I still never got a breakdown of where you got the 15% figure on solar, but let's play around with the numbers for nuclear. If you consider 100% to be the total amount of energy in nuclear bonds in the nuclear fuel, what's the total percentage of that you get in electricity out the other end? Somewhere in the neighborhood of a fraction of a single percentage point? Not that that really matters since it really is apples to oranges, just wanted to drive that home a bit more.
We agree that we should be researching sustainable nuclear fusion. I'm a little more cautious on nuclear fission. Modern plant designs are safer, but I have serious concerns about the actual economic viability of nuclear plants. They cost an arm and a leg to build in the first place, then to operate and decommission, not to mention dealing with the spent fuel. Using realistic accounting of all the involved costs compared to the actual power they produce, I'm not currently convinced they can actually compete. Maybe some of the new and upcoming designs will change that. We shouldn't stop research by any means.
As for the wind turbine collapse video. You can't make anything that's guaranteed 100% against failure. That includes aeroplanes (and all kinds of fossil fuel infrastructure, and nuclear power plants), but people still live next to airports, so I still don't buy the argument that wind turbines make areas uninhabitable. Also, your belief that wind turbines can't become safer is frankly laughable. Even mature technologies like automobiles find new ways to be safer all the time (of course, their increasing capabilities also keep adding new danger potential as well).
I also argue with your statement that the past 60 years have shown that nuclear can be safe. Chernobyl did manage to kill and sicken a lot of people. Not as many as other large industrial accidents, such as the Union Carbide accident in Bhopal, but certainly enough to demonstrate that nuclear power isn't absolutely safe. Your claims that nuclear power is the only power technology capable of becoming safer through revision is, as I've previously stated, a joke. In fact, I think you're failing to consider how many nuclear power plants are still operating using older, less-safe designs and that they'll keep on operating, quite possibly all the way up to catastrophic failure. It's quite possible we'll actually see a hump in the graph of nuclear safety where a lot more disasters happen as old plants go belly up. We'll just have to wait and see.
Also, I'm not sure where you've been flying, but aeroplanes most certainly do fly at night. Not so much little single engine prop planes that people fly for fun on weekends, but big planes, certainly.
We could argue about whether or not it was deliberate on his part. Probably was in his particular case. Ultimately, I don't think it matters. What really matters is whether intellectual property rights should be allowed on truly self-replicating living things that can't be controlled. I hope we all know that DRM is impossible, and that's just for copyrighted material that the end-users replicate themselves. GM crops will self-replicate, farmers or no farmers. They will, without a doubt, spread their genetic material to non-modified variants and dominate. Then consider that farmers don't manufacture crops, they cultivate them. The crops manufacture themselves and the farmers provide support for this process. Throwing intellectual property rights that don't even work well in a conventional invention/design/manufacturing paradigm is just a disaster.
Resistance to glyphosates isn't only exhibited by GM crops. In another twenty years or so, in fact, glyphosate will be played out as a weed killer since so many plants are becoming resistant to it (of course, it's possible that all those weeds are getting their resistance from genetic transfer from Monsanto crops, but if that's the case, those weeds are infringing on Monsanto's property). Given how broadly resistance is emerging, it's not a long shot for it to emerge naturally in crops. Traditionally, farmers would breed plants for resistance in exactly the way you've described. Now, honestly, the farmer probably did know that the crops he was isolating probably had the Monsanto genes. The thing is, the presence of their garbage in the environment completely screws up the traditional method of breeding for specific traits. Without extensive genetic analysis, no farmer could ever tell if they were infringing or not. The whole thing stinks to high heaven because it throws into contrast one of the worst things about "intellectual property", which is that every copyright, patent and trademark registered isn't some fenced in region with a clear "no trespassing" sign, rather it's a hidden landmine that everyone in the world who actually wants to get something done has to pick their way around. It really has become impossible for anyone to even know if they're actually infringing on someone else's IP. The introduction of literally infectious, living IP is a huge problem because it suddenly requires a never before required level of costly diligence from an entire industry.
You mean a farmer picked the best performing plants from his crop and saved seeds from those plants to plant the next season? And he didn't have the DNA of every seed sequenced to make sure he wasn't infringing on anyone's intellectual property? The horror.
As has been pointed out, a genetic advantage like being able to survive glyphosate poisoning, will lead to that advantage dominating after a few short generations. Also, if a small farm is downwind from a large one which uses the genetically modified plant, the small farm's plants will be overwhelmed by pollen from the larger farm. Also plant DNA is typically a double helix (although plants are much more capable than animals of surviving with haploid or polyploid DNA) and only one half has to contain the Monsanto gene for it to be infringing. So 95% Monsanto-patented gene containing plants isn't actually as damning as you make it sound.
Disregarding whether or not your 15% figure is even correct, what does the efficiency of solar compared to other power sources even mean? Are you talking about conversion rate of the energy in sunlight to electrical power? How are you comparing that to fossil fuel power generation? Are you just saying that fossil fuel based generators have maybe a 60% efficiency (if you completely disregard everything it took to get the fuel in the first place) and that industrial solar has a 15% efficiency and that since the first number is bigger, fossil fuel is better? You may have heard the expression "comparing apples and oranges". It applies to what you're trying to do here.
Also, you're ignoring the fact that the supply of solar energy is constant long term. Yes, there's solar fluctuation, and the global dimming problem (caused by fossil fuel use), but we can be very confident in how much solar power will be available on earth 100 million years from now, whereas fossil fuels will be getting really, really scarce in one millionth of that time period.
As for wind towers. Yeah, they can be loud (although all the ones I've been around have been silent so it looks like they're only loud for houses that are in the exact wrong spot, which suggests the problem can be mitigated). And they can fail catastrophically. The video you linked to is from more than a decade ago if I'm not mistaken and represents an engineering flaw in that manufacturers turbines. Problems like that can be avoided with better engineering. But, yes, it is possible for the turbines to fail catastrophically, and they can be loud. Just like aeroplanes. So, to repeat myself, ask someone who lives near an airport. Or, how about taking the fact that they live next to an airport as an answer to the question. I'm not claiming that in the shadow of any sort of giant tower is necessarily the most desirable living situation, but it's a long, long way from uninhabitable.
That's a very good point. A 300mm IC-grade wafer isn't a measured amount of precious material, it's more like an expensive product. If it's broken, or simply flawed to begin with, most of the value is gone and it's back to being highly refined silicon to be melted and formed into a crystal and cut again. A more realistic way to look at the value of the silicon is how much they pay for the refined material they make the big crystals out of.
That's cute, but the term applies to the source of the energy, not the equipment used to harness it. It's not as mining, refining, construction, transportation, and useful lifetime don't apply to the equipment used to get power out of fossil fuels. Consider what goes into making a car, for example. Or a gas station, or a fuel tanker, or an oil pipeline, oil rig, oil well, etc. There's a huge amount of infrastructure, which also has a limited lifetime that goes into obtaining and making use of fossil fuels. The fossil fuels, however, will run out (at least in the sense of being usefully extractable to make energy) in a brief fraction of human history regardless of how much infrastructure we build. Solar energy, on the other hand, has been and will be available on a time scale dwarfing geologic time and as long as we build and renew the infrastructure, we'll be able to make use of it. For that matter, until very recently in human history, the burning of fossil fuels for energy was nowhere near as widely practised as the burning of biomass (wood and vegetable and animal oils/fats) for energy. That biomass all got pretty close to 100% of its energy from the sun (maybe a little chemosynthesis here and there contributed as well).
That's silly. You're claiming that the term 'renewable' indicates an energy source of a kind that doesn't exist anywhere in the universe? As for fossil fuels being renewable, if they're renewed, it's from plant and animal matter being fossilized. The animal life gets its energy ultimately from photosynthesizing plant life. Can you tell me where photosynthetic plants get their energy?
A good rule of thumb might be to consider that an energy source that will last for longer than life has existed on Earth and certainly longer than human beings have been around can probably be considered indefinitely replaceable for the time being. Energy sources that may well run out (in the sense of becoming too scarce or hard to extract to be viable) within the lifetimes of currently living people, or even several generations removed probably can't be considered renewable.
You might have a point with hydro. That's one renewable that isn't particularly environmentally sound. What you're saying about solar and wind just doesn't make any sense. For one thing, solar isn't just one particular technology. There's solar panels of various kinds, then there's various types of large solar collectors, several types of which are perfectly compatible with farming, for example. Sure you wouldn't want to live in a greenhouse, but there's no reason you couldn't have housing under solar panels or collector mirrors. Whatever solar method you choose, it can be removed when you're done with it, and any land it took up is pretty much instantly safe for people to live on. As for wind power. Sure, the towers are huge, but their foundations aren't that big. No reason people can't live around them. Apparently, some houses have sound issues with them and that could hurt property values, but ask anyone who lives near an airport if the sound makes the area uninhabitable or is just an annoyance.
1. Interpretation of the constitution might be considered to include such things as interpreting "persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures" to include e-mail messages, computer records and the contents of your cell phone during a traffic stop. Interpreting it _not_ to mean those things is also an interpretation (a bad one), but both ways of seeing it are interpretations. It's a 200+ year old document. Even with the amendment process, it still has a lot of language that only sorta-kinda fits the modern world. Generally the intent is pretty clear, and I'll admit that politicians and judges pretending they can't see that intent or that many modern inventions still fit the framework just fine is a real problem. But, for good or bad, the constitution pretty much requires interpretation.
2. That one's a no brainer. The government should never, ever go into debt without extraordinary circumstances such as a truly huge natural disaster. The fact that the US government has been living beyond its means for something like thirty years is truly disturbing. Basically, just about everyone who has held high office in this country during that entire time, except for a scarce few, deserve to be fired for gross incompetence for this state of affairs.
3. I would have to say that controlling money supply and cost is and pretty much always has been a basic function of government. Not just in the US, but in pretty much every government that's ever had some form of money. Suggesting that it be done some other way is fine and good, but at present our only other real alternative is to fall back to a pure barter economy or to use bitcoins, which aren't really proven yet. Some future technological advance might allow us to shift to an energy based economy or something like that, but we just aren't there yet. All that said, the government should act responsibly in its role as controller of the money supply (a role which it has actually kind of doled out to semi-private third parties).
4. As for giving the government power to insure people in any way, I have to say yes. Yes to insuring bank deposits because it's been proven necessary to protect people from financial disasters. The crucial thing is that the insurance should be to protect the depositers, not the banks. If a bank screws things up like that, the government should sweep in, nationalize it, weed management aggressively, voiding compensation requirements in contracts as it sees fit, get it back on track and then sell it via some open bidding process so it doesn't just get handed over to cronies for a song. For retirement, yes, but the money collected should be handled responsibly, not shamelessly raided. For healthcare, good gravy yes! The system the US has right now is an abomination. It's pretty much the worst healthcare in the developed world for the highest price. When you consider the sorts of things government is good for, pooling risk across the entire population is one of those things.
5. Governments need taxes to operate. Nearly all governments have an income tax of some sort. You could have a set tax amount that everyone pays regardless of income. Of course, if it's high enough to actually support government operations, then it's going to financially crush poorer people and barely be noticed by richer people. Poorer people doesn't just mean the lazy, it can also include people who can't work this year because an anvil fell on them. Plus, what about children? Just remember, if you make any exceptions for anyone, then you're once again taxing based on income, just with coarser granularity.
6. The US government is certainly going way too far on that one at present. Trouble is, this is one of those things where there's always a balance. For example, you'd be hard pressed to find many people who think convicted criminals shouldn't lose some liberties, at least for a time. On the other hand, the TSA is now groping people getting onto (and off of!) trains and buses. Even ignoring the
The density does vary, but the problem is that it varies in a very predictable way. What I was thinking of could work if you had a spherical planet that had one iron hemisphere and one calcium carbonate hemisphere, but that simply can't happen in an object the size of a planet any more than an object the size of a planet could come in cube shape. I was definitely off in fantasy land on that one. I'm going to attempt to claim it was because I was tired and my knees are killing me. Yeah, yeah, that's the ticket.
As for the adding layers of lighter material, it worked in my head when I ignored the fact that doing that would change the average density. It is worth noting that, due to local variations in density and to the rotation of the Earth, gravity can vary by something like 0.5% (or more since that only looks at cities and not, for example, floating over the deepest part of the ocean) from location to location. There was a good xkcd comic about it.
Don't normally reply to myself but, as someone pointed out in another thread, I'm full of it on this one. Planet's don't tend to have uniform densities, but the density at any given depth is extremely uniform since if it weren't, the material would flow plastically until it was. No Bizarro worlds in the real universe. So, you can treat average density as if it were exactly average.
I feel a bit foolish and I'm currently waiting for some water to boil to cook some noodles to flagellate myself with.
Hmm. I think I may have been making some erroneous assumptions about this. I did some quick thought experiments about adding layers of extremely light material and failed to realize that it would significantly change the average density of the planet. There are, of course, certain assumptions you have to make about the distribution of the spherically-symmetrical body for what you say to work, but those assumptions are, of course, completely safe ones (in fact, for them not to hold would be miraculous) in an object the size of a planet and I didn't think about that.
Mea culpa.
P.S. Of course, we're all just assuming the same average density as Earth. It's entirely possible that this planet has a lower average density than Earth. Anyway, I'm off to beat myself with a wet noodle.
Don't forget the next step: Take a vacation or follow a "job offer" to somewhere in a US jurisdiction or that will extradite to the US and discover that the US firmly believes its laws have global jurisdiction and that people acting contrary to US laws in places they can't reach them is just a loophole that hasn't been closed yet. and the next: rot in prison.
I've been around for a while and listened to Electric Universe proponents spout off about it for some time. I can assure you that, at one point, the party line in the posts I saw was that stars were basically just big iron-nickel anodes and cathodes in space surrounded by a relatively thin layer of plasma. Similarly, the trails behind comets weren't water reflecting sunlight, but were in fact an electrical aurora, etc., etc. Maybe such claims have been abandoned now, but they were there in the past. Electric Universe theory surely keeps changing just like most things. The only real constant seems to be that proponents insist that all other forces must bow to the electromagnetic force and that conventional physicists who don't subscribe to the theory are soulless minions of orthodoxy. Essentially, the entire point of EU theory seems to simply be contrarian.
In a lot of ways it reminds me of creationism. When I was a kid, dinosaur bones were just a few old bones that scientists had put together wrong and misinterpreted. When it became far too clear to everyone that only a complete idiot could really believe that, dinosaur bones because a trick planted by the devil. Today, dinosaurs are antediluvian life which didn't make it onto the ark... they're even mentioned in the bible!!! The creationists trail real science and keep changing their story, but never, ever, ever admit error. What they believe is always the absolute truth and always has been and if you remember having hours long arguments with them over something which they now believe to be the case but didn't then, your memory is faulty! The thing that's important to them isn't really any particular set of facts, it's that all those scientists with their fancy degrees aren't really so smart and are, in fact, actually stupid fools who can't see the truth, which is obvious to any of the superior (yet humble) believers.
Oh, gee. I am embarrassed to admit, I wrote the previous two paragraphs without reading the links you provided. Nothing but demagoguery and misrepresentation from me. I clearly never even your alternate theory a fighting chance. But, now I have read those pages and I am enlightened. In the spirit of enlightenment, I present an excerpt from this article which you linked to:
Stars formed in this way have an outer envelope of helium and hydrogen. Working inwards, hydrogen, oxygen and nitrogen will form the atmospheric middle layers, and iron, silicon and magnesium will make up the core, which is cool. There is no thermonuclear engine in stars!
Now, this is not exactly "big balls of iron" like I wrote (of course that was just what I'd heard from other EU proponents), but your response that "they claim they are balls of ionized plasma (i.e. gas-like, not solid-like)" after berating me for my idiocy seems a little disingenuous in light of what that article says. It seems to fit what I said a lot better than what you said. Solid core, lots of iron.
Fusion as a secondary effect of huge arc discharges doesn't seem like it would be sufficient to create all the higher elements in the universe given how ridiculously small the yield would be with plain hydrogen rather than tritium and deuterium like we do it on earth so, as far as I'm concerned, at present, the EU theory doesn't explain where all those elements came from. I'm sorry, I don't think that I'm drinking someone's poisoned kool-aid by finding EU theory to be flawed. I think I'm just looking at a heavily flawed theory and seeing it for what it is.
It's interesting that people notice that as a problem in space battles in movies, but not in regular battles in war movies. In pretty much every war movie I've ever seen, explosions and their sound effects are simultaneous, even when the explosions are far away. In movies, sound travels at the speed of light, but people only notice it as a problem for space movies. Some of that should actually be attributed to the suspension of disbelief required for storytelling devices. For example, you never actually see a band following Darth Vader around playing the Imperial Death March, or whatever his leitmotif is. Maybe it's coming from the PA system or speakers in his suit? Or maybe it's just a storytelling convention like voiceovers, subtitles and everyone speaking English even though they're, for example, Russians on a soviet stealth sub.
In any case there would actually be sound in space during a space battle. When a space ship explodes, it's going to let out a blast of gas going really fast. It would probably travel much faster than the speed of sound on Earth, (at all kinds of different speeds, actually) and would be heard in other ships upon impact with the hull. The actual sound would probably be very different than a standard foley explosion.
The GP is thinking of something you're not thinking about, which is density distribution. If the planet has a density equal to that of Earth, then it probably has a density distribution like that of Earth as well, which means that the material that's actually close to the surface is about half as dense as the core material. So, there's a lot of distance between anyone at the surface and the dense core material, which means that there's less of a gravitational effect on an object at the surface from the denser core material. I think I might need a refresher on differential calculus. It might actually be easy to figure this out from a formula describing the change in density from the surface to the center of the planet. At the moment, I'd be more comfortable writing a program to model the entire planet in 1 km cubes. Of course, for the purposes of this discussion, I'm not going to go that far, I'm just going to guesstimate. The one thing I can state with certainty is that a planet with 2.4 times the radius of Earth and the same proportional density distribution is going to have less than 2.4 times Earth's surface gravity.
If the planet is the same density as our planet, then the surface gravity should work out to 2.4 times the surface gravity of Earth, except that it actually probably wouldn't. Consider that the effects of gravity fall off with distance following the inverse square law. So, if you're standing on the surface of this alien planet, a gigaton of matter at its core is going to be 2.4 times as far away than a gigaton of matter at Earth's core is from someone at the surface of Earth. So, that gigaton of matter would only pull with 17.36% of the force that it would on Earth.
None of this would be important if planets had uniform densities, but they don't. Earth's core has nearly twice the density of its upper layers. If you dig into the planet Earth all the way to the core, the gravity you experience actually increases for the first 2000 kilometers or so, even with all that mantle above you cancelling some of the gravity below. After that point, you would get lighter until you hit the dead center, where gravity would be completely cancelled out. If you stripped Earth down to its dense core, then surface gravity would actually go up (density of the core would actually decrease without all that matter pressing down on it, of course, but it wouldn't be a huge effect).
To make a long story short, a planet could have a dense core and less dense material at the surface so as to have 2.4 times the radius of Earth, the same average density, but still not have 2.4 times the surface gravity. I'm pretty sure it's even possible for it to have less surface gravity than earth, although that would be unlikely. If the planet had 2.4 times the radius of Earth and the exact same density _and_ the exact same density distribution as Earth, then it would definitely have less than 2.4 times the surface gravity of Earth. I do not have the time or the data to work out what it actually would be, but we'd probably be looking at more like 1.5 times Earth rather than 2.4.
Remind me how the Electric Universe theory explains nucleosynthesis? If stars are actually just big balls of iron and nuclear fusion isn't powering them, where did the iron, and all of the other elements come from? Traditional cosmology explains it pretty well, and decades of observations of stars at all stages of development supports those explanations very well. How does the Electric Universe fit with all the existing evidence?
Just in case anyone isn't aware, the parent post is a rant about the "electric universe" "theory". Basically, it's pseudoscientific quackery. Not because of scientific snobbery, or some sort of conspiracy against the theory, but because most of it is quite obviously bunk. It's basically just a form of monomania.
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I still never got a breakdown of where you got the 15% figure on solar, but let's play around with the numbers for nuclear. If you consider 100% to be the total amount of energy in nuclear bonds in the nuclear fuel, what's the total percentage of that you get in electricity out the other end? Somewhere in the neighborhood of a fraction of a single percentage point? Not that that really matters since it really is apples to oranges, just wanted to drive that home a bit more.
We agree that we should be researching sustainable nuclear fusion. I'm a little more cautious on nuclear fission. Modern plant designs are safer, but I have serious concerns about the actual economic viability of nuclear plants. They cost an arm and a leg to build in the first place, then to operate and decommission, not to mention dealing with the spent fuel. Using realistic accounting of all the involved costs compared to the actual power they produce, I'm not currently convinced they can actually compete. Maybe some of the new and upcoming designs will change that. We shouldn't stop research by any means.
As for the wind turbine collapse video. You can't make anything that's guaranteed 100% against failure. That includes aeroplanes (and all kinds of fossil fuel infrastructure, and nuclear power plants), but people still live next to airports, so I still don't buy the argument that wind turbines make areas uninhabitable. Also, your belief that wind turbines can't become safer is frankly laughable. Even mature technologies like automobiles find new ways to be safer all the time (of course, their increasing capabilities also keep adding new danger potential as well).
I also argue with your statement that the past 60 years have shown that nuclear can be safe. Chernobyl did manage to kill and sicken a lot of people. Not as many as other large industrial accidents, such as the Union Carbide accident in Bhopal, but certainly enough to demonstrate that nuclear power isn't absolutely safe. Your claims that nuclear power is the only power technology capable of becoming safer through revision is, as I've previously stated, a joke. In fact, I think you're failing to consider how many nuclear power plants are still operating using older, less-safe designs and that they'll keep on operating, quite possibly all the way up to catastrophic failure. It's quite possible we'll actually see a hump in the graph of nuclear safety where a lot more disasters happen as old plants go belly up. We'll just have to wait and see.
Also, I'm not sure where you've been flying, but aeroplanes most certainly do fly at night. Not so much little single engine prop planes that people fly for fun on weekends, but big planes, certainly.
We could argue about whether or not it was deliberate on his part. Probably was in his particular case. Ultimately, I don't think it matters. What really matters is whether intellectual property rights should be allowed on truly self-replicating living things that can't be controlled. I hope we all know that DRM is impossible, and that's just for copyrighted material that the end-users replicate themselves. GM crops will self-replicate, farmers or no farmers. They will, without a doubt, spread their genetic material to non-modified variants and dominate. Then consider that farmers don't manufacture crops, they cultivate them. The crops manufacture themselves and the farmers provide support for this process. Throwing intellectual property rights that don't even work well in a conventional invention/design/manufacturing paradigm is just a disaster.
Resistance to glyphosates isn't only exhibited by GM crops. In another twenty years or so, in fact, glyphosate will be played out as a weed killer since so many plants are becoming resistant to it (of course, it's possible that all those weeds are getting their resistance from genetic transfer from Monsanto crops, but if that's the case, those weeds are infringing on Monsanto's property). Given how broadly resistance is emerging, it's not a long shot for it to emerge naturally in crops. Traditionally, farmers would breed plants for resistance in exactly the way you've described. Now, honestly, the farmer probably did know that the crops he was isolating probably had the Monsanto genes. The thing is, the presence of their garbage in the environment completely screws up the traditional method of breeding for specific traits. Without extensive genetic analysis, no farmer could ever tell if they were infringing or not. The whole thing stinks to high heaven because it throws into contrast one of the worst things about "intellectual property", which is that every copyright, patent and trademark registered isn't some fenced in region with a clear "no trespassing" sign, rather it's a hidden landmine that everyone in the world who actually wants to get something done has to pick their way around. It really has become impossible for anyone to even know if they're actually infringing on someone else's IP. The introduction of literally infectious, living IP is a huge problem because it suddenly requires a never before required level of costly diligence from an entire industry.
Got it. Planting the seeds from your best-performing crops, a standard agricultural practice since agriculture was invented, is a crime.
You mean a farmer picked the best performing plants from his crop and saved seeds from those plants to plant the next season? And he didn't have the DNA of every seed sequenced to make sure he wasn't infringing on anyone's intellectual property? The horror.
That farmer had a choice. He could have just burned all of his seeds because some of them might have been contaminated.
As has been pointed out, a genetic advantage like being able to survive glyphosate poisoning, will lead to that advantage dominating after a few short generations. Also, if a small farm is downwind from a large one which uses the genetically modified plant, the small farm's plants will be overwhelmed by pollen from the larger farm. Also plant DNA is typically a double helix (although plants are much more capable than animals of surviving with haploid or polyploid DNA) and only one half has to contain the Monsanto gene for it to be infringing. So 95% Monsanto-patented gene containing plants isn't actually as damning as you make it sound.
Disregarding whether or not your 15% figure is even correct, what does the efficiency of solar compared to other power sources even mean? Are you talking about conversion rate of the energy in sunlight to electrical power? How are you comparing that to fossil fuel power generation? Are you just saying that fossil fuel based generators have maybe a 60% efficiency (if you completely disregard everything it took to get the fuel in the first place) and that industrial solar has a 15% efficiency and that since the first number is bigger, fossil fuel is better? You may have heard the expression "comparing apples and oranges". It applies to what you're trying to do here.
Also, you're ignoring the fact that the supply of solar energy is constant long term. Yes, there's solar fluctuation, and the global dimming problem (caused by fossil fuel use), but we can be very confident in how much solar power will be available on earth 100 million years from now, whereas fossil fuels will be getting really, really scarce in one millionth of that time period.
As for wind towers. Yeah, they can be loud (although all the ones I've been around have been silent so it looks like they're only loud for houses that are in the exact wrong spot, which suggests the problem can be mitigated). And they can fail catastrophically. The video you linked to is from more than a decade ago if I'm not mistaken and represents an engineering flaw in that manufacturers turbines. Problems like that can be avoided with better engineering. But, yes, it is possible for the turbines to fail catastrophically, and they can be loud. Just like aeroplanes. So, to repeat myself, ask someone who lives near an airport. Or, how about taking the fact that they live next to an airport as an answer to the question. I'm not claiming that in the shadow of any sort of giant tower is necessarily the most desirable living situation, but it's a long, long way from uninhabitable.
That's a very good point. A 300mm IC-grade wafer isn't a measured amount of precious material, it's more like an expensive product. If it's broken, or simply flawed to begin with, most of the value is gone and it's back to being highly refined silicon to be melted and formed into a crystal and cut again. A more realistic way to look at the value of the silicon is how much they pay for the refined material they make the big crystals out of.
The tab came off my pudding can!
That's cute, but the term applies to the source of the energy, not the equipment used to harness it. It's not as mining, refining, construction, transportation, and useful lifetime don't apply to the equipment used to get power out of fossil fuels. Consider what goes into making a car, for example. Or a gas station, or a fuel tanker, or an oil pipeline, oil rig, oil well, etc. There's a huge amount of infrastructure, which also has a limited lifetime that goes into obtaining and making use of fossil fuels. The fossil fuels, however, will run out (at least in the sense of being usefully extractable to make energy) in a brief fraction of human history regardless of how much infrastructure we build. Solar energy, on the other hand, has been and will be available on a time scale dwarfing geologic time and as long as we build and renew the infrastructure, we'll be able to make use of it. For that matter, until very recently in human history, the burning of fossil fuels for energy was nowhere near as widely practised as the burning of biomass (wood and vegetable and animal oils/fats) for energy. That biomass all got pretty close to 100% of its energy from the sun (maybe a little chemosynthesis here and there contributed as well).
That's silly. You're claiming that the term 'renewable' indicates an energy source of a kind that doesn't exist anywhere in the universe? As for fossil fuels being renewable, if they're renewed, it's from plant and animal matter being fossilized. The animal life gets its energy ultimately from photosynthesizing plant life. Can you tell me where photosynthetic plants get their energy?
A good rule of thumb might be to consider that an energy source that will last for longer than life has existed on Earth and certainly longer than human beings have been around can probably be considered indefinitely replaceable for the time being. Energy sources that may well run out (in the sense of becoming too scarce or hard to extract to be viable) within the lifetimes of currently living people, or even several generations removed probably can't be considered renewable.
You might have a point with hydro. That's one renewable that isn't particularly environmentally sound. What you're saying about solar and wind just doesn't make any sense. For one thing, solar isn't just one particular technology. There's solar panels of various kinds, then there's various types of large solar collectors, several types of which are perfectly compatible with farming, for example. Sure you wouldn't want to live in a greenhouse, but there's no reason you couldn't have housing under solar panels or collector mirrors. Whatever solar method you choose, it can be removed when you're done with it, and any land it took up is pretty much instantly safe for people to live on. As for wind power. Sure, the towers are huge, but their foundations aren't that big. No reason people can't live around them. Apparently, some houses have sound issues with them and that could hurt property values, but ask anyone who lives near an airport if the sound makes the area uninhabitable or is just an annoyance.
Here's my take on those:
1. Interpretation of the constitution might be considered to include such things as interpreting "persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures" to include e-mail messages, computer records and the contents of your cell phone during a traffic stop. Interpreting it _not_ to mean those things is also an interpretation (a bad one), but both ways of seeing it are interpretations. It's a 200+ year old document. Even with the amendment process, it still has a lot of language that only sorta-kinda fits the modern world. Generally the intent is pretty clear, and I'll admit that politicians and judges pretending they can't see that intent or that many modern inventions still fit the framework just fine is a real problem. But, for good or bad, the constitution pretty much requires interpretation.
2. That one's a no brainer. The government should never, ever go into debt without extraordinary circumstances such as a truly huge natural disaster. The fact that the US government has been living beyond its means for something like thirty years is truly disturbing. Basically, just about everyone who has held high office in this country during that entire time, except for a scarce few, deserve to be fired for gross incompetence for this state of affairs.
3. I would have to say that controlling money supply and cost is and pretty much always has been a basic function of government. Not just in the US, but in pretty much every government that's ever had some form of money. Suggesting that it be done some other way is fine and good, but at present our only other real alternative is to fall back to a pure barter economy or to use bitcoins, which aren't really proven yet. Some future technological advance might allow us to shift to an energy based economy or something like that, but we just aren't there yet. All that said, the government should act responsibly in its role as controller of the money supply (a role which it has actually kind of doled out to semi-private third parties).
4. As for giving the government power to insure people in any way, I have to say yes. Yes to insuring bank deposits because it's been proven necessary to protect people from financial disasters. The crucial thing is that the insurance should be to protect the depositers, not the banks. If a bank screws things up like that, the government should sweep in, nationalize it, weed management aggressively, voiding compensation requirements in contracts as it sees fit, get it back on track and then sell it via some open bidding process so it doesn't just get handed over to cronies for a song. For retirement, yes, but the money collected should be handled responsibly, not shamelessly raided. For healthcare, good gravy yes! The system the US has right now is an abomination. It's pretty much the worst healthcare in the developed world for the highest price. When you consider the sorts of things government is good for, pooling risk across the entire population is one of those things.
5. Governments need taxes to operate. Nearly all governments have an income tax of some sort. You could have a set tax amount that everyone pays regardless of income. Of course, if it's high enough to actually support government operations, then it's going to financially crush poorer people and barely be noticed by richer people. Poorer people doesn't just mean the lazy, it can also include people who can't work this year because an anvil fell on them. Plus, what about children? Just remember, if you make any exceptions for anyone, then you're once again taxing based on income, just with coarser granularity.
6. The US government is certainly going way too far on that one at present. Trouble is, this is one of those things where there's always a balance. For example, you'd be hard pressed to find many people who think convicted criminals shouldn't lose some liberties, at least for a time. On the other hand, the TSA is now groping people getting onto (and off of!) trains and buses. Even ignoring the
You're a little late since Ted Stevens died last year.
The density does vary, but the problem is that it varies in a very predictable way. What I was thinking of could work if you had a spherical planet that had one iron hemisphere and one calcium carbonate hemisphere, but that simply can't happen in an object the size of a planet any more than an object the size of a planet could come in cube shape. I was definitely off in fantasy land on that one. I'm going to attempt to claim it was because I was tired and my knees are killing me. Yeah, yeah, that's the ticket.
As for the adding layers of lighter material, it worked in my head when I ignored the fact that doing that would change the average density. It is worth noting that, due to local variations in density and to the rotation of the Earth, gravity can vary by something like 0.5% (or more since that only looks at cities and not, for example, floating over the deepest part of the ocean) from location to location. There was a good xkcd comic about it.
Don't normally reply to myself but, as someone pointed out in another thread, I'm full of it on this one. Planet's don't tend to have uniform densities, but the density at any given depth is extremely uniform since if it weren't, the material would flow plastically until it was. No Bizarro worlds in the real universe. So, you can treat average density as if it were exactly average.
I feel a bit foolish and I'm currently waiting for some water to boil to cook some noodles to flagellate myself with.
Hmm. I think I may have been making some erroneous assumptions about this. I did some quick thought experiments about adding layers of extremely light material and failed to realize that it would significantly change the average density of the planet. There are, of course, certain assumptions you have to make about the distribution of the spherically-symmetrical body for what you say to work, but those assumptions are, of course, completely safe ones (in fact, for them not to hold would be miraculous) in an object the size of a planet and I didn't think about that.
Mea culpa.
P.S. Of course, we're all just assuming the same average density as Earth. It's entirely possible that this planet has a lower average density than Earth. Anyway, I'm off to beat myself with a wet noodle.
Don't forget the next step:
Take a vacation or follow a "job offer" to somewhere in a US jurisdiction or that will extradite to the US and discover that the US firmly believes its laws have global jurisdiction and that people acting contrary to US laws in places they can't reach them is just a loophole that hasn't been closed yet.
and the next:
rot in prison.
I've been around for a while and listened to Electric Universe proponents spout off about it for some time. I can assure you that, at one point, the party line in the posts I saw was that stars were basically just big iron-nickel anodes and cathodes in space surrounded by a relatively thin layer of plasma. Similarly, the trails behind comets weren't water reflecting sunlight, but were in fact an electrical aurora, etc., etc. Maybe such claims have been abandoned now, but they were there in the past. Electric Universe theory surely keeps changing just like most things. The only real constant seems to be that proponents insist that all other forces must bow to the electromagnetic force and that conventional physicists who don't subscribe to the theory are soulless minions of orthodoxy. Essentially, the entire point of EU theory seems to simply be contrarian.
In a lot of ways it reminds me of creationism. When I was a kid, dinosaur bones were just a few old bones that scientists had put together wrong and misinterpreted. When it became far too clear to everyone that only a complete idiot could really believe that, dinosaur bones because a trick planted by the devil. Today, dinosaurs are antediluvian life which didn't make it onto the ark... they're even mentioned in the bible!!! The creationists trail real science and keep changing their story, but never, ever, ever admit error. What they believe is always the absolute truth and always has been and if you remember having hours long arguments with them over something which they now believe to be the case but didn't then, your memory is faulty! The thing that's important to them isn't really any particular set of facts, it's that all those scientists with their fancy degrees aren't really so smart and are, in fact, actually stupid fools who can't see the truth, which is obvious to any of the superior (yet humble) believers.
Oh, gee. I am embarrassed to admit, I wrote the previous two paragraphs without reading the links you provided. Nothing but demagoguery and misrepresentation from me. I clearly never even your alternate theory a fighting chance. But, now I have read those pages and I am enlightened. In the spirit of enlightenment, I present an excerpt from this article which you linked to:
Now, this is not exactly "big balls of iron" like I wrote (of course that was just what I'd heard from other EU proponents), but your response that "they claim they are balls of ionized plasma (i.e. gas-like, not solid-like)" after berating me for my idiocy seems a little disingenuous in light of what that article says. It seems to fit what I said a lot better than what you said. Solid core, lots of iron.
Fusion as a secondary effect of huge arc discharges doesn't seem like it would be sufficient to create all the higher elements in the universe given how ridiculously small the yield would be with plain hydrogen rather than tritium and deuterium like we do it on earth so, as far as I'm concerned, at present, the EU theory doesn't explain where all those elements came from. I'm sorry, I don't think that I'm drinking someone's poisoned kool-aid by finding EU theory to be flawed. I think I'm just looking at a heavily flawed theory and seeing it for what it is.
It's interesting that people notice that as a problem in space battles in movies, but not in regular battles in war movies. In pretty much every war movie I've ever seen, explosions and their sound effects are simultaneous, even when the explosions are far away. In movies, sound travels at the speed of light, but people only notice it as a problem for space movies. Some of that should actually be attributed to the suspension of disbelief required for storytelling devices. For example, you never actually see a band following Darth Vader around playing the Imperial Death March, or whatever his leitmotif is. Maybe it's coming from the PA system or speakers in his suit? Or maybe it's just a storytelling convention like voiceovers, subtitles and everyone speaking English even though they're, for example, Russians on a soviet stealth sub.
In any case there would actually be sound in space during a space battle. When a space ship explodes, it's going to let out a blast of gas going really fast. It would probably travel much faster than the speed of sound on Earth, (at all kinds of different speeds, actually) and would be heard in other ships upon impact with the hull. The actual sound would probably be very different than a standard foley explosion.
The GP is thinking of something you're not thinking about, which is density distribution. If the planet has a density equal to that of Earth, then it probably has a density distribution like that of Earth as well, which means that the material that's actually close to the surface is about half as dense as the core material. So, there's a lot of distance between anyone at the surface and the dense core material, which means that there's less of a gravitational effect on an object at the surface from the denser core material. I think I might need a refresher on differential calculus. It might actually be easy to figure this out from a formula describing the change in density from the surface to the center of the planet. At the moment, I'd be more comfortable writing a program to model the entire planet in 1 km cubes. Of course, for the purposes of this discussion, I'm not going to go that far, I'm just going to guesstimate. The one thing I can state with certainty is that a planet with 2.4 times the radius of Earth and the same proportional density distribution is going to have less than 2.4 times Earth's surface gravity.
If the planet is the same density as our planet, then the surface gravity should work out to 2.4 times the surface gravity of Earth, except that it actually probably wouldn't. Consider that the effects of gravity fall off with distance following the inverse square law. So, if you're standing on the surface of this alien planet, a gigaton of matter at its core is going to be 2.4 times as far away than a gigaton of matter at Earth's core is from someone at the surface of Earth. So, that gigaton of matter would only pull with 17.36% of the force that it would on Earth.
None of this would be important if planets had uniform densities, but they don't. Earth's core has nearly twice the density of its upper layers. If you dig into the planet Earth all the way to the core, the gravity you experience actually increases for the first 2000 kilometers or so, even with all that mantle above you cancelling some of the gravity below. After that point, you would get lighter until you hit the dead center, where gravity would be completely cancelled out. If you stripped Earth down to its dense core, then surface gravity would actually go up (density of the core would actually decrease without all that matter pressing down on it, of course, but it wouldn't be a huge effect).
To make a long story short, a planet could have a dense core and less dense material at the surface so as to have 2.4 times the radius of Earth, the same average density, but still not have 2.4 times the surface gravity. I'm pretty sure it's even possible for it to have less surface gravity than earth, although that would be unlikely. If the planet had 2.4 times the radius of Earth and the exact same density _and_ the exact same density distribution as Earth, then it would definitely have less than 2.4 times the surface gravity of Earth. I do not have the time or the data to work out what it actually would be, but we'd probably be looking at more like 1.5 times Earth rather than 2.4.
Remind me how the Electric Universe theory explains nucleosynthesis? If stars are actually just big balls of iron and nuclear fusion isn't powering them, where did the iron, and all of the other elements come from? Traditional cosmology explains it pretty well, and decades of observations of stars at all stages of development supports those explanations very well. How does the Electric Universe fit with all the existing evidence?
Just in case anyone isn't aware, the parent post is a rant about the "electric universe" "theory". Basically, it's pseudoscientific quackery. Not because of scientific snobbery, or some sort of conspiracy against the theory, but because most of it is quite obviously bunk. It's basically just a form of monomania.