That's why I put in the "probably, depending on the nature of universe". It might turn out that fresh energy and/or matter are created from nothing somewhere in the universe or that the laws of thermodynamics don't actually hold. It doesn't look very likely at this stage, however.
Ok, What elements are only found on Earth? There's about 30 so called synthetic ones, but a third of those are found in trace amounts naturally just about everywhere. The rest, except einsteinium have such short half-lives that your claim is ridiculous.
Water on the moon is all either pretty deep, or in permanently shadowed craters. The Apollo astronauts just scrabbled around on the surface a bit. Claiming that they should have found some is like claiming that you should be able to find gold if you were just dropped off at some random location on Earth and given a few hours to dig.
As for the moon being "filled with H3", I assume you mean Helium 3 and not an unusual hydrogen molecule. The presence of Helium 3 in large amounts, relative to earth, on the moon is based on pretty sound theory (long term deposition by solar wind). That theory has been experimentally confirmed with moon rocks brought back by the Apollo missions. Uh, so what was the problem again?
To answer your question of why Nasa estimates that, if we started today, it would take 10 years to get back to the moon, I would guess that it's because they would essentially be starting from scratch and that's pretty close to the time it took the first time they did it, and 10 years is a nice round number?
There's a finite supply in the sense that there's a certain quantity that can ever potentially exist (probably, depending on the nature of the universe). Below iron, you can get energy from fusion, but fission costs you energy. There is a finite quantity of energy and the pesky laws of thermodynamics essentially say that there are diminishing returns on re-using it before it dilutes away. Now, we may get some sort of big crunch, or vacuum collapse re-ordering of space, or something like that which resets the whole kit so you can use that energy again. Of course, it's unlikely that any form of information or order can survive such an event. So, it would be the end of the universe for all intents and purposes.
The budget for tracking those objects isn't that big and they've only found a small percentage of them so far. Your belief that we're currently keeping tabs on everything big that could wipe us out is straight out of the realm of fantasy. If something were going to hit us, we might get a few months notice.
In terms of probability, the likelihood of an extinction level event like the one 65 million years ago in the next million years is probably around one in a hundred. But it is nearly certain to happen again eventually (unless of course we master space travel and can actively prevent it from happening).
The heat death of the universe is a very, very, very long way off. It'll be about an order of magnitude beyond the current age of the universe before the current crop of red dwarf stars even start to die off.
Anything you've ever done to avoid your own death has only delayed the inevitable. Looking back at all those times you breathed and ate food and didn't just give up while driving and drift into oncoming traffic, was it worth it? If it was, then why do you argue against applying that same principle to the human race in general. if it wasn't worth it, I'm very sorry.
Agree with you on the lack of benefits of the scanners. As far as the safety. As someone who works in radiation safety, can you elaborate some more. Conventional wisdom on radiation safety is that the dangers are cumulative, but that's clearly not really the case. Maybe for long term risks like cancer, but clearly in the short term, higher intensity is more dangerous. For an extreme example, consider em radiation in the 560 to 490 nm wavelengths. Exposure is, as far as anyone has ever studied, virtually harmless. An entire lifetime's exposure adds 0% to cancer risk as far as I know. However, take a person's average exposure over the course of a month and give it to them in a tenth of a second. The cancer risk is still 0%, but that's only because the person has just been utterly vaporized. Maybe try instead taking a person's exposure to those frequencies in full sunlight over their whole body and concentrate it for 30 seconds on just one square centimeter of their body. No instant death this time, but that square centimeter will be completely and permanently destroyed. Also, cancer risk from that is now no longer 0% because of all of the byproducts from the burn.
So, yes you get more radiation from the flight than you do from the body scanner. People forget that visible light is radiation too, of course. So, technically, you get far more radiation from the lights in the plane than you do from either of them. Radiation safety obviously has to take these things into account, and it gets technical. Maybe many of us here won't understand the deeper issues involved in a full technical explanation of the relative safety of the body scanners versus the flight. We're a pretty technical crowd, however, I'm pretty sure just about all of us can withstand a lot more detail than you gave. So, if it's your field, by all means educate us on _why_ the scanners are so safe.
When I said the world would burn, I really did just mean those parts of it important to us. Like our buildings, roads, forests, selves, that sort of thing. I really did realize it would take an amazing amount of extra oxygen (at amazing pressure) for the oceans to catch fire (there's lots of organic matter, very dilute of course, but still there, and some of the dissolved minerals will burn) and the trace amounts of carbon monoxide in the atmosphere to catch fire (although I suppose if everything on land is on fire, there will be a lot more stuff in the air to catch fire). I didn't think that things that literally will not burn would burn, I just meant we could have a pretty intense global firestorm if the amount of oxygen suddenly shot up.
As for the "flammability" of oxygen. The reaction I was thinking of was the creation of dioxygen difluoride. You do need pretty unusual conditions to create it, so I suppose whether you can actually use the word flammable is debatable. But the reaction involves the oxidation of oxygen with fluorine. So the oxygen is the fuel and the fluorine is the oxidiser. The resulting dioxygen difluoride is horrifyingly reactive with almost everything.
Ooh. Already replied to this once to point out that I didn't say that the oxygen would burn, but that the world would burn. As long as you're being nitpicky and pedantic, I felt I should too and point out that your statement that "oxygen is not flammable" is actually incorrect. You correctly point out that oxygen is only one of the oxidisers that will cause a flame. Another is fluorine, which is an even better oxidiser than oxygen. So, using fluorine, you can have a flame where oxygen is the fuel.
Well, fair enough then. I think there are still benefits to the effort, but they're mostly intangibles, speculation, and things that won't pan out for centuries. We might be able to bring launch costs down enough that mining gold/rhodium/platinum would be profitable... Aside from that, Mars resources would mostly be useful to the Martians. But its hard to get people to care about things that benefit foreigners while having no bearing on themselves. Especially when those foreigners don't exist yet. You've made me think about replacing other forms of entertainment. If it would get a real Mars mission up there, I'd gladly donate my entertainment budget for the next four years and watch reality TV from Mars instead.
Fortunately for me, I didn't specify an exact level of pain on a scale of 1 to 10 in my original post. Thus I am saved from your masterful deconstruction of my statement. As long as there's any documented level of pain in the demise, I'm in the clear. So, you know, how about the part I quoted that says "headache". I'm pretty sure that any proper definition of a headache is going to require the word pain or a synonym thereof. Now, as I sarcastically pointed out in another post, technically you won't be awake when you actually die from it, so you won't actually be feeling pain at the moment of death. On the other hand, I'm pretty sure that any reasonable definition of "painful death" has to allow for the possibility that the subject won't actually experience the pain any more for some portion of time before absolute brain death.
It's possible because "the world" is not made of oxygen (except for the parts that are). So, you know forests would burn. Homes would burn. Things made out of metal would burn, stone would burn. Obviously it would need to be a very high concentration of oxygen. And duh, the oxygen itself wouldn't catch fire, but I never made any such claim.
Ok. I lied.It's not painful at the point when you actually die. At that point you're unconscious, so you don't feel anything. The headache, burning sensation in your lungs and hyperventilation occur before the actual point of death, so I guess they don't count.
Oh, ok. Well, there's this great online encyclopedia called Wikipedia. It has an article on carbon dioxide with a subsection on Toxicity. It says "At about 8% it causes headache, sweating, dim vision, tremor and loss of consciousness after exposure for between five and ten minutes". It doesn't specifically mention death, but it has a link to another Wikipedia article on hypercapnea which is death from excessive carbon dioxide. If you want to find more such articles, you can use a search engine such as google. You just bring up that site and type what you want in the box and hit enter. Then a bunch of links will come up. Very frequently, the information you're looking for is in the first few links.
Well, it would be painful because CO2 causes a burning sensation. It also regulates your autonomous breathing. Hold your breath for as long as you can, that desperate sensation to breathe you feel is caused by CO2 buildup. In a high concentration of CO2, you'll feel that way all the time. Around 10% CO2 and you'll probably hyperventilate to death. If you can manage to control that, it's still going to mess up the ability of your lungs to exchange CO2 out of your bloodstream and have similar effects to Carbon Monoxide poisoning (in the short-term, it won't permanently tie up your hemoglobin like CO does, but temporarily tying it up for the duration of an hour is enough to kill you).
Absolutely agree. That's the scummiest lie on there. Just because something is natural doesn't make it not a pollutant. "The fact is that CO2 is not a pollutant. CO2 is a colorless and odorless gas, exhaled at high concentrations by each of us, and a key component of the biosphere's life cycle". The "high concentrations" bit is ridiculous. It's higher than standard atmospheric concentration, obviously, but they're completely icing over the fact that the carbon in the CO2 animals breathe out comes from a fairly closed cycle. We breathe it out because we got it from our food in the first place. Our vegetable food got it from the atmosphere. Our animal food got it from vegetable matter, or from other animals that got it from vegetable matter, etc. Some natural processes bring out more carbon from under the earth and the overall action of our biosphere is to sequester it under the earth again. Something that's already naturally present can be a pollutant if it's in the wrong concentration or in the wrong place. Too much oxygen would be a pollutant too (a very dangerous one since the world could catch fire). Ozone is a pollutant at ground level, but great for us in the stratosphere. The quote they give about CO2 applies equally well to excrement (well, minus the colorless and odorless part, and we don't normally exhale it, although those people who do are a great example of it being a pollutant when it's in the wrong place), but excrement is obviously a pollutant when there's too much of it in our water supply.
Someone should see how many of these "scientists" are willing to spend an hour in a chamber with 10% CO2. Then we can ask them if they still think it's not potentially a pollutant depending on concentration afterwards. We won't get much of an answer since they will have died painfully, of course.
Chemical rockets existed well before Newton was born and would have been familiar to him during his lifetime in the form of fireworks. There are actually records of him making fireworks as a boy.
I'm curious what you think about government money being spent on sports? Where do you stand on the amount of money England and the City of London are spending on the 2012 Olympics? You literally could fund a Mars mission for the amount that's being spent. Of course, governments always claim that they'll recoup the investment on new sports stadiums, etc. through increased business. Pretty much every final accounting ever done on any such project, however, has shown that just doesn't happen. As far as I can tell, they spend the money because sports are "really cool!" Well, ok, maybe they spend the money because sports are really corrupt and they get kickbacks of some kind, but they justify it to the public because sports are "really cool".
Why can't landing people on other planets get some of that "really cool" action?
But we've shown that people can live in space longer than a trip to Mars would take without devastating permanent effects. Plus they're now having some luck with medications to prevent bone loss. We also have radiation shielding sufficient for a trip to Mars. It's not good enough to prevent raised risk of cancer, but there's enough people who don't care about the raised cancer risk willing to go that it doesn't matter.
Why is it that people always think that Antarctica is more hospitable than Mars? You can get stuff to Antarctica more easily, but, as far as habitability of enclosed structures, it's not as clear cut as you think. For starters, the sunlight on Mars is pretty much guaranteed. At is distance from the sun, only 44% of the amount of sunlight that hits Earth's atmosphere hits the atmosphere of Mars. However, since Mars has such a thin atmosphere, more of it gets through, especially at glancing angles. Also, the only weather that Mars gets that blocks sunlight is dust storms, and our Mars probes have shown that they diffuse the light, but barely block it at all. Also, at the equator on Mars, you don't get 3 months of darkness like you do in Antarctica.
Air temperatures on Mars can get colder than Antarctica, but, since the atmosphere is virtually a vacuum, that's essentially meaningless. Less insulation is actually needed on Mars than Antarctica. The wind speeds on Mars can get higher than those in Antarctica, but, once again,it's a virtual vacuum, so high wind speeds don't mean as much, because there's correspondingly less energy involved.
There certainly are challenges in colonizing Mars. The lack of free oxygen certainly is a problem that needs to be solved. Perchlorates have been found in Martian soil and could serve as a ready source of oxygen or, with sufficient electrical power, electrolysis of water could work too. It's pretty clear now that there's plenty of Water on Mars, so that's pretty viable. With the inexhaustible supply of CO2, and readily available water, Zubrin's plan of making methane and oxygen from the atmosphere and a small amount of hydrogen as both rocket fuel and as the power source for vehicles and other equipment using pretty standard internal combustion engines and 4 parts oxygen to 1 part methane as fuel seems even more workable.
You say: "At this point, we really cannot even just visit Mars, as we did the moon". Guys like Zubrin and Ellis, even if they don't agree on everything, agree for certain on this. I agree with them too. We could just visit Mars like we did the moon. Energy wise it's actually easier to get there since you can aerobrake at the other end. The atmosphere means you can also use a parachute to slow descent, although you still need rockets to slow down enough to land. The long trip is an issue, but the radiation fears are overblown and, as a million experiments in space and isolation chambers on earth, in submarines and remote weather stations, etc. have shown, so are the fears of isolation induced space madness. The visit has to be a long visit, but the same technology from the sixties that got humans to the moon and back could be used for a Mars mission as well. If it really has become impossible for us to recreate that technology today... well, then we're pretty much doomed. If we're actually becoming less capable moving into the future, how long until we lose mastery over fire?
Personally, I think romance all by itself is justification for going to mars and, in fact, for all sorts of endeavours. Anyway, if not now, then when? Your attitude that we can try in 50 years, why not now is the same reason that my kitchen still needs repainting. I could have done it by now. I could be working on it right now instead of reading Slashdot, but I'm not, because I can always do it later. I know from experience that this attitude could lead to it being years before I do it. Chances are, in fact, pretty high that I'll never do it because I'll move first. It's called procrastination.
I suppose it could work with a multi-layer solution. I was mostly just being facetious about making a pure graphene envelope. The other big problem I didn't bother bringing up is whether or not it's even possible to make an envelope out of graphene because of its unusual properties. Large sheets of it may not be very physically stable. Sandwiching it between layers of other materials might work really well, however. So, off the cuff mocking of the idea completely withdrawn. I didn't think.
I don't think we're ever going to agree. I'm going to have to guess that you're not a programmer, otherwise you never would have said: "As to yield signs, you're going out of your way to find ambiguity. So I'm not even going to respond". Of course I'm going out of my way to find ambiguity. I'm trying to figure out how you'd go about following the driving laws in a computer program. You're... I don't actually know what you're doing. Defending the driving laws against what you see as my foul slander as far as I can tell.
When disagreeing with me on the ambiguity of whether or not you can pull forward and wait to turn left at a green light when traffic is blocking the turn, you wrote: "No it's not. It means that unless you know for absolute certainty that you can enter and leave the intersection without blocking traffic then you must not do so". I think this demonstrates the fundamental disconnect we have here. You're saying that the rules aren't ambiguous and then use the term "absolute certainty". I think the problem is that you literally don't believe in ambiguity, therefore, to you, nothing is ambiguous, it's just black and white. The fact is, whether or not you can enter and leave the intersection without blocking traffic is frequently un-knowable without precognition. Without precognition, you need information that generally is not available to the driver such as the actual duration of the light (I've argued for years that traffic lights of all colors should have visible indicators on them of exactly how much time until they change), the current speed and maximum speed, the direction, and the position of all nearby cars. With that information, you might be able to tell, in approximately.1% of real world cases that you'll be able to enter and leave the intersection without blocking traffic. The fact is, you can enter and leave without blocking traffic at all probably a good 90% of the time, but you can't actually accurately predict that you'll be able to (in the situation we discussed, obviously you can predict it easily if the path is clear at the time), except in a tiny fraction of cases, and then only with perfect information. So, it comes down to the question of how sure is sure enough to satisfy the law? The law doesn't say. It just holds you to "reasonable" standards. Unspecified by "reasonable" standards are ambiguous no matter what you say. If the engineers have to pick a number based on a best guess, then later go to court and face manslaughter charges because the law doesn't say how cautious they have to be, but a judge and jury think it wasn't cautious enough, then the law is ambiguous. On the other side of the equation, if they're such sticklers for the law that they leave no room whatsoever for uncertainty, I can assure you the car won't be able to drive far in the real world before it hits an unsolvable conundrum.
Empathising with the programmers who actually have to make this monstrosity operate, I see the law as a haphazardly written mess written by dozens or hundreds of disjoint committees with a dusty deck of existing implementation, a decent chunk of which doesn't follow the spec in the first place. Legalise, for all that it claims to be concise and logical, is always a mess, written by people with a "fire and forget" attitude who do very little error checking
That is exactly my point: humans have never lived in "harmony with nature", and they never will. Yet, you say you want a world in which humans do not "use up resources faster than they can recover".
Uh, yeah. Of course I want that. Because, you know, I don't want unthinkable numbers of people to suffer and die unnecessarily. I'm not happy with how many people are suffering and dying unnecessarily right now, why would I want it to get worse? I'm not naive. You yourself noted how negative my post was. I don't expect humanity to improve before it's too late, I just wish they would.
As for the human development index trends you point to. On the surface, those are encouraging. The problem is, those graphs don't show available resources. The simple fact is, most of that improvement is built on the back of unsustainable industrial and agricultural growth. What exactly do you think we're all going to eat when we run out of cheap petrochemical fertilizers? What is the farm equipment going to run on? What will the industry run on? If we don't get our act together now, we're going to run out of those things and have nothing to replace them.
It's you who is ignorant. You start off with the preposterous assumption that things are getting worse for humanity, and then you arrive at the equally preposterous conclusion that non-sustainable resource usage is to blame.
No, I'm pretty sure you're the one who is ignorant. For starters, you're apparently ignorant of what I've actually said. You're claiming that I'm starting with the assumption that things are getting worse for humanity. I'm not. In absolute terms there's more suffering because things haven't gotten _that_ much better, but the population has increased dramatically. Per capita, however, I actually agree with you that things have gotten better in most ways for humans. What I actually said is that the environmental damage we're doing is piling up faster than it's recovering and that there's eventually going to be a crunch. If you grow bacteria in a sealed petri dish with a set quantity of nutrients, they're going to do spectacularly well. If you graph their success, you'll be able to plot a nice upward trending graph, just like the one you showed me for the human development index. If can't predict the actual future of the graph for the bacteria, then there's no hope for you.
You also wrote: "as a solution, you propose killing off the primary resource that has made human development over the last century possible: fossil fuel." Sorry, where did I propose "killing off" fossil fuel? I'm a bit confused. Have you actually read my posts at all. I'm pretty sure that I'm in favor of _not_ killing off fossil fuels. One of the ways I think we should avoid killing them off is to stop using them for things we don't need them for.
As for your next paragraph, you basically go on to claim that you're in complete agreement with me, but then in the last paragraph you say that I "want destructive intervention based on irrational FUD". What "destructive intervention" are you claiming I want? Where did I say this? It sounds a lot like you're just making this up. As for Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt... Well, I do fear for the future of the human race. Uncertainty, though... I would have to say that, without drastic changes in the way we do things or amazing new technology (which is an uncertainty, you can't just rely on new technologies miraculously appearing), a devastating resource/environment crunch is eventually coming. As for doubt, well I doubt your groundless theories that everything is going to get better and better no matter what we do just because.
So, I am going to wallow, but not in ignorance, because I'm not ignorant. I'm going to wallow in my well-founded pessimism. You can be an optimist. That's fine. It must be kind of nice for you. But why do you have to be an obstructive optimist? Do you have any idea how frustrating people who actually want things to get better find it when people block their way, insisting that nothing be done because things are just going to get better anyway? If things are so great, what's your motivation?
Right. But what features the description has to cover are a bit vague. Separate types of intellectual property on characters create weird intersections. The comic book market is where you'll see some of the odder ones. For example, both Marvel comics and DC comics have a Captain Marvel. They're different characters with the same name so they have their own independent character copyrights, but the trademark on the Captain Marvel name belongs to Marvel comics, even though the DC Captain Marvel has been around longer (that's the situation as of ten years back, anyway, it's possible it's changed in the meantime, I haven't checked). So, even though Marvel wasn't even publishing a regular Captain Marvel comic book,DC's Captain Marvel book couldn't actually have "Captain Marvel" in the title. It's especially ridiculous when you consider the actual original purpose of trademark. There's essentially 0 chance of a comic book reader suffering any brand confusion whatsoever. That's the way "Intellectual Property" rights go, however, once they're established, people start thinking of them as a form of property rather than as a form of consumer protection.
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That's why I put in the "probably, depending on the nature of universe". It might turn out that fresh energy and/or matter are created from nothing somewhere in the universe or that the laws of thermodynamics don't actually hold. It doesn't look very likely at this stage, however.
Wow.
Ok, What elements are only found on Earth? There's about 30 so called synthetic ones, but a third of those are found in trace amounts naturally just about everywhere. The rest, except einsteinium have such short half-lives that your claim is ridiculous.
Water on the moon is all either pretty deep, or in permanently shadowed craters. The Apollo astronauts just scrabbled around on the surface a bit. Claiming that they should have found some is like claiming that you should be able to find gold if you were just dropped off at some random location on Earth and given a few hours to dig.
As for the moon being "filled with H3", I assume you mean Helium 3 and not an unusual hydrogen molecule. The presence of Helium 3 in large amounts, relative to earth, on the moon is based on pretty sound theory (long term deposition by solar wind). That theory has been experimentally confirmed with moon rocks brought back by the Apollo missions. Uh, so what was the problem again?
To answer your question of why Nasa estimates that, if we started today, it would take 10 years to get back to the moon, I would guess that it's because they would essentially be starting from scratch and that's pretty close to the time it took the first time they did it, and 10 years is a nice round number?
There's a finite supply in the sense that there's a certain quantity that can ever potentially exist (probably, depending on the nature of the universe). Below iron, you can get energy from fusion, but fission costs you energy. There is a finite quantity of energy and the pesky laws of thermodynamics essentially say that there are diminishing returns on re-using it before it dilutes away. Now, we may get some sort of big crunch, or vacuum collapse re-ordering of space, or something like that which resets the whole kit so you can use that energy again. Of course, it's unlikely that any form of information or order can survive such an event. So, it would be the end of the universe for all intents and purposes.
The budget for tracking those objects isn't that big and they've only found a small percentage of them so far. Your belief that we're currently keeping tabs on everything big that could wipe us out is straight out of the realm of fantasy. If something were going to hit us, we might get a few months notice.
In terms of probability, the likelihood of an extinction level event like the one 65 million years ago in the next million years is probably around one in a hundred. But it is nearly certain to happen again eventually (unless of course we master space travel and can actively prevent it from happening).
The heat death of the universe is a very, very, very long way off. It'll be about an order of magnitude beyond the current age of the universe before the current crop of red dwarf stars even start to die off.
Anything you've ever done to avoid your own death has only delayed the inevitable. Looking back at all those times you breathed and ate food and didn't just give up while driving and drift into oncoming traffic, was it worth it? If it was, then why do you argue against applying that same principle to the human race in general. if it wasn't worth it, I'm very sorry.
Agree with you on the lack of benefits of the scanners. As far as the safety. As someone who works in radiation safety, can you elaborate some more. Conventional wisdom on radiation safety is that the dangers are cumulative, but that's clearly not really the case. Maybe for long term risks like cancer, but clearly in the short term, higher intensity is more dangerous. For an extreme example, consider em radiation in the 560 to 490 nm wavelengths. Exposure is, as far as anyone has ever studied, virtually harmless. An entire lifetime's exposure adds 0% to cancer risk as far as I know. However, take a person's average exposure over the course of a month and give it to them in a tenth of a second. The cancer risk is still 0%, but that's only because the person has just been utterly vaporized. Maybe try instead taking a person's exposure to those frequencies in full sunlight over their whole body and concentrate it for 30 seconds on just one square centimeter of their body. No instant death this time, but that square centimeter will be completely and permanently destroyed. Also, cancer risk from that is now no longer 0% because of all of the byproducts from the burn.
So, yes you get more radiation from the flight than you do from the body scanner. People forget that visible light is radiation too, of course. So, technically, you get far more radiation from the lights in the plane than you do from either of them. Radiation safety obviously has to take these things into account, and it gets technical. Maybe many of us here won't understand the deeper issues involved in a full technical explanation of the relative safety of the body scanners versus the flight. We're a pretty technical crowd, however, I'm pretty sure just about all of us can withstand a lot more detail than you gave. So, if it's your field, by all means educate us on _why_ the scanners are so safe.
Nobody axed you. :)
When I said the world would burn, I really did just mean those parts of it important to us. Like our buildings, roads, forests, selves, that sort of thing. I really did realize it would take an amazing amount of extra oxygen (at amazing pressure) for the oceans to catch fire (there's lots of organic matter, very dilute of course, but still there, and some of the dissolved minerals will burn) and the trace amounts of carbon monoxide in the atmosphere to catch fire (although I suppose if everything on land is on fire, there will be a lot more stuff in the air to catch fire). I didn't think that things that literally will not burn would burn, I just meant we could have a pretty intense global firestorm if the amount of oxygen suddenly shot up.
As for the "flammability" of oxygen. The reaction I was thinking of was the creation of dioxygen difluoride. You do need pretty unusual conditions to create it, so I suppose whether you can actually use the word flammable is debatable. But the reaction involves the oxidation of oxygen with fluorine. So the oxygen is the fuel and the fluorine is the oxidiser. The resulting dioxygen difluoride is horrifyingly reactive with almost everything.
Ooh. Already replied to this once to point out that I didn't say that the oxygen would burn, but that the world would burn. As long as you're being nitpicky and pedantic, I felt I should too and point out that your statement that "oxygen is not flammable" is actually incorrect. You correctly point out that oxygen is only one of the oxidisers that will cause a flame. Another is fluorine, which is an even better oxidiser than oxygen. So, using fluorine, you can have a flame where oxygen is the fuel.
Well, fair enough then. I think there are still benefits to the effort, but they're mostly intangibles, speculation, and things that won't pan out for centuries. We might be able to bring launch costs down enough that mining gold/rhodium/platinum would be profitable... Aside from that, Mars resources would mostly be useful to the Martians. But its hard to get people to care about things that benefit foreigners while having no bearing on themselves. Especially when those foreigners don't exist yet. You've made me think about replacing other forms of entertainment. If it would get a real Mars mission up there, I'd gladly donate my entertainment budget for the next four years and watch reality TV from Mars instead.
Fortunately for me, I didn't specify an exact level of pain on a scale of 1 to 10 in my original post. Thus I am saved from your masterful deconstruction of my statement. As long as there's any documented level of pain in the demise, I'm in the clear. So, you know, how about the part I quoted that says "headache". I'm pretty sure that any proper definition of a headache is going to require the word pain or a synonym thereof. Now, as I sarcastically pointed out in another post, technically you won't be awake when you actually die from it, so you won't actually be feeling pain at the moment of death. On the other hand, I'm pretty sure that any reasonable definition of "painful death" has to allow for the possibility that the subject won't actually experience the pain any more for some portion of time before absolute brain death.
It's possible because "the world" is not made of oxygen (except for the parts that are). So, you know forests would burn. Homes would burn. Things made out of metal would burn, stone would burn. Obviously it would need to be a very high concentration of oxygen. And duh, the oxygen itself wouldn't catch fire, but I never made any such claim.
Ok. I lied.It's not painful at the point when you actually die. At that point you're unconscious, so you don't feel anything. The headache, burning sensation in your lungs and hyperventilation occur before the actual point of death, so I guess they don't count.
Oh, ok. Well, there's this great online encyclopedia called Wikipedia. It has an article on carbon dioxide with a subsection on Toxicity. It says "At about 8% it causes headache, sweating, dim vision, tremor and loss of consciousness after exposure for between five and ten minutes". It doesn't specifically mention death, but it has a link to another Wikipedia article on hypercapnea which is death from excessive carbon dioxide. If you want to find more such articles, you can use a search engine such as google. You just bring up that site and type what you want in the box and hit enter. Then a bunch of links will come up. Very frequently, the information you're looking for is in the first few links.
Well, it would be painful because CO2 causes a burning sensation. It also regulates your autonomous breathing. Hold your breath for as long as you can, that desperate sensation to breathe you feel is caused by CO2 buildup. In a high concentration of CO2, you'll feel that way all the time. Around 10% CO2 and you'll probably hyperventilate to death. If you can manage to control that, it's still going to mess up the ability of your lungs to exchange CO2 out of your bloodstream and have similar effects to Carbon Monoxide poisoning (in the short-term, it won't permanently tie up your hemoglobin like CO does, but temporarily tying it up for the duration of an hour is enough to kill you).
Absolutely agree. That's the scummiest lie on there. Just because something is natural doesn't make it not a pollutant. "The fact is that CO2 is not a pollutant. CO2 is a colorless and odorless gas, exhaled at high concentrations by each of us, and a key component of the biosphere's life cycle". The "high concentrations" bit is ridiculous. It's higher than standard atmospheric concentration, obviously, but they're completely icing over the fact that the carbon in the CO2 animals breathe out comes from a fairly closed cycle. We breathe it out because we got it from our food in the first place. Our vegetable food got it from the atmosphere. Our animal food got it from vegetable matter, or from other animals that got it from vegetable matter, etc. Some natural processes bring out more carbon from under the earth and the overall action of our biosphere is to sequester it under the earth again. Something that's already naturally present can be a pollutant if it's in the wrong concentration or in the wrong place. Too much oxygen would be a pollutant too (a very dangerous one since the world could catch fire). Ozone is a pollutant at ground level, but great for us in the stratosphere. The quote they give about CO2 applies equally well to excrement (well, minus the colorless and odorless part, and we don't normally exhale it, although those people who do are a great example of it being a pollutant when it's in the wrong place), but excrement is obviously a pollutant when there's too much of it in our water supply.
Someone should see how many of these "scientists" are willing to spend an hour in a chamber with 10% CO2. Then we can ask them if they still think it's not potentially a pollutant depending on concentration afterwards. We won't get much of an answer since they will have died painfully, of course.
Chemical rockets existed well before Newton was born and would have been familiar to him during his lifetime in the form of fireworks. There are actually records of him making fireworks as a boy.
I'm curious what you think about government money being spent on sports? Where do you stand on the amount of money England and the City of London are spending on the 2012 Olympics? You literally could fund a Mars mission for the amount that's being spent. Of course, governments always claim that they'll recoup the investment on new sports stadiums, etc. through increased business. Pretty much every final accounting ever done on any such project, however, has shown that just doesn't happen. As far as I can tell, they spend the money because sports are "really cool!" Well, ok, maybe they spend the money because sports are really corrupt and they get kickbacks of some kind, but they justify it to the public because sports are "really cool".
Why can't landing people on other planets get some of that "really cool" action?
But we've shown that people can live in space longer than a trip to Mars would take without devastating permanent effects. Plus they're now having some luck with medications to prevent bone loss. We also have radiation shielding sufficient for a trip to Mars. It's not good enough to prevent raised risk of cancer, but there's enough people who don't care about the raised cancer risk willing to go that it doesn't matter.
Why is it that people always think that Antarctica is more hospitable than Mars? You can get stuff to Antarctica more easily, but, as far as habitability of enclosed structures, it's not as clear cut as you think. For starters, the sunlight on Mars is pretty much guaranteed. At is distance from the sun, only 44% of the amount of sunlight that hits Earth's atmosphere hits the atmosphere of Mars. However, since Mars has such a thin atmosphere, more of it gets through, especially at glancing angles. Also, the only weather that Mars gets that blocks sunlight is dust storms, and our Mars probes have shown that they diffuse the light, but barely block it at all. Also, at the equator on Mars, you don't get 3 months of darkness like you do in Antarctica.
Air temperatures on Mars can get colder than Antarctica, but, since the atmosphere is virtually a vacuum, that's essentially meaningless. Less insulation is actually needed on Mars than Antarctica. The wind speeds on Mars can get higher than those in Antarctica, but, once again,it's a virtual vacuum, so high wind speeds don't mean as much, because there's correspondingly less energy involved.
There certainly are challenges in colonizing Mars. The lack of free oxygen certainly is a problem that needs to be solved. Perchlorates have been found in Martian soil and could serve as a ready source of oxygen or, with sufficient electrical power, electrolysis of water could work too. It's pretty clear now that there's plenty of Water on Mars, so that's pretty viable. With the inexhaustible supply of CO2, and readily available water, Zubrin's plan of making methane and oxygen from the atmosphere and a small amount of hydrogen as both rocket fuel and as the power source for vehicles and other equipment using pretty standard internal combustion engines and 4 parts oxygen to 1 part methane as fuel seems even more workable.
You say: "At this point, we really cannot even just visit Mars, as we did the moon". Guys like Zubrin and Ellis, even if they don't agree on everything, agree for certain on this. I agree with them too. We could just visit Mars like we did the moon. Energy wise it's actually easier to get there since you can aerobrake at the other end. The atmosphere means you can also use a parachute to slow descent, although you still need rockets to slow down enough to land. The long trip is an issue, but the radiation fears are overblown and, as a million experiments in space and isolation chambers on earth, in submarines and remote weather stations, etc. have shown, so are the fears of isolation induced space madness. The visit has to be a long visit, but the same technology from the sixties that got humans to the moon and back could be used for a Mars mission as well. If it really has become impossible for us to recreate that technology today... well, then we're pretty much doomed. If we're actually becoming less capable moving into the future, how long until we lose mastery over fire?
Personally, I think romance all by itself is justification for going to mars and, in fact, for all sorts of endeavours. Anyway, if not now, then when? Your attitude that we can try in 50 years, why not now is the same reason that my kitchen still needs repainting. I could have done it by now. I could be working on it right now instead of reading Slashdot, but I'm not, because I can always do it later. I know from experience that this attitude could lead to it being years before I do it. Chances are, in fact, pretty high that I'll never do it because I'll move first. It's called procrastination.
I suppose it could work with a multi-layer solution. I was mostly just being facetious about making a pure graphene envelope. The other big problem I didn't bother bringing up is whether or not it's even possible to make an envelope out of graphene because of its unusual properties. Large sheets of it may not be very physically stable. Sandwiching it between layers of other materials might work really well, however. So, off the cuff mocking of the idea completely withdrawn. I didn't think.
What happens to those airships when it rains?
I don't think we're ever going to agree. I'm going to have to guess that you're not a programmer, otherwise you never would have said:
"As to yield signs, you're going out of your way to find ambiguity. So I'm not even going to respond". Of course I'm going out of my way to find ambiguity. I'm trying to figure out how you'd go about following the driving laws in a computer program. You're... I don't actually know what you're doing. Defending the driving laws against what you see as my foul slander as far as I can tell.
When disagreeing with me on the ambiguity of whether or not you can pull forward and wait to turn left at a green light when traffic is blocking the turn, you wrote: "No it's not. It means that unless you know for absolute certainty that you can enter and leave the intersection without blocking traffic then you must not do so". I think this demonstrates the fundamental disconnect we have here. You're saying that the rules aren't ambiguous and then use the term "absolute certainty". I think the problem is that you literally don't believe in ambiguity, therefore, to you, nothing is ambiguous, it's just black and white. The fact is, whether or not you can enter and leave the intersection without blocking traffic is frequently un-knowable without precognition. Without precognition, you need information that generally is not available to the driver such as the actual duration of the light (I've argued for years that traffic lights of all colors should have visible indicators on them of exactly how much time until they change), the current speed and maximum speed, the direction, and the position of all nearby cars. With that information, you might be able to tell, in approximately .1% of real world cases that you'll be able to enter and leave the intersection without blocking traffic. The fact is, you can enter and leave without blocking traffic at all probably a good 90% of the time, but you can't actually accurately predict that you'll be able to (in the situation we discussed, obviously you can predict it easily if the path is clear at the time), except in a tiny fraction of cases, and then only with perfect information. So, it comes down to the question of how sure is sure enough to satisfy the law? The law doesn't say. It just holds you to "reasonable" standards. Unspecified by "reasonable" standards are ambiguous no matter what you say. If the engineers have to pick a number based on a best guess, then later go to court and face manslaughter charges because the law doesn't say how cautious they have to be, but a judge and jury think it wasn't cautious enough, then the law is ambiguous. On the other side of the equation, if they're such sticklers for the law that they leave no room whatsoever for uncertainty, I can assure you the car won't be able to drive far in the real world before it hits an unsolvable conundrum.
Empathising with the programmers who actually have to make this monstrosity operate, I see the law as a haphazardly written mess written by dozens or hundreds of disjoint committees with a dusty deck of existing implementation, a decent chunk of which doesn't follow the spec in the first place. Legalise, for all that it claims to be concise and logical, is always a mess, written by people with a "fire and forget" attitude who do very little error checking
That is exactly my point: humans have never lived in "harmony with nature", and they never will. Yet, you say you want a world in which humans do not "use up resources faster than they can recover".
Uh, yeah. Of course I want that. Because, you know, I don't want unthinkable numbers of people to suffer and die unnecessarily. I'm not happy with how many people are suffering and dying unnecessarily right now, why would I want it to get worse? I'm not naive. You yourself noted how negative my post was. I don't expect humanity to improve before it's too late, I just wish they would.
As for the human development index trends you point to. On the surface, those are encouraging. The problem is, those graphs don't show available resources. The simple fact is, most of that improvement is built on the back of unsustainable industrial and agricultural growth. What exactly do you think we're all going to eat when we run out of cheap petrochemical fertilizers? What is the farm equipment going to run on? What will the industry run on? If we don't get our act together now, we're going to run out of those things and have nothing to replace them.
It's you who is ignorant. You start off with the preposterous assumption that things are getting worse for humanity, and then you arrive at the equally preposterous conclusion that non-sustainable resource usage is to blame.
No, I'm pretty sure you're the one who is ignorant. For starters, you're apparently ignorant of what I've actually said. You're claiming that I'm starting with the assumption that things are getting worse for humanity. I'm not. In absolute terms there's more suffering because things haven't gotten _that_ much better, but the population has increased dramatically. Per capita, however, I actually agree with you that things have gotten better in most ways for humans. What I actually said is that the environmental damage we're doing is piling up faster than it's recovering and that there's eventually going to be a crunch. If you grow bacteria in a sealed petri dish with a set quantity of nutrients, they're going to do spectacularly well. If you graph their success, you'll be able to plot a nice upward trending graph, just like the one you showed me for the human development index. If can't predict the actual future of the graph for the bacteria, then there's no hope for you.
You also wrote: "as a solution, you propose killing off the primary resource that has made human development over the last century possible: fossil fuel." Sorry, where did I propose "killing off" fossil fuel? I'm a bit confused. Have you actually read my posts at all. I'm pretty sure that I'm in favor of _not_ killing off fossil fuels. One of the ways I think we should avoid killing them off is to stop using them for things we don't need them for.
As for your next paragraph, you basically go on to claim that you're in complete agreement with me, but then in the last paragraph you say that I "want destructive intervention based on irrational FUD". What "destructive intervention" are you claiming I want? Where did I say this? It sounds a lot like you're just making this up. As for Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt... Well, I do fear for the future of the human race. Uncertainty, though... I would have to say that, without drastic changes in the way we do things or amazing new technology (which is an uncertainty, you can't just rely on new technologies miraculously appearing), a devastating resource/environment crunch is eventually coming. As for doubt, well I doubt your groundless theories that everything is going to get better and better no matter what we do just because.
So, I am going to wallow, but not in ignorance, because I'm not ignorant. I'm going to wallow in my well-founded pessimism. You can be an optimist. That's fine. It must be kind of nice for you. But why do you have to be an obstructive optimist? Do you have any idea how frustrating people who actually want things to get better find it when people block their way, insisting that nothing be done because things are just going to get better anyway? If things are so great, what's your motivation?
Right. But what features the description has to cover are a bit vague. Separate types of intellectual property on characters create weird intersections. The comic book market is where you'll see some of the odder ones. For example, both Marvel comics and DC comics have a Captain Marvel. They're different characters with the same name so they have their own independent character copyrights, but the trademark on the Captain Marvel name belongs to Marvel comics, even though the DC Captain Marvel has been around longer (that's the situation as of ten years back, anyway, it's possible it's changed in the meantime, I haven't checked). So, even though Marvel wasn't even publishing a regular Captain Marvel comic book,DC's Captain Marvel book couldn't actually have "Captain Marvel" in the title. It's especially ridiculous when you consider the actual original purpose of trademark. There's essentially 0 chance of a comic book reader suffering any brand confusion whatsoever. That's the way "Intellectual Property" rights go, however, once they're established, people start thinking of them as a form of property rather than as a form of consumer protection.