BTW, that Big Giant fusion reactor they're building in France to go on line in 2016? 2Re:Home Kit016! Don't hold your breath. First its Pork. Second it'll likley be dropped for cost overruns, ir. more Pork. And third, even if they managed to finish it, it is only Big Giant so ordinary folk will still lack the means to there own energy production.
It's not pork! Apart from the obvious fact that in France it would be "porc", the various conuntries and organisations involved in this actually have a pretty good record on big science projcts: CERN has delivered its major accelerators pretty much on time; various big telescope projects are going well, and the predecessor fusiona lab, JET, near Oxford, has worked really well.
It is true that this approach to fusion power will not scale down to anything less than a multi gigawatt power station in the near future, but then the original steam engines wouldn't scale down to anything less than pumping out a Cornish tin mine, and now we can make them almost too small to see.
Seriously, the problem here is that you're required to input a tremendous amount of force to overcome the nuclear bonds that hold the atoms together. As long as you have to put that force into the system, you're not going to get surplus energy out of the system. Simple physics. You can't get more energy out of a reaction than it takes to reverse it. The same reason why hydrogen cars that run on electrolyzed water don't work.
Nice idea, but, I'm afraid it's not like that. There are basically two forces involved here: electomagentic forces and the strong nuclear force. The EM force tends to keep atomic nuclei apart, since they are all positively charged. In "normal" matter they stay far enough apart to allow a bunch of electrons (negatively charged) to get in between and "screen" the charges. Meanwhile the strong nuclear force wants to pull nucleons together to make bigger nuclei. It's really powerful, as its name suggests, but also really short range.
The net effect of the interplay between these two forces (and some other considerations which I will overlook for now) is that the most stable (equivalently lowest energy) state for matter in quantities of less than a few solar masses (beyond which gravity starts to play a role) is as iron-56 nuclei. This is basically as many protons and neutrons as you can squash together and stillhave them all be in range of each others strong nuclear forces. Put in more and the electrostatic repulsion starts to dominate, put in fewer and the strong nuclear force would still pull in more if it could.
So, you can, in principle, get energy from any nuclear reaction that moves things towards iron -- fusion of light elements, or fission of heavy ones.
So, why is the whole universe not made of iron already? Basically the answer is that it got stuck!. When the universe was very hot and very dense indeed, it was a see of protons and neutrons constantly smashing into one another, sticking briefly to make nuclei and then being smashed apart by the next collision. The temperature was so high that thermal motion of the particles overcame the electromagnetic repulsion. When it cooled, it did so so quickly that the protons and neutrons didn't have time to form into iron nuclei, or indeed into many nuclei at all. That's why, before stars got into the game the universe was mostly hydrogen, with a decent amount of helium and only traces of other things.
Now, at the temperatures found in most of the universse, when two light nuclei collide, the electromagnetic forces cause them to bounce before they get close enough for the strong forces to make them stick. In a star, or a hydrogen bomb, or one of the pieces of borated plastic in this laser experiment, temperatures and densities are high enough that sometimes two nuclei smash together had enough to get past the EM repulsion and feel the strong force attracting them, whereupon they "snap" together, releasing a lot of energy.
If you want a very poor analogy, consider a room with a powerully magnetic roof a vibrating floor and a lot of ball-bearing. Initially, all the bearings are on the floor. Even though it would be a lower energy state for them to be stuck to the magnets in the roof. It we turn up the vibration (temperature), initially not much happens, but eventually we reach a temperature where a few bearings get close to the ceiling and are then pulled in hard by the magnets, releasing lots of energy as they "thunk" into the ceiling. This is what we are trying to do in a fusion reaction.
If we take the same analogy and turn up the heat still hotten, we recreate conditions in the original big bang. Now the room is full of flying ball bearings moving so fast that they are as likely as not to knock free any that get stock to the ceiling.
I think you mean "motion of iron" not "motion of ions". The Earth's outer core is (generally believed to be) mainly liquid iron. By a convoluted process involving feedback between magnetic fields and this rotating conductor the outer core seems to convert heat energy (from radioactive decay in the Earth's core) into magentic field and rotation. This process seems to develop chaotically, resulting the flips of the field perceived at the surface.
All 4 basic forces: electromagnatism, gravity, strong nuclear, and weak forces propogate at the speed of light in their reference frame.
I don't think so. EM does, because the carrier particle for the force is massless (the photon). Gravity does, in so far as the question is meaningful (which it may not be because gravity bends space-time, making the questions of how far it went and how long it took both rather hard). For the others, though, the carrier particles (W and Z bosons and gluons) have mass, so I would expect the forces to propagate at less than the speed of light. If not, I'd be interested to hear why?
You don't need Einstein's equation to connect the units. 1 Joule is defined as follows:
if you have kilogram mass, there is a certain force which will cause it to accelerate at 1 meter/second/second. This is called 1 Newton.
Now if you push something along for 1 meter with a force of 1 Newton, you use 1 Joule of energy.
These definitions pre-dated Einstein. You can do the same thing starting with centimeters and grams and get the erg. "Imperial units" tend not to be defined so nicely and have Earth's gravity mixed up in the definitions in a few places. Anyway Einstein's equation works for any system where the energy unit is defined from the ones for mass, distance and time in this "natural" way.
The choices of unit are not independent. You can choose any two and that forces a choice for the third. For instance, you can measure mass in kilograms and speed in meters/second. Your unit of energy is then twice the kinetic energy of a 1 kilogram mass moving at 1 meter per second (don't worry about the twice). If instead, you like to measure mass in stones and energy in British thermal units your unit of velocity is the velocity of a 1 stone mass which has 2 BTUs of kinetic energy. Ans so on.
The main data is ice cores in which yearly layers can be distinguished and counted. By measuring the isotope ratios of hydrogen in samples from each layer, we get an average sea surface temperature for that year.
"Yup, here is a science that proves that 400,000 years ago, it was cooler."
"Wait, I thought there was an ice age that we are still coming out of."
You haven't been listening very carefully:
1. We have science that gives us a pretty accurate and detailed picture of global average temperatures for the last half million or so years (possibly longer with the latest Antarctic ice core).
2. We likewise have solid data on the atmospheric abundance of CO2 for the same period.
3. At no time in this period has (a) CO2 been as high as it is now or (b) temperature risen as fast as it is rising now. In particular, the slow steady rise in temperatures for the last 10K years since the last ice age is NOTHING compared to the rate of rise we're seeing in the last 50 years.
1 & 2 are by quite direct methods, that depend on few assumptions that can't be easily tested.
Now do you see why we need to pay some attention to this!
Actually I got the figure wrong, it's 1 million square kilometers of permafrost. If you could get away with covering that with a 0.1 mm thick plastic film and somehow collecting up the methane, you'd need a 100 million tons of plastic to make the film. To cover it with greenhouses, which we could treat as 3mm glass sheeting, you'd need about 6 billion tons of glass.
1. The climate is warming MUCH FASTER than we have any record of it doing in the past. Yes it has warmed, yes it has been warmer than it is now, but this speed of change appears to be unprecendented.
2. Regardless of why the climate is changing, the change will inconvenience us considerably, and expensively over the next 50 years or so. There seems little doubt that emitting less CO2 will moderate this to some extent. It may therefore pay to reduce CO2 emissions now, rather than have to relocate cities later.
Heat output from human activity is not really a factor. The thing that matters is the change in the transparency of the atmosphere to thermal IR caused by the extra CO2. This changes the balance between incoming solar light and outgoing thermal IR.
Have you read the reports of the International Panel on Climate Change? or the US National Academy of Sciences analysis of it? "prove" is more or less impossible in any science (rather than in mathematics) but the weight of evidence (some years ago now) was wnought to convince a panel of senior scientists with nothing much to gain or lose (this is the US panel) who were asked to look sceptically at it.
Also, the cause of the warming actually doesn't matter. It is indisputable that there has been global warming over the last 50 years (we have explicit and detailed data). It is fairly clear that, if this accelerates, as we think it probably will, and this Siberian news supports that, over the next 50 years it will be a right pain (to put it mildly) so we should do what we can to slow or stop it. Reducing the CO2 content of the atmosphere, thereby making it more transparent to thermal IR would surely do that. So we should reduce CO2 emmissions.
So they either go to school in the dark in the morning, or they come home in the dark at night.
There is clear evidence that going to school in the dark is far safer than coming home. Everyone is more alert and usually in more of a hurry, so less likely to wander into the road.
I think some of your information is quite seriously out of date:
The gas is not "superheated". Superheating specifically refers to the process of heating something to above the point where it should transition from a lower energy state to a higher energy state.....
True but pedantic. colloquial usage also allows "superheated" simply meaning "very hot", or "unusually hot".
Second, Quasars (Quasi-Stellar Objects) are, as yet, undefined. Nobody knows what drives them, so to call them super-active Black Holes is blatantly absurd.
Ten years ago this was the case. There now seems to be a great deal of consensus that quasars are the early stages of large active galactic nuclei. They are large black holes in the centre of large young galaxies, which are accreting large amounts of material, quickly and emiting very powerful axial jets.
They are also frequently at the very edge of the visible Universe, making it very unlikely anything large enough to collapse into a super-massive Black Hole could have existed - let alone existed long enough to actually undergo gravitational collapse.
Remember that the whole universe was denser then. I believe current simulations do support multi-million solar mass black holes forming quite quickly, at the same time as, or even earlier than, the formation of "regular" galaxies.
Besides which, such objects are not near. This is important. Black Holes evaporate, but they don't evaporate THAT quickly. A Black Hole the size of a typical Quasar would need to be absolutely gigantic and would not have evaporated in this time even if no other matter had fallen in.
Sure, but if nothing is falling into it, it's just sitting there being black. We do see very large (billion solar mass) balck holes at the centres of some relatively nearby galaxies (more accurately, we see stars orbiting them).
The idea that Quasars then formed into galaxies is improbable - the diameter of a Black Hole is a direct function of the mass of the Black Hole (which includes the mass and effective mass of everything it consumes). It is unlikely that there are any galaxies large enough to have a Black Hole of the kind of mass implied by the output of a typical Quasar.
As I say, we see billion solar mass black holes (which are still only a few light years across at most) by their gravity in some nearby galaxies. I'm not sure what the problem is.
If a Quasar were powered by a Black Hole, it would be typically 100,000 times more massive than the Black Hole at the Black Hole at the center of our own galaxy. Given that the presence of a galaxy implies that the Black Hole is still being fed matter and energy, it would be quite impossible for a Black Hole to evaporate to 0.00001% of its original size in the time available.
Don't understand this one. Sure not all galaxies have very large black holes in them, but no one is claiming that all galaxies were once quasars. Only the biggest ones.
Now we get into a real mess. The Milky Way galaxy is ALSO estimated at 12 billion years old, based on the ages of known structures. There are no structures around Quasars. They'd be blown to bits. For the Milky Way to have formed around a "dead" Quasar, the Quasar must have formed considerably earlier. There are a LOT of galaxies out there as old as, or older than, the Milky Way. If all of them formed around Quasars, there would have needed to have been more of these really early starters than existed at the height of the reign of Quasars.
There is another problem. The Milky Way belongs to a local cluster of galaxies. If they ALL had formed around dead Quasars, the Quasars would have fallen into each other from their gravitational pull LONG before there was any possibility of a galaxy forming.
I think the Milky Way is considered too small to have been a quasar. Only the biggest elliptical galaxies will have been quasars.
Nor are Black Holes strictly "hidden". They always emit H
I can't find any numbers from the palynographic record yet, although several sites talk about it as an important future technique. Do you have numbers?
We require more because we desire to decrease our local entropy.
If you check the thermodynamics, just about every technology we have uses at least a million times more energy than is needed for this purpose. Most use much more than that. It's a nice idea, but we are a very long way from hitting that limit.
Fuel re-processing and breeders are independent things.
Re-processing splits a used fuel rod into a small amount of highly radioactive waste (fission products) a larger amount of medium-level waste (things like fuel rod coatings that have been in the heart of the reactor and got pretty active) and a lot of uranium and plutonium that can be used as fuel.
It sound like a great idea, but there are some issues in practice: you produce and separate plutonium, from which it's loads easier to make bombs that from uranium; the process is quite hard to do safely and economically, you need acids and heat and heavy machinery, all remotely operated and rad-hardenened; you make lots more low-level waste from the used materials, plant and equipment.
Breeder reactors are nuclear reactors are "tuned" to turn U238, which is 99+ percent of natural uranium and not directly usable as fuel, into plutonium, which can be used. Together with a reprocessing plant you get a cycle that effectively burns U238, and produces small amounts of high level waste plus lots of medium and low-level waster. Which is nice, but it's not cheap or simple.
Oxygen isotope ratios in the atmosphere are a pretty accurate reflection of average sea surface temperature over moderate periods. Modern satellite data gives an accurate global picture of surface temperatures. There are other methods. Sorry, while there may be localised glitches the data is actually very solid for the last half million years or so, although more detailed closer to the present.
There is a reason that Leif Erikson called what is currently an ice heavy area "Greenland." If you compare the conditions there to what we have today, it is obvious that the global temp was a lot higher not that long ago.
No. It is obvious that the temperature in Greenland was a lot higher not that long ago. Other evidence shows clearly that the global average temperature at the time was colder.
The warming in the year 1000 was relatively local. The global average temperature has not been as high as it is now for, at least, hundreds of thousands of years.
There is loads of data of many different kinds. Many of them (like oxygen isotope rations in polar ice) measure average sea-surface temperature globally.
Your statement about satellite data is just plain wrong. Some cloud temperatures are lowering, but surface temperatres are rising.
The CO2 cycle is roughly 200 GTonnes in (before 1900 or so) a balanced cycle, about half in the sea, half on land. Humanity now releases roughly 9 GT/yr, and the increase in atmospheric CO2 suggests that roughly none of this extra 9 GT is being absorbed anywhere, so the cycles seem to be slow to regulate themselves.
Many of your other statements are simply wrong. See, for instance, the National Academy of Sciences report.
Slashdot Mirror
The Greenland icecap is mainly in the arctic and not floating. If this melted it would raise sea levels quite noticeably.
BTW, that Big Giant fusion reactor they're building in France to go on line in 2016? 2Re:Home Kit016! Don't hold your breath. First its Pork. Second it'll likley be dropped for cost overruns, ir. more Pork. And third, even if they managed to finish it, it is only Big Giant so ordinary folk will still lack the means to there own energy production.
It's not pork! Apart from the obvious fact that in France it would be "porc", the various conuntries and organisations involved in this actually have a pretty good record on big science projcts: CERN has delivered its major accelerators pretty much on time; various big telescope projects are going well, and the predecessor fusiona lab, JET, near Oxford, has worked really well.
It is true that this approach to fusion power will not scale down to anything less than a multi gigawatt power station in the near future, but then the original steam engines wouldn't scale down to anything less than pumping out a Cornish tin mine, and now we can make them almost too small to see.
Seriously, the problem here is that you're required to input a tremendous amount of force to overcome the nuclear bonds that hold the atoms together. As long as you have to put that force into the system, you're not going to get surplus energy out of the system. Simple physics. You can't get more energy out of a reaction than it takes to reverse it. The same reason why hydrogen cars that run on electrolyzed water don't work.
Nice idea, but, I'm afraid it's not like that. There are basically two forces involved here: electomagentic forces and the strong nuclear force. The EM force tends to keep atomic nuclei apart, since they are all positively charged. In "normal" matter they stay far enough apart to allow a bunch of electrons (negatively charged) to get in between and "screen" the charges. Meanwhile the strong nuclear force wants to pull nucleons together to make bigger nuclei. It's really powerful, as its name suggests, but also really short range.
The net effect of the interplay between these two forces (and some other considerations which I will overlook for now) is that the most stable (equivalently lowest energy) state for matter in quantities of less than a few solar masses (beyond which gravity starts to play a role) is as iron-56 nuclei. This is basically as many protons and neutrons as you can squash together and stillhave them all be in range of each others strong nuclear forces. Put in more and the electrostatic repulsion starts to dominate, put in fewer and the strong nuclear force would still pull in more if it could.
So, you can, in principle, get energy from any nuclear reaction that moves things towards iron -- fusion of light elements, or fission of heavy ones.
So, why is the whole universe not made of iron already? Basically the answer is that it got stuck!. When the universe was very hot and very dense indeed, it was a see of protons and neutrons constantly smashing into one another, sticking briefly to make nuclei and then being smashed apart by the next collision. The temperature was so high that thermal motion of the particles overcame the electromagnetic repulsion. When it cooled, it did so so quickly that the protons and neutrons didn't have time to form into iron nuclei, or indeed into many nuclei at all. That's why, before stars got into the game the universe was mostly hydrogen, with a decent amount of helium and only traces of other things.
Now, at the temperatures found in most of the universse, when two light nuclei collide, the electromagnetic forces cause them to bounce before they get close enough for the strong forces to make them stick. In a star, or a hydrogen bomb, or one of the pieces of borated plastic in this laser experiment, temperatures and densities are high enough that sometimes two nuclei smash together had enough to get past the EM repulsion and feel the strong force attracting them, whereupon they "snap" together, releasing a lot of energy.
If you want a very poor analogy, consider a room with a powerully magnetic roof a vibrating floor and a lot of ball-bearing. Initially, all the bearings are on the floor. Even though it would be a lower energy state for them to be stuck to the magnets in the roof. It we turn up the vibration (temperature), initially not much happens, but eventually we reach a temperature where a few bearings get close to the ceiling and are then pulled in hard by the magnets, releasing lots of energy as they "thunk" into the ceiling. This is what we are trying to do in a fusion reaction.
If we take the same analogy and turn up the heat still hotten, we recreate conditions in the original big bang. Now the room is full of flying ball bearings moving so fast that they are as likely as not to knock free any that get stock to the ceiling.
I think you mean "motion of iron" not "motion of ions". The Earth's outer core is (generally believed to be) mainly liquid iron. By a convoluted process involving feedback between magnetic fields and this rotating conductor the outer core seems to convert heat energy (from radioactive decay in the Earth's core) into magentic field and rotation. This process seems to develop chaotically, resulting the flips of the field perceived at the surface.
All 4 basic forces: electromagnatism, gravity, strong nuclear, and weak forces propogate at the speed of light in their reference frame.
I don't think so. EM does, because the carrier particle for the force is massless (the photon). Gravity does, in so far as the question is meaningful (which it may not be because gravity bends space-time, making the questions of how far it went and how long it took both rather hard). For the others, though, the carrier particles (W and Z bosons and gluons) have mass, so I would expect the forces to propagate at less than the speed of light. If not, I'd be interested to hear why?
Steve
You don't need Einstein's equation to connect the units.
1 Joule is defined as follows:
if you have kilogram mass, there is a certain force which will cause it to accelerate at 1 meter/second/second. This is called 1 Newton.
Now if you push something along for 1 meter with a force of 1 Newton, you use 1 Joule of energy.
These definitions pre-dated Einstein. You can do the same thing starting with centimeters and grams and get the erg. "Imperial units" tend not to be defined so nicely and have Earth's gravity mixed up in the definitions in a few places. Anyway Einstein's equation works for any system where the energy unit is defined from the ones for mass, distance and time in this "natural" way.
The choices of unit are not independent. You can choose any two and that forces a choice for the third. For instance, you can measure mass in kilograms and speed in meters/second. Your unit of energy is then twice the kinetic energy of a 1 kilogram mass moving at 1 meter per second (don't worry about the twice). If instead, you like to measure mass in stones and energy in British thermal units your unit of velocity is the velocity of a 1 stone mass which has 2 BTUs of kinetic energy. Ans so on.
They mean a few times 1/(100 000 000) meters (ie a few tens of nanometers.
Really you can!
The main data is ice cores in which yearly layers can be distinguished and counted. By measuring the isotope ratios of hydrogen in samples from each layer, we get an average sea surface temperature for that year.
Here is what I am hearing:
"The world is experiencing global warming!"
"Are you sure?"
"Yup, here is a science that proves that 400,000 years ago, it was cooler."
"Wait, I thought there was an ice age that we are still coming out of."
You haven't been listening very carefully:
1. We have science that gives us a pretty accurate and detailed picture of global average temperatures for the last half million or so years (possibly longer with the latest Antarctic ice core).
2. We likewise have solid data on the atmospheric abundance of CO2 for the same period.
3. At no time in this period has (a) CO2 been as high as it is now or (b) temperature risen as fast as it is rising now. In particular, the slow steady rise in temperatures for the last 10K years since the last ice age is NOTHING compared to the rate of rise we're seeing in the last 50 years.
1 & 2 are by quite direct methods, that depend on few assumptions that can't be easily tested.
Now do you see why we need to pay some attention to this!
Actually I got the figure wrong, it's 1 million square kilometers of permafrost. If you could get away with covering that with a 0.1 mm thick plastic film and somehow collecting up the methane, you'd need a 100 million tons of plastic to make the film. To cover it with greenhouses, which we could treat as 3mm glass sheeting, you'd need about 6 billion tons of glass.
It's just too big for this kind of trick.
Some scientist was quoted as saying that he felt that there isn't enough oil to turn the earrgy sourceth into Venus.
This is true. You have to bake all the carbon out of the carbonate rocks to get Venus, which takes rather longer.
Two points here:
1. The climate is warming MUCH FASTER than we have any record of it doing in the past. Yes it has warmed, yes it has been warmer than it is now, but this speed of change appears to be unprecendented.
2. Regardless of why the climate is changing, the change will inconvenience us considerably, and expensively over the next 50 years or so. There seems little doubt that emitting less CO2 will moderate this to some extent. It may therefore pay to reduce CO2 emissions now, rather than have to relocate cities later.
The area is huge, many thousands of square miles. How are you going to collect that methane?
Heat output from human activity is not really a factor. The thing that matters is the change in the transparency of the atmosphere to thermal IR caused by the extra CO2. This changes the balance between incoming solar light and outgoing thermal IR.
Have you read the reports of the International Panel on Climate Change? or the US National Academy of Sciences analysis of it? "prove" is more or less impossible in any science (rather than in mathematics) but the weight of evidence (some years ago now) was wnought to convince a panel of senior scientists with nothing much to gain or lose (this is the US panel) who were asked to look sceptically at it.
Also, the cause of the warming actually doesn't matter. It is indisputable that there has been global warming over the last 50 years (we have explicit and detailed data). It is fairly clear that, if this accelerates, as we think it probably will, and this Siberian news supports that, over the next 50 years it will be a right pain (to put it mildly) so we should do what we can to slow or stop it. Reducing the CO2 content of the atmosphere, thereby making it more transparent to thermal IR would surely do that. So we should reduce CO2 emmissions.
So they either go to school in the dark in the morning, or they come home in the dark at night.
There is clear evidence that going to school in the dark is far safer than coming home. Everyone is more alert and usually in more of a hurry, so less likely to wander into the road.
I think some of your information is quite seriously out of date:
The gas is not "superheated". Superheating specifically refers to the process of heating something to above the point where it should transition from a lower energy state to a higher energy state.....
True but pedantic. colloquial usage also allows "superheated" simply meaning "very hot", or "unusually hot".
Second, Quasars (Quasi-Stellar Objects) are, as yet, undefined. Nobody knows what drives them, so to call them super-active Black Holes is blatantly absurd.
Ten years ago this was the case. There now seems to be a great deal of consensus that quasars are the early stages of large active galactic nuclei. They are large black holes in the centre of large young galaxies, which are accreting large amounts of material, quickly and emiting very powerful axial jets.
They are also frequently at the very edge of the visible Universe, making it very unlikely anything large enough to collapse into a super-massive Black Hole could have existed - let alone existed long enough to actually undergo gravitational collapse.
Remember that the whole universe was denser then. I believe current simulations do support multi-million solar mass black holes forming quite quickly, at the same time as, or even earlier than, the formation of "regular" galaxies.
Besides which, such objects are not near. This is important. Black Holes evaporate, but they don't evaporate THAT quickly. A Black Hole the size of a typical Quasar would need to be absolutely gigantic and would not have evaporated in this time even if no other matter had fallen in.
Sure, but if nothing is falling into it, it's just sitting there being black. We do see very large (billion solar mass) balck holes at the centres of some relatively nearby galaxies (more accurately, we see stars orbiting them).
The idea that Quasars then formed into galaxies is improbable - the diameter of a Black Hole is a direct function of the mass of the Black Hole (which includes the mass and effective mass of everything it consumes). It is unlikely that there are any galaxies large enough to have a Black Hole of the kind of mass implied by the output of a typical Quasar.
As I say, we see billion solar mass black holes (which are still only a few light years across at most) by their gravity in some nearby galaxies. I'm not sure what the problem is.
If a Quasar were powered by a Black Hole, it would be typically 100,000 times more massive than the Black Hole at the Black Hole at the center of our own galaxy. Given that the presence of a galaxy implies that the Black Hole is still being fed matter and energy, it would be quite impossible for a Black Hole to evaporate to 0.00001% of its original size in the time available.
Don't understand this one. Sure not all galaxies have very large black holes in them, but no one is claiming that all galaxies were once quasars. Only the biggest ones.
Now we get into a real mess. The Milky Way galaxy is ALSO estimated at 12 billion years old, based on the ages of known structures. There are no structures around Quasars. They'd be blown to bits. For the Milky Way to have formed around a "dead" Quasar, the Quasar must have formed considerably earlier. There are a LOT of galaxies out there as old as, or older than, the Milky Way. If all of them formed around Quasars, there would have needed to have been more of these really early starters than existed at the height of the reign of Quasars.
There is another problem. The Milky Way belongs to a local cluster of galaxies. If they ALL had formed around dead Quasars, the Quasars would have fallen into each other from their gravitational pull LONG before there was any possibility of a galaxy forming.
I think the Milky Way is considered too small to have been a quasar. Only the biggest elliptical galaxies will have been quasars.
Nor are Black Holes strictly "hidden". They always emit H
I can't find any numbers from the palynographic record yet, although several sites talk about it as an important future technique. Do you have numbers?
We require more because we desire to decrease our local entropy.
If you check the thermodynamics, just about every technology we have uses at least a million times more energy than is needed for this purpose. Most use much more than that. It's a nice idea, but we are a very long way from hitting that limit.
Fuel re-processing and breeders are independent things.
Re-processing splits a used fuel rod into a small amount of highly radioactive waste (fission products) a larger amount of medium-level waste (things like fuel rod coatings that have been in the heart of the reactor and got pretty active) and a lot of uranium and plutonium that can be used as fuel.
It sound like a great idea, but there are some issues in practice: you produce and separate plutonium, from which it's loads easier to make bombs that from uranium; the process is quite hard to do safely and economically, you need acids and heat and heavy machinery, all remotely operated and rad-hardenened; you make lots more low-level waste from the used materials, plant and equipment.
Breeder reactors are nuclear reactors are "tuned" to turn U238, which is 99+ percent of natural uranium and not directly usable as fuel, into plutonium, which can be used. Together with a reprocessing plant you get a cycle that effectively burns U238, and produces small amounts of high level waste plus lots of medium and low-level waster. Which is nice, but it's not cheap or simple.
Oxygen isotope ratios in the atmosphere are a pretty accurate reflection of average sea surface temperature over moderate periods. Modern satellite data gives an accurate global picture of surface temperatures. There are other methods. Sorry, while there may be localised glitches the data is actually very solid for the last half million years or so, although more detailed closer to the present.
There is a reason that Leif Erikson called what is currently an ice heavy area "Greenland." If you compare the conditions there to what we have today, it is obvious that the global temp was a lot higher not that long ago.
No. It is obvious that the temperature in Greenland was a lot higher not that long ago. Other evidence shows clearly that the global average temperature at the time was colder.
The warming in the year 1000 was relatively local. The global average temperature has not been as high as it is now for, at least, hundreds of thousands of years.
There is loads of data of many different kinds. Many of them (like oxygen isotope rations in polar ice) measure average sea-surface temperature globally.
Your statement about satellite data is just plain wrong. Some cloud temperatures are lowering, but surface temperatres are rising.
The CO2 cycle is roughly 200 GTonnes in (before 1900 or so) a balanced cycle, about half in the sea, half on land. Humanity now releases roughly 9 GT/yr, and the increase in atmospheric CO2 suggests that roughly none of this extra 9 GT is being absorbed anywhere, so the cycles seem to be slow to regulate themselves.
Many of your other statements are simply wrong. See, for instance, the National Academy of Sciences report.
.... of a comment by a Pentagon spokesman after yet another failed anti-missile test: "you have to remember this IS rocket science!"