Not really, there's more to it than the snow and ice reflecting sunlight. It also prevents the rock underneath from weathering/eroding, which will prevent removal of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere (via binding with freshly exposed rock). Volcanoes are still spewing out CO2, and the CO2 level builds up until temperatures rise, even with a low albedo. Eventually, CO2 levels are high enough that all the ice melts, weather goes crazy, erosion starts going gangbusters, and CO2 levels start falling (this is the part that there's geological evidence for).
The key part of "Snowball Earth" is how the continental masses are distributed. If it's all at or around the equator, growing ice caps are covering ocean, reducing the earth's albedo while not interfering with processes removing CO2 from the atmosphere up until late in the game, when a lot of the surface is covered with ice and the albedo is pretty low. That was the situation with snowball earth. Nowadays, there's plenty of land in polar regions (Canada/Siberia) where growing ice caps will reduce exposed land surface and will lower the amount of CO2 removed from the atmosphere immediately (well, immediately on geological time scales).
Most of what I've read about snowball earth was fairly recent (Scientific American). When did you take your class?
Actually, it's the number of people who would be willing to pay a high enough price for Webvan to make money and stay in business. What you were paying wasn't even remotely covering their costs. Which may be why they went belly up.
I think the story you're thinking of is about Joe Kennedy (JFK's dad), who made a fortune in bootlegging during Prohibition and then went legit in the 1920's and made more money in the stock market.
Supposedly, he was walking to his offices on Wall Street one morning and he stopped to get his shoes shined. The shoe shine boy started talking about the stock market, what his picks were. After his shoes were shined, Mr. Kennedy paid up, gave a good tip, went into work, and sold every stock he had. Got out right before the Crash.
When the shoe shine boys start getting into the market, it's time to get out. Late '90s, 2000 I was watching the news and they had a story about this body shop where the workers were day trading between jobs. That's when I started getting out:)
This is probably what you meant, but you can stop paying mortgage insurance once you have 20% equity; you don't need 80%. And if property values go down, the bank can require you to re-appraise the house and if it's gone down enough you'll have to start paying the insurance again.
Feel free to calculate how much energy you need to power a mass driver that could cause problems for a city. Not happening any time soon. You may be able to make something that could take out a tank (for 100x the cost of a laser guided bomb from an F-18).
They're pretty much talking about using mass drivers to take out satellites.
Don't know what the big deal is. You could load up a Scud with a ton of sand, launch it straight up into the path of a satellite, and blow it up so the sand disperses evenly. Satellite flies through a cubic mile of dispersed sand at five miles a second; scratch one satellite. The sand would all fall back to earth, leaving no evidence. Taking out satellites in geosync would be much harder.
The EU will take humanity into the next age? Hardly. Non-muslim Europeans aren't having enough kids; in thirty or forty years non-muslim Europeans will be scrambling to emigrate to the US in order to avoid living under sharia law.
You're being pedantic. They died on a space mission. I guess you can say the atmosphere extends up a thousand miles (after all, isn't it slowing down the ISS?) and we don't ever have to worry about having any deaths "in space".
Jettison the SRBs? They can't be throttled down and will accelerate faster than the rest of the vehicle. Don't really want to be *behind* them while they're running. Especially if you're still attached to a big tank of high explosive. They may have a lot of abort *options*, but they're not survivable while the SRBs are running.
What large payloads do they *need* to bring back? Build a space station, and all the stuff you take up, just leave it up. Don't bring back that gamma ray observatory. Don't bring back Spacehabs. Just leave them up. Just bring back people and things that need to be analyzed on the ground, like moon rocks and LDEF panels. Those can fit in a capsule. I can think of a lot of reasons to bring large payloads back from orbit, but only if I was willing to waste money like politians do.
BTW, I was a naysayer about the shuttle *way* before it was popular. And as far as facts are concerned, when you compare the safety records of big dumb boosters (U.S. and Russian) with the shuttle, throwaway rockets come out ahead. When you factor in cost, they come out waaaaay ahead. At least the Russians were smart enough to not use SRBs on *their* shuttle, and they were also smart enough to only fly it once.
Which was (probably) a reference to John Glenn humming the same hymn when he was re-entering the Earth's atmosphere in "The Right Stuff". Especially since he also had a problem with his heat shield (the retro rocket pack was still attached).
Yeah, how does an object "know" which way the center of the earth is? It's got to be *told* which way to fall, and this obviously requires intelligence.
If you do not believe in god, and one exists, you go to hell.
If you do not believe in god, and one does not exist, you go nowhere.
If you do believe in god, and one exists, you go to heaven.
If you do believe in god, and one does not exist, you go nowhere.
So it's in your best interest to believe in god.
Kind of neat, though, how he preloaded the argument with the assumption that god will send you to heaven if you believe in him and send you to hell if you don't.
Personally, I believe in a god that sends you to hell if you believe in him and sends you to heaven if you don't. So to win mfrank's wager, you need to be agnostic.
If you think entropy prevents evolution, you've either never taken thermodynamics or you had a lousy teacher. And if you don't think evolution happens, go hang out with someone with antibiotic-resistant tuberculosis.
They were using guided evolution to make microbes that chowed down on oil spills back in the '70s.
Human fossils in rock 200 million years old would be a good start. Or a bird with insect (compound) eyes. If Satan can put dinosaur fossils in Mesozoic rock, God can put bunny fossils in Pre-Cambrian rock. You ever wonder why scientists got so excited about the duck-billed platypus?
So, what do you mean "information must originate from intelligence"? I have a hard enough time understanding what the hell you're saying, let alone knowing how it's falsifiable. Bacteria can become antibiotic resistant without intelligent intervention; is that "information"?
Why don't they use hybrids? Solid fuel with a tank of liquid oxygen sitting on top of it. Like an SRB, but you can shut off the oxidizer flow and shut it down. It's a lot easier to pump LOX than liquid hydrogen, too, isn't it?
Well, maybe laser or microwave powered vehicles are the equivalent to propellor driven ships. Use directed energy to heat the reaction mass. Chemical fuels have gone about as far as they're going to go.
Problem is, that kind of technology isn't suitable for launching hundreds of ICBMs simultaneously, so there's no *real* motive to develop it. It could reduce launch cost, but reducing launch cost has never been a motive for NASA.
The Apollo I fire wasn't during a mission. They were doing testing on the pad; no launch involved. If there hadn't been a fire, they would have finished for the day and gone out for dinner and drinks.
Granted it was still deaths related to Apollo hardware, but c'mon, they weren't even gotten to the point where they were launching the hardware.
How many Americans died in space in Apollo? Zero scaled by whatever is still zero.
Apollo had abort modes all the way from ignition to orbit. For the shuttle, as long as the SRBs are running you're pretty much screwed if something goes wrong. Apollo was safer for re-entry; its heat shield was protected up until a few minutes before re-entry.
Yeah, yeah, the shuttle can bring back 20 tons from orbit. Big whoop. Why would you spend a billion dollars to put something in orbit and then bring it back?
Re:We're not going to leave the planet just yet...
on
NASA's Shuttle Plans
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· Score: 1
And which launch system uses hydrogen and oxygen exclusively? The SRBs on the shuttle put out some crap, and the unmanned version of the proposed vehicle has SRBs on it.
Yeah, it was pretty cool. I actaully got an invitation to a test launch. I belonged to "Ad Astra" at the time and had given money to SpaceCause, and they gave out invitations to random people. I still kick myself for not going.
The moon's orbit is stable; but it is slowly getting farther away because of tidal drag. Tidal drag is slowing the earth's rotation (that's why the moon keeps the same face towards the earth; it's smaller so tidal drag worked faster, slowing its rotation until it stopped rotating relative to the earth). Conservation of angular momentum causes the moon's orbit to expand.
Eventually, the moon will be far enough that it will drift away. But not because the orbit is unstable.
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Not really, there's more to it than the snow and ice reflecting sunlight. It also prevents the rock underneath from weathering/eroding, which will prevent removal of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere (via binding with freshly exposed rock). Volcanoes are still spewing out CO2, and the CO2 level builds up until temperatures rise, even with a low albedo. Eventually, CO2 levels are high enough that all the ice melts, weather goes crazy, erosion starts going gangbusters, and CO2 levels start falling (this is the part that there's geological evidence for).
The key part of "Snowball Earth" is how the continental masses are distributed. If it's all at or around the equator, growing ice caps are covering ocean, reducing the earth's albedo while not interfering with processes removing CO2 from the atmosphere up until late in the game, when a lot of the surface is covered with ice and the albedo is pretty low. That was the situation with snowball earth. Nowadays, there's plenty of land in polar regions (Canada/Siberia) where growing ice caps will reduce exposed land surface and will lower the amount of CO2 removed from the atmosphere immediately (well, immediately on geological time scales).
Most of what I've read about snowball earth was fairly recent (Scientific American). When did you take your class?
Actually, it's the number of people who would be willing to pay a high enough price for Webvan to make money and stay in business. What you were paying wasn't even remotely covering their costs. Which may be why they went belly up.
I think the story you're thinking of is about Joe Kennedy (JFK's dad), who made a fortune in bootlegging during Prohibition and then went legit in the 1920's and made more money in the stock market.
:)
Supposedly, he was walking to his offices on Wall Street one morning and he stopped to get his shoes shined. The shoe shine boy started talking about the stock market, what his picks were. After his shoes were shined, Mr. Kennedy paid up, gave a good tip, went into work, and sold every stock he had. Got out right before the Crash.
When the shoe shine boys start getting into the market, it's time to get out. Late '90s, 2000 I was watching the news and they had a story about this body shop where the workers were day trading between jobs. That's when I started getting out
This is probably what you meant, but you can stop paying mortgage insurance once you have 20% equity; you don't need 80%. And if property values go down, the bank can require you to re-appraise the house and if it's gone down enough you'll have to start paying the insurance again.
Why in the world would a landlord do that? A more likely explanation is that his parents own the house. Or a sugar daddy :)
Feel free to calculate how much energy you need to power a mass driver that could cause problems for a city. Not happening any time soon. You may be able to make something that could take out a tank (for 100x the cost of a laser guided bomb from an F-18).
They're pretty much talking about using mass drivers to take out satellites.
Don't know what the big deal is. You could load up a Scud with a ton of sand, launch it straight up into the path of a satellite, and blow it up so the sand disperses evenly. Satellite flies through a cubic mile of dispersed sand at five miles a second; scratch one satellite. The sand would all fall back to earth, leaving no evidence. Taking out satellites in geosync would be much harder.
The EU will take humanity into the next age? Hardly. Non-muslim Europeans aren't having enough kids; in thirty or forty years non-muslim Europeans will be scrambling to emigrate to the US in order to avoid living under sharia law.
Well, seems like the thing to do then is to put the heat shield where you don't have to worry about it being hit by anything.
You know, like Soyuz or Apollo.
He probably finds the thought of Hillary running scary because it'll mean having a Republican president for four more years.
Or maybe they can try running another Massachusetts senator.
You're being pedantic. They died on a space mission. I guess you can say the atmosphere extends up a thousand miles (after all, isn't it slowing down the ISS?) and we don't ever have to worry about having any deaths "in space".
Jettison the SRBs? They can't be throttled down and will accelerate faster than the rest of the vehicle. Don't really want to be *behind* them while they're running. Especially if you're still attached to a big tank of high explosive. They may have a lot of abort *options*, but they're not survivable while the SRBs are running.
What large payloads do they *need* to bring back? Build a space station, and all the stuff you take up, just leave it up. Don't bring back that gamma ray observatory. Don't bring back Spacehabs. Just leave them up. Just bring back people and things that need to be analyzed on the ground, like moon rocks and LDEF panels. Those can fit in a capsule. I can think of a lot of reasons to bring large payloads back from orbit, but only if I was willing to waste money like politians do.
BTW, I was a naysayer about the shuttle *way* before it was popular. And as far as facts are concerned, when you compare the safety records of big dumb boosters (U.S. and Russian) with the shuttle, throwaway rockets come out ahead. When you factor in cost, they come out waaaaay ahead. At least the Russians were smart enough to not use SRBs on *their* shuttle, and they were also smart enough to only fly it once.
Which was (probably) a reference to John Glenn humming the same hymn when he was re-entering the Earth's atmosphere in "The Right Stuff". Especially since he also had a problem with his heat shield (the retro rocket pack was still attached).
Yeah, how does an object "know" which way the center of the earth is? It's got to be *told* which way to fall, and this obviously requires intelligence.
Pascal's wager:
There either is or is not a god.
If you do not believe in god, and one exists, you go to hell.
If you do not believe in god, and one does not exist, you go nowhere.
If you do believe in god, and one exists, you go to heaven.
If you do believe in god, and one does not exist, you go nowhere.
So it's in your best interest to believe in god.
Kind of neat, though, how he preloaded the argument with the assumption that god will send you to heaven if you believe in him and send you to hell if you don't.
Personally, I believe in a god that sends you to hell if you believe in him and sends you to heaven if you don't. So to win mfrank's wager, you need to be agnostic.
If you think entropy prevents evolution, you've either never taken thermodynamics or you had a lousy teacher. And if you don't think evolution happens, go hang out with someone with antibiotic-resistant tuberculosis.
They were using guided evolution to make microbes that chowed down on oil spills back in the '70s.
Human fossils in rock 200 million years old would be a good start. Or a bird with insect (compound) eyes. If Satan can put dinosaur fossils in Mesozoic rock, God can put bunny fossils in Pre-Cambrian rock. You ever wonder why scientists got so excited about the duck-billed platypus?
So, what do you mean "information must originate from intelligence"? I have a hard enough time understanding what the hell you're saying, let alone knowing how it's falsifiable. Bacteria can become antibiotic resistant without intelligent intervention; is that "information"?
Why don't they use hybrids? Solid fuel with a tank of liquid oxygen sitting on top of it. Like an SRB, but you can shut off the oxidizer flow and shut it down. It's a lot easier to pump LOX than liquid hydrogen, too, isn't it?
Well, maybe laser or microwave powered vehicles are the equivalent to propellor driven ships. Use directed energy to heat the reaction mass. Chemical fuels have gone about as far as they're going to go.
Problem is, that kind of technology isn't suitable for launching hundreds of ICBMs simultaneously, so there's no *real* motive to develop it. It could reduce launch cost, but reducing launch cost has never been a motive for NASA.
The Apollo I fire wasn't during a mission. They were doing testing on the pad; no launch involved. If there hadn't been a fire, they would have finished for the day and gone out for dinner and drinks. Granted it was still deaths related to Apollo hardware, but c'mon, they weren't even gotten to the point where they were launching the hardware.
How many Americans died in space in Apollo? Zero scaled by whatever is still zero.
Apollo had abort modes all the way from ignition to orbit. For the shuttle, as long as the SRBs are running you're pretty much screwed if something goes wrong. Apollo was safer for re-entry; its heat shield was protected up until a few minutes before re-entry.
Yeah, yeah, the shuttle can bring back 20 tons from orbit. Big whoop. Why would you spend a billion dollars to put something in orbit and then bring it back?
And which launch system uses hydrogen and oxygen exclusively? The SRBs on the shuttle put out some crap, and the unmanned version of the proposed vehicle has SRBs on it.
Not that it's that big of a deal.
You are aware of the fact that Pakistan has nukes, right? It was in all the papers a few years ago. Kind of complicates things.
Bzzzt, wrong, please play again.
England declared war on Germany in WWII. So, by your definition, Churchill *is* a war pig.
Yeah, it was pretty cool. I actaully got an invitation to a test launch. I belonged to "Ad Astra" at the time and had given money to SpaceCause, and they gave out invitations to random people. I still kick myself for not going.
The moon's orbit is stable; but it is slowly getting farther away because of tidal drag. Tidal drag is slowing the earth's rotation (that's why the moon keeps the same face towards the earth; it's smaller so tidal drag worked faster, slowing its rotation until it stopped rotating relative to the earth). Conservation of angular momentum causes the moon's orbit to expand.
Eventually, the moon will be far enough that it will drift away. But not because the orbit is unstable.
Like Warren Buffet says:
Give your children enough money so they can do anything they want, but not enough so they can do nothing.