beliefs - what he quoted was a set of actions. One of the great problems of Christianity recently is not realizing that these two can, in fact, be the same thing. John 13:35 - "This is how all will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another." Note the wording - if you have love for one another, people will know that you're Christ's disciple.
The core of Christianity is believing in Christ and being his disciple. What Christ said was that being his disciple means that you have love for one another - therefore, those who have love for one another are Christ's disciples.
Anyway, I don't want this to be an "attack" on your own beliefs. I'm just throwing this out as food for thought, and trying to point out that what you feel as the core tenets of Christianity need not be incompatible with what he said, as well.
The idea that a theory should be accepted as true until it's credibly proven false is ridiculous. Why shouldn't the burden of proof be on those who stand behind a theory?
Because the burden of proof was on them to prove that it fits the observed Universe. If it's a theory, it's already done that.
I mean, if we're going to play that game, then I have a theory that you're an idiot.
That's not a theory. It's a hypothesis. The next step would be to devise experiments to prove or disprove the hypothesis. If the experiments all prove valid, then the hypothesis becomes a theory. It's not a theory until it already has backing.
Once it's a theory, then it becomes a valid explanation for the way the world works. After this, of course people will still attempt to confirm it, but they can also use it to attempt to explain new things, because all the evidence that backs the original theory backs any new ones.
A "hypothesis" is an unvalidated assertion - a conjecture. A "theory" is a validated assertion - a conjecture that has a body of data behind it which would need to be explained equally well by any hypothesis competing with it.
I don't know when "theory" became synonymous with "hypothesis" in everyday speak. It isn't. A theory is disprovable, but with far more effort than a hypothesis. In order to disprove a theory, you need to either show the evidence was bad, or the theory was incomplete.
Taking the case of evolution, there's well more than enough evidence that the first suggestion isn't possible - the evidence is good. At this point, the only solution for evolution being wrong is if it's incomplete, akin to, for instance, Newton's Theory of Gravity.
Or, you could realize the Pope is only dictator of Catholicism; not the hundred or so other ways to believe in God and Christ. Get a clue.
Riight... so what part of that invalidates my argument? Unless you're saying the Pope doesn't believe in God and Christ?
And considering it isn't just Catholicism - it's at least Judaism as well. Lutherans seem to be a bit torn about it, but some branches say it's OK, whereas others say "... ehhhh...", UCC, as always, is church-local on it, Methodists say it's OK, Greek Orthodox as well. I could go on, and on... but it certainly seems that a lot of people who are Christians have no problem with evolution. As would anyone whose faith doesn't rest on the belief of a giant hand coming out of the sky.
But it doesn't. Just in case you missed it: Evolution does not fit your faith, if that faith is God and Christ. If one of the foundations (creationism) of your hypothesis (God and Christ are real) is wrong, then the whole thing is simply WRONG. You can't throw one away and replace it with another.
Cool. An anonymous coward knows more than the Pope about religion. Arrogant, aren't we?
The Pope stated sometime in the 1980s that christianity and evolution don't contradict, and that one can easily believe in both.
Or you can read the very well written commentary here, and get a clue. Using the same stubborn-headed aspect that you bedevil in others makes you just as bad.
Roast just means to cook in an oven. To broil something means to expose it to intense heat. It's the highest heat setting on an oven, and you're supposed to put the meat right beside the burners themselves.
Hmm, considering there's a dish called "London Broil", it just makes me wonder if that's not actually British, but yet another American bastardization...
Actually, it will more likely provide an apparatus for inducing oscillations, to avoid known orbital debris. But, of course, that can damp out unwanted vibrations as well.
When you pluck a guitar string, do you stretch your fingers from capo to bridge? Or is your pick just a tiny sliver compared to its full length? The latter, I think. Which should open your mind a little. Here's what to allow into it:
Sigh.
Plucking a string is not a resonant oscillation - you'd have to pluck the string, then pluck it again when string vibrated back to you, et cetera. Each time, the oscillation gets larger, and is fed by the plucking. Otherwise, the oscillation gets damped because of the fixed ends of the string. In this case, only one end is fixed, but it's got such a gigantic tension that this oscillation will damp very rapidly.
Plus, while you don't stretch your fingers across the full length, the only way you can get a resonant oscillation is if you're the only force across that full length. Anything else will damp out the vibrations, because it won't be perfectly in phase with the first induced pulse.
Since there will definitely be other sources of oscillation (such as the Earth's rotation), there's little danger of an accidental resonant oscillation.
The wind at the bottom will act more like a violin bow, and the harmonics of the primary mode of vibration (i.e., all the multiples of f=1/(7*3600) cycles/second) will be induced into the cable in the stable state.
Of course they will. So the ribbon will wave, very, very, very slightly. It's under megatons of tension, after all! But the modes won't grow, as they would in a resonant case, as they did with Tacoma Narrows. There's nothing along its entire length which has a period of 7 hours, so the induced vibrations (some of which will come from using the ribbon itself, which causes an oscillation!) will damp.
Induced oscillations would be a major worry, and unavoidable given an unavoidable and underestimated source of mechanical input in the atmosphere.
Underestimated? By who? By me? I never estimated anything. I just said people have done it already (and they did more than just calculate the fundamental modes, which you can do on a napkin). Underestimated by the people who've been looking into this? I doubt it. Read the reports. This has been modeled quite extensively. It's stable.
It's not like string dynamics are this exciting new branch of physics.
Does the name Tacoma Narrows ring a bell?
Yes, it does. And it did to the people who looked at the space elevator as well. The Tacoma Narrows bridge fell because the period of its resonant frequency happened to be close to a naturally occurring oscillation.
In order for resonance to be a serious problem, the induced oscillation has to occur over the entire object, and it has to be close in period to the natural frequency of the object.
The fundamental period of the space elevator is 7 hours. There's nothing which occurs on the full scale of the elevator (hundreds of thousands of kilometers) which is near to 7 hours.
So induced oscillations aren't a worry.
(Wind oscillations are a non issue if they don't rip the ribbon. The ribbon is huge. The atmosphere is just a tiny sliver compared to its full length.)
Steam turbines are really, really well researched technology.
And really, really bad. They're heat engines. They suck. They're limited by the temperature differential between the hot and cold baths, both of which are limited by the properties of water. You're going to be throwing away easily 30-40% of your energy just in thermal conversion inefficiencies, and typically it's more like 50-60%.
Compare that to hydroelectric, which is conversion of mechanical to electrical - it's virtually *perfect* energy conversion. The efficiency is in the 90% and higher range.
It would be very, very nice if someone could come up with a way to generate electrical energy from nuclear power without using heat transfer.
You're completely right, and I agree with you that solar thermal, if you only look at the short-term, might be viable - that is, as a stop-gap.
But my whole point throughout this was that photovoltaics, fundamentally, are a better technology. Half the reason I even replied was because the person recommended power towers as "better" at converting solar to electricity. Heat engines are just fundamentally impossible to make efficient, because of that darned Second Law of Thermodynamics. And so, eventually, any sane study of the two technologies would have to be in favor of solar panels in the long run, because they will (and currently do, from what I can calculate) generate more power per square meter than power tower designs. And fundamentally, in the end, land is the one thing that you can't hope for process technologies to improve upon - one square meter is one square meter. Solar panels might get cheaper, power towers might get cheaper, but since you're dealing with solar flux, ultimately, if you need to scale, land issues are going to come into play. And solar panels use land much more effectively than towers do.
It should also be noted, of course, that there's no reason you couldn't use mirrors with solar panels, either to increase their effective area, but there's an efficiency loss there as well.
Would seem to me to make sense to build an array of tracking solar panels with mirror extensions which can be replaced with solar panels when they drop down in price. That seems to me to be a perfect stopgap solution.