Your story and mine agree completely. They really did screw this thing up. Sad, really.
My only nit is that if you lose an O-ring the stick will probably tumble out of control, which would suck. But you at least have the abort capability - though they don't explicitly state that it's a full-envelope recovery system, so I could imagine that there is a time when they jettison the tower, but are still thrusting. That is of course one way to solve any mass-problems - move up the tower jettison time. And then you're back to a period of time where you couldn't recover from a failure...
and yet these same engineers just randomly throw an engine onto a rocket while screaming "ye haw!!" and hope that it works??
Three problems with your comment: 1) they are most definitely not the same people. JPL is very different from MSFC, and I can tell you from personal experience that most MSFC guys have their heads pretty far up their asses. 2) Even those vaunted JPL engineers have been known to fsck up. Especially lately. 3) The "Orion Exploration archtecture" was not designed from the ground up. It was a bunch of political operatives (that is what Griffin is, don't fool yourself otherwise) looked at what the various NASA centers were already doing and said "how can we piece this crap together so it'll look like a rocket?" and decided that was what they would fly. Whe else would they ignore the existing Delta 4H and Atlas boosters and decide to design yet another launcher? This was in no way an engineering decision. So don't expect the engineering to make any sense whatsoever.
No, the "stick" as the Ares 1 rocket is affectionally known is a piece of sh*t and you will probably never see it fly.
An acqaintance of mine who used to be a launch officer for the Shuttle summed it up this way: "They took all the pieces that had demonstrated fatal failures, kept them, and discarded the rest."
I'm a fundamentalist, and I lean toward a literal understanding of Genesis and a 6000-year earth (although I'm not adamant about it and easily accept that I might be misunderstanding things), and even I accept that the "Big Bang" is probably a pretty good model for what happened. (I just think the timescale may be way off
Which timescale? The astronomers', or the Bibles? I think this new data is actually a beautiful confirmation of the Big Bang. The theory makes some very specifc predictions about what one should see when using a partuclar kind of microwave receiver - predictions that have now been confirmed.
At this point, the idea of the Big Bang is as solidly supported by real-world evidence as almost any other theory - including gravity, relativity, QED, or even the theory of evolution. That theory makes very specific claims about the age of the Universe. Pretty cool, eh?
What supporting evidence does the Genesis story have? What predictions does it make - and can they be falsified?
I've been trying to understand why the Prez is insisting on bypassing the FISA court, and I can only come up with two reasons, both are scary:
1) He wants to set the precedent that "in times of War" (i.e. whenever he feels like it), the President can violate law, morality and the Constitution at will. Or,
2) They really are running a program that monitors so many people that getting warrants really is unfeasible. In other words, a fishing expedition on thousands (or millions?) of people... Think about it - the NSA is expert at doing traffic analysis on large data sets. I'd be kinda suprised if they weren't doing it.
The fun thought that occurs to me if they are indeed doing traffic analysis is this - just how many phone number links away from a known or suspected terrorist are you? It's kinda like 6 degrees of Kevin Bacon, but with Osama instead. You might not have had a phone conversation with someone in Pakistan, but if you ordered a pizza from that place down the street owned by Ahmed...
I'll be impressed when I meet a cat that appreciates quantum physics
Why should cats appreciate Quantum? All it ever does for them is stick them in a box and kill them. No tuna to be found anywhere in Cohen-Tannouji, so why should cats appreciate it?
I think I disagree with the claim. Physics today is pretty stagnant. The truth is that the very best minds aren't going into physics - they are getting rich on Wall Street. At least, that's what happened to the 3 smartest Phys majors in my class (the ones the rest of us went to for help when we got stuck on Jackson-level problems). Since then a couple of postdocs I know have been poached as well.
The truth is that fields do lose their momentum. With the cancellation of the SSC and the total dominance of the Standard model, I think physics is there. Especially given that the biggest new things in Physics are the anthropic principle and a theory that isn't even wrong...
- Methane is about 23 times more powerful a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide.
That is on a molecule-by-molecule basis. But CO2 is hundreds to millions of times more common than methane or CFC's, and so is producing a more significant warming effect.
The last two posts have been so wrong and misleading as to indicate one of two possibilities: either the authors are deliberately trying to confuse the issues, or they are just ignorant.
Specifically, saying "3 out of 5 greenhouse gases which account for 97% of the warming" are flat is ignoring the fact that 90 out of those 97% comes from CO2, which is in fact increasing rapidly. So you are giving the misleading impression that the problem isn't getting worse, when in fact it is....
Tropical storms could not be completely detected in 1933. Only ones that reached land in an area that shared information with the United States.
Because we all know they didn't have ships, or barometers, or radio in 1933, eh?
In fact, coverage in the 30's was quite good, because ships frequently reported weather conditions, and there were a lot of ships around.
Exactly what happens when people are allowed to spend other people's money with essentially zero accountability. Personally I'd like to see NASA eliminated as a public entity - there just isn't enough ROI.
I would have to second the motion that you are talking out of your ass.
As a working planetary scientist my field of research simply wouldn't exist without NASA. You can argue about the ROI for such things as the Mars Rovers, the Hubble Space Telescope, the Voyager missions etc. etc. But one thing is absolutely certain: without government and NASA there would be no such missions of exploration. For an example of what the best you could ever hope for from privcate enterprises, look up the British "Beagle 2" fiasco.
On a related note, without NACA - the predecessor to NASA - the Allies might well have lost WW2. The research they did on such things as laminar flow airfoils allowed the development of aircraft capable of defeating the Luftwaffe (the P-51 Mustang comes to mind). That research wasn't being done in the private sector, even when there was a lot of private money going into things like aircraft racing prizes (the equivalent to the X-prize).
Finally, where do you get the idiotic notion that there is no oversight or accountability? Have you ever been involved in a mission? Do you have any idea how many different mission reviews you have to go through? Every damned dime is scrutinized by panels of scientists, engineers and accountants. Not to mention congressional oversight.
The engine compartments are filled with pure N2 to prevent the possibility of fires.
500 ppm of O2 is quite small, but it shouldn't be there at all - clearly something is not right...
By the way, the inert-gas fill of the engine spaces has caused problems - I think a couple ground crew were killed some years back when they entered the spaces before they had been properly vented.
Soviet-style industrial planning didn't work particularly well for them.
That depends on what you look at, actually. The USSR went from a largely agrarian economy in 1917 to one of the most heavily industrialized in 1980. I saw an interesting graph of Soviet oil production vs time, compared to a similar US output; it showed that the Soviets grew much more rapidly. Ditto for steel production, and aircraft etc etc.
My point is that central planning actually did allow for tremendous leaps in industrial capacity in very short periods of time. Of course, the human cost was staggering, and it was probably not efficiently done. And then we get to the collapse of the USSR, which was certainly in part due to economic inefficiencies inherent in planned economies (active economic warfare by the West may also have played a part, eh?)
It is important to remeber that central direction can sometimes be a good way to solve massive societal challenges. There are other examples of this - including France and nuclear energy, or Europe and rail transportation, or FDR and rural electrification. The most extreme example of the value of centrally controlled reaction to challenges is of course war. You don't fight a war by putting a tax on dead civilians or a bounty on dead enemies and then let the market find the best solution (it might be interesting to try it.)
China represents a very interesting hybrid approach - the central planners deliberately decided to let the free market do certain things, and the results have been staggering. But don't for a moment confuse centrally planned capitalism with the free market.
With regards to the specific issue of finding a sustainable energy source, it is pretty clear to me that some form of active government intervention is necessary, if for no other reason than that the initial investment in R&D is larger than what the private sector can provide. The prooof is obvious - if it had been possible it would have been done by now.;) That last is not as glib as it sounds: a sustainable energy solution will have to be better (cheaper, less polluting) than fossil fuels in order to be adopted at all. If it is better, then there is no reason it couldn't be adopted now. In which case the question is: then why hasn't some entrepreneur already found it? On the other hand, it it isn't cheaper then it won't be adopted - meaning that we'll continue burning fossil fuesl until we've damaged the climate. In which case the only way to avoid that is through government intervention.
Last time I checked the Dems were in the minority in the House. Which means that the Republicans are the ones who set the rules - and if they had wanted it to pass badly enough, they could have easly arranged for it to only need a simple majority. They certainly aren't above changing rules to suit their needs in the Senate (e.g. the nuclear option). So this ain't the Dems fault.
That aside, it's not clear to me that the rules are such a bad thing. They basically say that if a political party spends campaign money on the Web then it has to be reported - just as the case if said party spends money on TV ads. This is perfectly reasonable. Despite what some party-funded astroturfers would have you believe, this does NOT restrict J. Random Blogger from posting whatever he wants. It just says that if he gets money from the RNC, the RNC has to report it.
people in this discussion seem to be concentrating on creationism, intelligent design and the damage that stuff is doing to science. That's certainly true - but there is another perhaps more insidious threat to science: the well-funded corporate campaigns intended to discredit particular areas of science that threaten profits. The most obvious examples are tobacco companies attacking medical evidence of the dangers of smoking, and oil companies attacking those who study global warming. These campaigns have also damaged science immensely, and slowed down progress in vital areas of research and public policy in a way that I think is downright criminal...
he was asked by one of his students what would have happened if the Soviet premier would have ordered a launch of these ICBMs.
He replied "Nothing, maybe a few explosions within the silos, but not much more."
That's pretty interestinng, but I really have to wonder. After all, the Soyuz rockets have the highest reliability of any launch vehicle anywhere (and the highest number of launches). Though I agree, essentially all of the recent ex-military launches (including a solar sail a while back) have been failures.
The only non-generic answer that comes to my mind there is along the lines of "WTF of a retarded question is that? Were you born that stupid, or worked hard to get there?"
And they would conclude that you were a version of Aks Jeeves
A base pair has four combinations. E.g., A=T != T=A
It's a double helix, but the two strands contain the same information. That's why they count the base pairs, not the bases. It's basically like using RAID 1.
There are about 3 billion coding letters (6 billion bases, paired as you say, two by two) in the human genome. There are four letters (ATCG). Four combinations can be stored using two bits; hence 6 billion bits of data. What am I missing?
200 years ago, most of the USA was filled with people who could not read or write.
Actually, that is incorrect. The 13 colonies, and in particular the Northern ones, had very high litteracy rates. Massachusetts had universal schooling, even for girls.
Yet, they formed a country with great prosperity.
Again, incorrect. The U.S. was quite poor; it wasn't even considered a nation of importance until the time of Teddy Roosevelt, i.e. the 20th Century. Before then Americans were considered to basically just be country bumpkins by people in the powerful countries of the day (UK, France, Germany).
It didn't become a superpower until after the second world war. And that was to a large extent because of the efforts of imported, secular, German and Eastern European scientists.
And they believed in GOD. They thanked him for what they had.
I infer that you think that we should "go back" to a society where religion dominates all political thinking and public life. I would suggest that you look at the Middle Ages, or even the Dark Ages for an example of what life in a theocracy is like...
For 1500 years they believed in God to the point of letting the church dominate all life - and lived in total squalor.
The recent spike in prices is due to short term supply problems. [...] Those of you who are certain that we're running out of oil forget as well. In 1970, it was common knowledge that we'd be out of oil by 1985.
Except that if you look at a fixed area of production, e.g. the continental U.S., then you'll see that the predictions came true. Domestic US oil production did peak in the 1970's and has been going downhill ever since. The only mitigating factor for oil has been the discovery of oil in the North Sea, in Alaska, and to some extent in Africa.
People who think global oil production is at or near peak today use the same methodology that was used to predict the US peak, and they find that their methods tell us that Saudi oil fields have pretty much peaked. Some pretty basic geology, coupled with the fact that basically the entire surface of the Earth has been scoured for oil reserves, implies that when Saudi fields peak, so does world oil production.
Your argument about increased efficiency applies to raw materials - not energy. It's true that we could become more energy efficient over time, but not to the same extent as you can with raw materials. After all, you can recycle raw materials, and this is frequently done with e.g. steel and other more exotic metals (look up Rhodium).
On the other hand, no-one can reasonably argue that there is an infinte oil supply, and thermodynamics tells us you can't recycle energy.
Physics tells us it requires a certain amount of energy to do things like transport mass, or rearrange molecular bonds, and there are definite limits to what "efficiency" gains you can make.
That's always the problem I find when discussing this sort of thing with econ-majors; they seem to believe too much in their idealized models. At some point certain things become unavailable at any price, despite what the nice supply and demand curves imply.
I strongly believe nature will take care of itself. I also believe mankind is part of nature as opposed to many others who believe mankind is some kind of new external force that challenges nature. In the interest of self preservation, nature will take care of itself.[..] There is no need to worry or get upset about it. Everything will be all right in the end.
There is no guarantee that said end will include human civilization. Or life at all, for that matter. I don't know how stupid, stoned or just depressed you have to be to have your attitude, but I, for one, want my children to live in a better world than the one we have now.
The result of attitudes like yours are on clear public display in Louisiana right as we speak.
Is the "hole" there, sure, I'll take their word for it. If I really cared I could establish if that fact was true or not. Everything after that fact is opinion and probably biased. Some people may believe it's a problem and will change the earth for the worse forever. Other people may believe it's part of the natural evolution of the earth which may lead to a new great era. Others may believe it's part of Intelligent Design so it must be implicitly good. Who is right? Probably none of the above. My opinion is that the effects will be both bad and good. It's part of life, learn to deal with change.
I hate to have to do this, but your opinion is idiotic. Here is why: it is simply an undisputed fact that without the ozone layer protecting the surface of the Earth from ultra-violet radiation, life cannot survive on the surface. Period. DNA absorbs UV-photons and is dissociated by them.
The ozone hole is - again, undisputably - due the the presence of CFC's in the upper atmosphere. Humans have the very real ability to make the surface of the Earth devoid of life as we know it. Wacky, huh? Unlike CO2, CFC's are not emitted naturally, are not part of any known natural process. They have not existed in the atmosphere before, and their levels do not wax and wane due to natural cycles.
You may have been confusing this issue with global warming, where there is currently a great deal of debate about how bad it might be etc etc.
The ozone hole is a very separate issue, and if the Montreal protocol hadn't been implemented, a very much more life-threatening one. Compared to climnate change, ozone depletion is a dead-simple no-brainer. That's why the Montreal protocol went through. And make no mistake, that was avery good thing.
Your attitude of "who is right? I don't care - eveyone is biased" is deeply disturbing. It implies that you have simply given up on finding out if there is an objective truth, and that you can't be bothered enough to educate yourself about issues that are of truly life-and-death importance. It's pretty sad, actually.
Natural selection has had its day, but we've discovered it's not the primary driving force of evolution, only someone naive would think that, or was educated a long time ago.
Huh? What is then the driver of evolution? Gerbils?
I guess getting a PhD in 2003 counts as a long time ago...
Imagine if I popped these pills before studying for organic chemistry in college. Now I'd be having flashbacks of acid/base interactions and other useless trivia while I try to go about my daily job.
As opposed to just having flashbacks of acid-based interactions in college, eh?
Besides, some of us wish we could remember our Lewis acid chemistry...
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They hate that....
Your story and mine agree completely. They really did screw this thing up. Sad, really. My only nit is that if you lose an O-ring the stick will probably tumble out of control, which would suck. But you at least have the abort capability - though they don't explicitly state that it's a full-envelope recovery system, so I could imagine that there is a time when they jettison the tower, but are still thrusting. That is of course one way to solve any mass-problems - move up the tower jettison time. And then you're back to a period of time where you couldn't recover from a failure...
Three problems with your comment: 1) they are most definitely not the same people. JPL is very different from MSFC, and I can tell you from personal experience that most MSFC guys have their heads pretty far up their asses. 2) Even those vaunted JPL engineers have been known to fsck up. Especially lately. 3) The "Orion Exploration archtecture" was not designed from the ground up. It was a bunch of political operatives (that is what Griffin is, don't fool yourself otherwise) looked at what the various NASA centers were already doing and said "how can we piece this crap together so it'll look like a rocket?" and decided that was what they would fly. Whe else would they ignore the existing Delta 4H and Atlas boosters and decide to design yet another launcher? This was in no way an engineering decision. So don't expect the engineering to make any sense whatsoever.
No, the "stick" as the Ares 1 rocket is affectionally known is a piece of sh*t and you will probably never see it fly.
An acqaintance of mine who used to be a launch officer for the Shuttle summed it up this way: "They took all the pieces that had demonstrated fatal failures, kept them, and discarded the rest."
Which timescale? The astronomers', or the Bibles? I think this new data is actually a beautiful confirmation of the Big Bang. The theory makes some very specifc predictions about what one should see when using a partuclar kind of microwave receiver - predictions that have now been confirmed. At this point, the idea of the Big Bang is as solidly supported by real-world evidence as almost any other theory - including gravity, relativity, QED, or even the theory of evolution. That theory makes very specific claims about the age of the Universe. Pretty cool, eh? What supporting evidence does the Genesis story have? What predictions does it make - and can they be falsified?
1) He wants to set the precedent that "in times of War" (i.e. whenever he feels like it), the President can violate law, morality and the Constitution at will. Or,
2) They really are running a program that monitors so many people that getting warrants really is unfeasible. In other words, a fishing expedition on thousands (or millions?) of people... Think about it - the NSA is expert at doing traffic analysis on large data sets. I'd be kinda suprised if they weren't doing it.
The fun thought that occurs to me if they are indeed doing traffic analysis is this - just how many phone number links away from a known or suspected terrorist are you? It's kinda like 6 degrees of Kevin Bacon, but with Osama instead. You might not have had a phone conversation with someone in Pakistan, but if you ordered a pizza from that place down the street owned by Ahmed...
It's probably a bit of both.
Why should cats appreciate Quantum? All it ever does for them is stick them in a box and kill them. No tuna to be found anywhere in Cohen-Tannouji, so why should cats appreciate it?
The truth is that fields do lose their momentum. With the cancellation of the SSC and the total dominance of the Standard model, I think physics is there. Especially given that the biggest new things in Physics are the anthropic principle and a theory that isn't even wrong...
Not according to my latest Greenpeace flyers.
- Methane is about 23 times more powerful a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide.
That is on a molecule-by-molecule basis. But CO2 is hundreds to millions of times more common than methane or CFC's, and so is producing a more significant warming effect.
The last two posts have been so wrong and misleading as to indicate one of two possibilities: either the authors are deliberately trying to confuse the issues, or they are just ignorant.
Specifically, saying "3 out of 5 greenhouse gases which account for 97% of the warming" are flat is ignoring the fact that 90 out of those 97% comes from CO2, which is in fact increasing rapidly. So you are giving the misleading impression that the problem isn't getting worse, when in fact it is....
Because we all know they didn't have ships, or barometers, or radio in 1933, eh? In fact, coverage in the 30's was quite good, because ships frequently reported weather conditions, and there were a lot of ships around.
I would have to second the motion that you are talking out of your ass.
As a working planetary scientist my field of research simply wouldn't exist without NASA. You can argue about the ROI for such things as the Mars Rovers, the Hubble Space Telescope, the Voyager missions etc. etc. But one thing is absolutely certain: without government and NASA there would be no such missions of exploration. For an example of what the best you could ever hope for from privcate enterprises, look up the British "Beagle 2" fiasco.
On a related note, without NACA - the predecessor to NASA - the Allies might well have lost WW2. The research they did on such things as laminar flow airfoils allowed the development of aircraft capable of defeating the Luftwaffe (the P-51 Mustang comes to mind). That research wasn't being done in the private sector, even when there was a lot of private money going into things like aircraft racing prizes (the equivalent to the X-prize).
Finally, where do you get the idiotic notion that there is no oversight or accountability? Have you ever been involved in a mission? Do you have any idea how many different mission reviews you have to go through? Every damned dime is scrutinized by panels of scientists, engineers and accountants. Not to mention congressional oversight.
By the way, the inert-gas fill of the engine spaces has caused problems - I think a couple ground crew were killed some years back when they entered the spaces before they had been properly vented.
That depends on what you look at, actually. The USSR went from a largely agrarian economy in 1917 to one of the most heavily industrialized in 1980. I saw an interesting graph of Soviet oil production vs time, compared to a similar US output; it showed that the Soviets grew much more rapidly. Ditto for steel production, and aircraft etc etc.
My point is that central planning actually did allow for tremendous leaps in industrial capacity in very short periods of time. Of course, the human cost was staggering, and it was probably not efficiently done. And then we get to the collapse of the USSR, which was certainly in part due to economic inefficiencies inherent in planned economies (active economic warfare by the West may also have played a part, eh?)
It is important to remeber that central direction can sometimes be a good way to solve massive societal challenges. There are other examples of this - including France and nuclear energy, or Europe and rail transportation, or FDR and rural electrification. The most extreme example of the value of centrally controlled reaction to challenges is of course war. You don't fight a war by putting a tax on dead civilians or a bounty on dead enemies and then let the market find the best solution (it might be interesting to try it.)
China represents a very interesting hybrid approach - the central planners deliberately decided to let the free market do certain things, and the results have been staggering. But don't for a moment confuse centrally planned capitalism with the free market.
With regards to the specific issue of finding a sustainable energy source, it is pretty clear to me that some form of active government intervention is necessary, if for no other reason than that the initial investment in R&D is larger than what the private sector can provide. The prooof is obvious - if it had been possible it would have been done by now. ;) That last is not as glib as it sounds: a sustainable energy solution will have to be better (cheaper, less polluting) than fossil fuels in order to be adopted at all. If it is better, then there is no reason it couldn't be adopted now. In which case the question is: then why hasn't some entrepreneur already found it? On the other hand, it it isn't cheaper then it won't be adopted - meaning that we'll continue burning fossil fuesl until we've damaged the climate. In which case the only way to avoid that is through government intervention.
Actually, hot fusion is about 8 light minutes away. Or 40 of the last minutes of our lives.
That aside, it's not clear to me that the rules are such a bad thing. They basically say that if a political party spends campaign money on the Web then it has to be reported - just as the case if said party spends money on TV ads. This is perfectly reasonable. Despite what some party-funded astroturfers would have you believe, this does NOT restrict J. Random Blogger from posting whatever he wants. It just says that if he gets money from the RNC, the RNC has to report it.
people in this discussion seem to be concentrating on creationism, intelligent design and the damage that stuff is doing to science. That's certainly true - but there is another perhaps more insidious threat to science: the well-funded corporate campaigns intended to discredit particular areas of science that threaten profits. The most obvious examples are tobacco companies attacking medical evidence of the dangers of smoking, and oil companies attacking those who study global warming. These campaigns have also damaged science immensely, and slowed down progress in vital areas of research and public policy in a way that I think is downright criminal...
That's pretty interestinng, but I really have to wonder. After all, the Soyuz rockets have the highest reliability of any launch vehicle anywhere (and the highest number of launches). Though I agree, essentially all of the recent ex-military launches (including a solar sail a while back) have been failures.
The climber is trivial, compared to the cable. Wake me up when they have a cable that can hold 100 GPa and is longer than a millimeter.
And they would conclude that you were a version of Aks Jeeves
There are about 3 billion coding letters (6 billion bases, paired as you say, two by two) in the human genome. There are four letters (ATCG). Four combinations can be stored using two bits; hence 6 billion bits of data. What am I missing?
Actually, that is incorrect. The 13 colonies, and in particular the Northern ones, had very high litteracy rates. Massachusetts had universal schooling, even for girls.
Yet, they formed a country with great prosperity.
Again, incorrect. The U.S. was quite poor; it wasn't even considered a nation of importance until the time of Teddy Roosevelt, i.e. the 20th Century. Before then Americans were considered to basically just be country bumpkins by people in the powerful countries of the day (UK, France, Germany). It didn't become a superpower until after the second world war. And that was to a large extent because of the efforts of imported, secular, German and Eastern European scientists.
And they believed in GOD. They thanked him for what they had.
I infer that you think that we should "go back" to a society where religion dominates all political thinking and public life. I would suggest that you look at the Middle Ages, or even the Dark Ages for an example of what life in a theocracy is like... For 1500 years they believed in God to the point of letting the church dominate all life - and lived in total squalor.
Except that if you look at a fixed area of production, e.g. the continental U.S., then you'll see that the predictions came true. Domestic US oil production did peak in the 1970's and has been going downhill ever since. The only mitigating factor for oil has been the discovery of oil in the North Sea, in Alaska, and to some extent in Africa.
People who think global oil production is at or near peak today use the same methodology that was used to predict the US peak, and they find that their methods tell us that Saudi oil fields have pretty much peaked. Some pretty basic geology, coupled with the fact that basically the entire surface of the Earth has been scoured for oil reserves, implies that when Saudi fields peak, so does world oil production.
Your argument about increased efficiency applies to raw materials - not energy. It's true that we could become more energy efficient over time, but not to the same extent as you can with raw materials. After all, you can recycle raw materials, and this is frequently done with e.g. steel and other more exotic metals (look up Rhodium).
On the other hand, no-one can reasonably argue that there is an infinte oil supply, and thermodynamics tells us you can't recycle energy. Physics tells us it requires a certain amount of energy to do things like transport mass, or rearrange molecular bonds, and there are definite limits to what "efficiency" gains you can make.
That's always the problem I find when discussing this sort of thing with econ-majors; they seem to believe too much in their idealized models. At some point certain things become unavailable at any price, despite what the nice supply and demand curves imply.
There is no guarantee that said end will include human civilization. Or life at all, for that matter. I don't know how stupid, stoned or just depressed you have to be to have your attitude, but I, for one, want my children to live in a better world than the one we have now.
The result of attitudes like yours are on clear public display in Louisiana right as we speak.
I hate to have to do this, but your opinion is idiotic. Here is why: it is simply an undisputed fact that without the ozone layer protecting the surface of the Earth from ultra-violet radiation, life cannot survive on the surface. Period. DNA absorbs UV-photons and is dissociated by them.
The ozone hole is - again, undisputably - due the the presence of CFC's in the upper atmosphere. Humans have the very real ability to make the surface of the Earth devoid of life as we know it. Wacky, huh? Unlike CO2, CFC's are not emitted naturally, are not part of any known natural process. They have not existed in the atmosphere before, and their levels do not wax and wane due to natural cycles.
You may have been confusing this issue with global warming, where there is currently a great deal of debate about how bad it might be etc etc. The ozone hole is a very separate issue, and if the Montreal protocol hadn't been implemented, a very much more life-threatening one. Compared to climnate change, ozone depletion is a dead-simple no-brainer. That's why the Montreal protocol went through. And make no mistake, that was avery good thing.
Your attitude of "who is right? I don't care - eveyone is biased" is deeply disturbing. It implies that you have simply given up on finding out if there is an objective truth, and that you can't be bothered enough to educate yourself about issues that are of truly life-and-death importance. It's pretty sad, actually.
Huh? What is then the driver of evolution? Gerbils? I guess getting a PhD in 2003 counts as a long time ago...
As opposed to just having flashbacks of acid-based interactions in college, eh?
Besides, some of us wish we could remember our Lewis acid chemistry...