The fuck? Seriously, I honestly expected better from slashdot.
Light has momentum NOT mass. There is a difference. Photons are massless particles and all that, the usual edge case quirks of physics aside since they don't matter here.
The speed of light in a vacuum is a universal constant. It does not change. It cannot be crossed. It cannot be reached by anything with mass. It's c. It is invariant. It's the maximum speed of light. When someone says the speed of light they mean c unless they note otherwise.
Now, light can go slower, nothing says otherwise. It goes slower in anything else including plain air. You can as a result go faster than light in a given medium, it's why nuclear reactors have that nifty blue glow. However you still can't go faster than c. That's all that matters.
Not quite, as I understand it to an external observer you will grow ever dimmer and slower. Approaching the event horizon but never crossing it. A trick of the light, literally.
Basically, it takes light longer and longer to escape the black hole the closer it is to the event horizon (gravity, time contraction, etc, etc.). Beyond the event horizon it takes infinite time to leave (ie: it cannot) but just on the outside side of it it'd take almost that long. Thus it's impossible to see anyone cross the event horizon for an outside observer. The light would be very dim since it's intensity is stretched out over longer and longer periods of time (intensity emitted in one second but seen over fifty billion years).
Seriously, you failed so badly with that post I didn't even need to reply for it to be moded to oblivion, that's hilariously serious fail.
Clearly you lack even a basic understanding of advanced physics so I'm not even going to bother, could probably have more luck with a lobster or a high school freshman who had a couple hours with wikipedia.
As for your comment, the event horizon is not the singularity nor is it the outer boundary of the singularity. The event horizon is mostly just a mathematical construct.
No it's not theoretically possible, go read up on this little thing called the theory of relativity.
Even to move at the speed of light requires infinite energy for any object with mass. The universe has finite energy. Nothing moves even at the speed of light unless it has no mass.
Moving information faster than light on the other hand leads to time travel except in very restricted cases (wormhole network with a certain topology that may be self-enforcing) or if relativity is incorrect in certain ways.
You're bringing horribly naive Newtonian physics into a realm they do not belong in. Stop before you make yourself sounds like even more of a fool.
As you fall into a black hole the event horizon appears to move away from you from your point of view. An external observer on the other hand would never see you cross the horizon due to other effects, just see you falling ever more slowly into it as the light from you takes ever longer to reach them. You'd see some odd effects from crossing the event horizon but you'd continue to observe things. http://casa.colorado.edu/~ajsh/singularity.html http://jila.colorado.edu/~ajsh/insidebh/schw.html
The event horizon is precisely the point at which you will be traveling at the speed of light...
No it's not. Matter cannot go at the speed of light and never does. Nothing can go faster than light. That's the whole bloody point of relativity. Stop watching bad sci-fi movies. There are I believe odd effects for certain observers who might see you but practically speaking you'd just be moving at just something like 0.99c. But that's just due to the acceleration of the black hole and it will continue to increase even after you cross the event horizon.
As soon as the flashlight passes through the event horizon, it'll disappear: not even the light from it will be able to reach you.
Nope, you continue seeing the flashlight. Well in some way at least. The event horizon for you has receded. Another way to think of it is that while the light is no longer moving towards you, sort of hovers at the event horizon, you're now moving towards the light. Relative velocity is all that matters. You'll get some odd relativistic distortions I believe, makes me wonder if a human nervous system even survive them, but you'll continue to observe things that went before you through the even horizon.
Originally, that pipe guided a drilling shaft with a drilling head. Shove the shaft back down the hole, this time with an inflatable head. After the flow stops, start pumping in mud/concrete.
It takes THOUSANDS of tons to keep it in check, an inflatable head wouldn't last a split second. In fact, that's what was used to push the drilling head down in the first place. Given all the damage it's unlikely they manage to get anything in there without ripping open the whole top of the pipe which would be a disaster of a whole new scale.
I've come to the conclusion that BP doesn't want to plug the hole. They would lose millions if not billions in drilling cost. What they want to do is cap the drill head and continue to profit from the oil pumped out.
To put it mildly, you're delusional and irrational. In the full sense of the word. A five year old probably has a better grasp on basic logic than you do. They're already drilling two other wells just to close this one and they're losing tons of oil they'll never get back. The oil they do get back is horribly contaminated and if they ever use it will be after absurdly expensive cleanup. Plus every second the oil is leaking out they're losing tons of money from all the equipment they have there trying to clean things up. By trivial logic it'd be cheaper for them to close this well now and drill a new well near it. Now they save the cost of a two wells (which they're drilling now and which won't ever provide them with oil) and they can get even more oil at a fraction of the cost. The lost lost opportunity cost from all the surface ships they got around this well alone is probably more than they'd ever make from it even if it had worked perfectly.
Basically this well is useless, it's too damaged to do anything with in the long run except permanently seal up which they'll do once the relief wells are done. The relief wells won't be of much use either I believe so that will be three wells they'd have dug that can never provide them with much oil.
So in summary, you might consider seeing a psychiatrist for your irrational thoughts.
BP drilled a pipe all the way from the seafloor to the oil, problem is that a lot of that pipe is above the rocky layer. Plus there other stuff I'm guessing like the hole weakening the rock and so on.
And as you said, the general goal is to plug the hole. However the hole is 6000 or so feet deep and what's at the bottom really wants to get out. The normal method is to fill the hole with heavy mud and then shove concrete plugs in there. The heavy mud, like the rock that used to be there, keeps the pressure in check due to it's own mass and gravity.
If you just try plugging the top then you'll have a lot of pressure right at the top where there is no natural barrier around the pipe. With mud in the pipe there is no excessive pressure on the pipe near the top. Only the mass of a few hundred feet of heavy mud which isn't that much. I think even the BOP, had it gone off and worked as it should have, would have been temporary until they pumped the thing full of mud for that reason. You don't want the massive pressure of all that oil pushing against the top of the well. Or really anywhere in the well.
So basically, in the end you really want the thing filled with heavy mud or it's going to leak sooner or later. If nothing else, small earthquake and it's probably all over.
The top kill tried to do that from the top of the well, pumping in mud and then cealing, but it failed.
The bottom kill on the other hand method does what you describe, it stops the oil starting in the rocky region. However to use it you must first reach that area which requires separate wells to be dug to get there. That takes time.
Awwww, how nice, it's one of the very idiots I mentioned in my post. Note that I never said if Obama was doing a good job or not, simply that ranting like a spoiled kid in general isn't how you respond to these sorts of things and means absolutely nothing. He may be doing a good job or a bad job, don't bloody know to be honest since I generally find politicians to be all liars not worth listening to. His external response however is perfectly fine and is what you should want from a politician. That was my point.
If you want to argue about how good of a job he is doing than provide arguments as to his failing or what he could have done better. Rational arguments. Not fifth grader "he's not yelling obscenities so he's not doing anything" bullshit
The people who love to memorize train and bus schedules are probably the descendants of the people that first figured out things like how to predict eclipses.
No, those people would have starved to death or been eaten by wolves. On the other hand the socially able and cunning ancient jock survived by organizing his village into an efficient force for fighting against natural and human enemies.
Honestly, if fixing an eventuality is that impossible maybe they shouldn't have been allowed to drill in the first place.
It's actually well known how to best fix this. It just takes something like six months to implement it. Relief wells and a bottom kill. Granted it shouldn't have happened in the first place if BP didn't cut corners. The government oversight agencies didn't do their job, if we're lucky they were corrupt and not just institutionally incompetent. Hell, if I remember correctly, some countries require relief wells to be drilled while the main well is being drilled just in case.
Here's the thing, a lot of things can have horrid nearly irreparable damage if every single safety fails. We still use them. Nuclear power plants? Have fun with a Chernobyl. Dam? Have fun with a city eliminating flood if it bursts. Levies? Prepare to lose a city if they break in a hurricane. Chemical plants? Hope you can hold your breath for a few hours at least. Large office building? A fast fire, earthquake or errant airplane might kill you. Medicine? Just look at all the medical mistakes that happen, hard to bring the dead back to life. Automobiles? Well I think I don't need to go on.
And yes I'm an armchair underwater mining engineer (but an actual, licensed, systems engineer) and I can't quite believe that BP can't drop a hundred tons of rock over the spill, I'm pretty sure they're trying to find the most "cost effective" way of dealing with it.
100 Tons? If I did the math wrong you'd need somewhere over 1000tons to counter the pressure of the oil. Then it'd just leak out of somewhere else, it's mud down there, you think with that pressure the oil won't make it's own path out?
That said plugging the hole isn't that implausibly difficult. Plugging it so the pipe doesn't burst 100 feet down and leak oil out of every ocean floor crack within 500 feet is. That's what they're really worried about.
They're not being cost effective, they're being paranoid. What is happening now is bad. What can happen if they mess up is much worse.
And do what? Rave and spit like a spoiled 5 year old? Throw a tantrum? Yell at people? Piss on the grave of some BP founder? Seriously, why do people want him to act like a spoiled angry kid? Are you that insane and irrational as to be incapable of even comprehending what rational responses to situations are?
And then you bitch about politicians not thinking ahead, caving in to interests and in all other ways acting like short sighted idiots. And when they don't, you're pissed because they're not acting like short sighted idiots. Lovely.
We work significantly less than we did a century, roughly 60 hours then versus 40 now, and we, in general, do so in significantly better conditions. Granted we have a larger workforce as a fraction of population, thanks to woman joining in, but if you count the very much non trivial amount of housework a century ago I'm pretty sure even woman work less.
First of all, let's ignore the fact that the probe does not generate enough power during winter even without any ice for minimal heating much less storing anything. That pretty much kills your proposal.
Second of all, all operations cannot be shut off. Mars is cold. The sort of cold that is outside the safe temperature zone for even specially designed electronics and batteries. So you've got a constant power drain or your chance of anything working after winter are very low. Which as I said is in practice more than the sun will provide but let's say the solar panels are enough to provide minimal heating.
But ignoring all those things.
There will be periods where the battery is drained more than charged, but the lack of (or minimisation of) ice will ensure some charge is still gained during the Martian winter - net drain, sure.
No it won't, your batteries will never charge. That's the whole point of my argument. That you can't comprehend conservation of energy it is not my concern but let's try once again.
Let's say the sun puts 20k W onto the panels and the rover captures 1k W of that. The total is still 20k W. My point was that even the full 20k W of energy is not enough to keep the panels free from ice. As a result you need more than 20k W of energy on the panels to keep them ice free. The sun only provides 20k W. If you use batteries than you can achieve that but there will never be a surplus. You will always be draining your batteries. If 1kW goes into the batteries than there is only 19kW left for heating by the sun. So you need to put in at least 1kW of heating to break even which means you're using at least the 1kW you just stored.
As a result you'll never be able to charge anything, there is simply no left over energy. Ever.
When I said batteries are a short term energy source I meant you can never sanely stuff enough of them to provide heating for all of winter. Even a month at a pathetic 100W will give you batteries massing twice what the lander does. In practice it'd probably take more to keep that panels ice free than you'd get from the panels so there's no point.
This isn't nighttime heating, this is winter. Your argument only works if the temperature is below freezing only part of the day or week or whatever. I seriously doubt that is the case especially once you get into the deep winter.
Sigh, honestly. I give people the benefit of the doubt in terms of logical thinking and this is the replies I get.
Mars!=Earth. If we had a magical energy storage device we could have the lander run at full power 24/7 without any problems. Clearly we don't in this one, I figured it went without saying. Batteries are very much short term. A RTG would work but the rover doesn't have one and the question was limited to the current situation.
It's all practical questions in these sorts of cases. Saying "in a magical world where X is true" is a foolish attempt to escape ones own stupidity.
Defrosting wires use external energy stored beforehand by other means or generated by other means. The Mars lander does not have this sort of energy.
The Mars lander has one long term energy source from the sun at roughly 5% efficiency I'm guessing. The same energy source that heats the environment. The environment absorbs more than 5% of the energy and is nonetheless below freezing. The panels cannot get above freezing for long durations with solar power alone. There is no other source of power.
If you used solar energy to heat a proportionally small insulated object such as electronics it'd work perfectly fine. It does work perfectly fine on most of Mars. The problem here is that the area you heat is the same as the energy you gather energy on. And it's not insulated in any way. Energy that on it's own is not enough to keep that area over freezing. 5% of that won't keep it above freezing.
Once you get frost on the panels you're screwed. Energy absorption, converted to electricity and plain heat, drops due to reflection. Ergo you need to keep the panels above freezing 24/7. Short term and one off solutions won't work. And as I pointed out in my reply to the other guy once you get any decent amount of ice it won't come off unless you sublime a sizable chunk of it. Even if you could you can't afford to wait for it to build up because you need that constant solar power to just keep the rest of the systems warm.
The full power of the sun cannot accomplish this. A smaller percentage of that won't accomplish it. There is no other long term energy source. You use your batteries and how will you magically recharge them? There isn't enough solar energy to just keep the panels defrosted so where the heck would you get the energy to recharge the batteries?
There's a difference between backups and redundancies failing, and backups and redundancies effectively not existing. The later is not an unexpected failure. You cannot claim to have backups and redundancies in that case.
An airplane hitting the WTC is an unexpected failure that goes beyond any sane planning. Not checking your batteries and letting the fuel rot in the tank for 20 years is a lack of backups and redundancies.
First of all, ice doesn't slide down just because you heat what it's on. Due to the whole objects having a tip and ice building on them like a cap on someone's head. Of course once you got a meaningful amount of ice on the rover would probably be a hunk of dead metal due to lack of electricity and thus heating of electronics.
Second of all, you're gonna need a lot more than a couple watts to do anything. Likely many orders of magnitude more than what you'd get from the solar panels.
Third of all, given the lack of sunlight you'd likely be covered in ice again long before you managed to recharge your batteries.
Practically speaking, the craft is dead ice or no ice. Mars winter is death to unheated electronics and solar panels simply don't provide enough energy to do enough with.
The solar panels provide power. You cannot provide more heating power than the sun does. The sun is putting energy into everything. Everything is still frozen. I hope you can work out the rest of the logic yourself.
I'm curious if you could list those known failed safety systems? I don't think you can, because there were none that I have found in my research.
There are various allegations of long term safety problems such as schematics that were not up to date. The pressure in the well was not kept track of. The BOP was not designed to cut through roughly 10% of the pipe as it was too thick. Probably other such long term issues that lower the chance of multiple failures from "astronomical" to just "unlikely."
Until the BOP didn't work, they thought it was working normally.
There are claims that the BOP rubber seal was damaged a few weeks before and the damage was ignored.
Until the cement failed, it seemed to be working normally.
The claim is that the cement was a new untested mix which means it wasn't a safety system. Again more of a long term safety issue but one that they should have been aware of.
Since that's such a common failure mode of complicated systems, its likely that happened here, just based on odds. Don't want to ruin the environment with oil based drilling mud, and don't want to let the mud interfere with the top plug of cement, so lets pump it out. Ooops, no happy ending like safety folks claimed, this time.
They had two options. Cap and then pump out mud, or pump out mud and then cap. The later is faster and thus more profitable. The former is safer. They chose the later. They considered the choice, not just blindly picked the usual choice. The well had previous problems with gas but they figured the concrete already there would contain things.
Vent flares for Methyl isocyanate don't work because somebody shut them off and you get a Bhopal disaster.
Hahahahaha, congratulations on using the single worst example ever to try and prove your point. The Bhopal was the result of a massive series of outright safety breaches, cost cutting design decisions and the cost saving disabling of multiple safety systems. The vent tower was, for example, underdesigned and even if it had worked would not have stopped the disaster.
So no, the Bhopal disaster happened because of such things as: lack of skilled operators due to the staffing policy; reduction of safety management due to reducing the staff; insufficient maintenance of the plant; lack of emergency response plans; choosing a dangerous method of manufacturing pesticides; large-scale storage of MIC before processing; location close to a densely populated area; under-dimensioning of the safety features; dependence on manual operations.
Exactly like the BP well, the safety mechanisms were broken and ignored in the name of profit. Failure analysis is a decently well understood field, neither BP or Union Carbine had any excuse for not knowing what turning of all those safety features could cause.
With other software, you can just buy the software, and know that since you paid money you have a reasonable right to use it.
Use does not mean modify. Use does not mean distribute. Go ahead, sell home made copies of windows and see how long till you get sued.
Hell, using windows isn't simple. The EULA tells you how you can sue it and it's anything but simple. Do I need a license for each uses who connects to a server? Can I run it in a vm? Can I run it in a non-microsoft vm? How many vms can I run of this software? Can I install it on multiple machines if only one is used at a time? If I have a student version when do I need to stop using it? If I have an OEM version, what hardware do I need to hold on to so I can legally use it?
Well almost right. The 50MT one had a maximum yield of 100MT. However there was no remotely safe place to test a 100MT bomb without irradiating more people than even the Soviets were willing to sacrifice. So they simply replaced the third, and possibly second, fission stages (ie: uranium originally) of the 100MT bomb with lead.
Granted it was utterly impractical weapon, the bomber used to drop it was specially modified by having it's bay doors removed since the bomb simply couldn't fit inside. Probably the only way to use that thing in a war would be to detonate it in your own territory when the wind is blowing towards your enemy. Wouldn't put it past the Soviets but still not very useful.
Slashdot Mirror
The fuck? Seriously, I honestly expected better from slashdot.
Light has momentum NOT mass. There is a difference. Photons are massless particles and all that, the usual edge case quirks of physics aside since they don't matter here.
The speed of light in a vacuum is a universal constant. It does not change. It cannot be crossed. It cannot be reached by anything with mass. It's c. It is invariant. It's the maximum speed of light. When someone says the speed of light they mean c unless they note otherwise.
Now, light can go slower, nothing says otherwise. It goes slower in anything else including plain air. You can as a result go faster than light in a given medium, it's why nuclear reactors have that nifty blue glow. However you still can't go faster than c. That's all that matters.
Not quite, as I understand it to an external observer you will grow ever dimmer and slower. Approaching the event horizon but never crossing it. A trick of the light, literally.
Basically, it takes light longer and longer to escape the black hole the closer it is to the event horizon (gravity, time contraction, etc, etc.). Beyond the event horizon it takes infinite time to leave (ie: it cannot) but just on the outside side of it it'd take almost that long. Thus it's impossible to see anyone cross the event horizon for an outside observer. The light would be very dim since it's intensity is stretched out over longer and longer periods of time (intensity emitted in one second but seen over fifty billion years).
My head hurts.
Seriously, you failed so badly with that post I didn't even need to reply for it to be moded to oblivion, that's hilariously serious fail.
Clearly you lack even a basic understanding of advanced physics so I'm not even going to bother, could probably have more luck with a lobster or a high school freshman who had a couple hours with wikipedia.
As for your comment, the event horizon is not the singularity nor is it the outer boundary of the singularity. The event horizon is mostly just a mathematical construct.
No it's not theoretically possible, go read up on this little thing called the theory of relativity.
Even to move at the speed of light requires infinite energy for any object with mass. The universe has finite energy. Nothing moves even at the speed of light unless it has no mass.
Moving information faster than light on the other hand leads to time travel except in very restricted cases (wormhole network with a certain topology that may be self-enforcing) or if relativity is incorrect in certain ways.
You're bringing horribly naive Newtonian physics into a realm they do not belong in. Stop before you make yourself sounds like even more of a fool.
As you fall into a black hole the event horizon appears to move away from you from your point of view. An external observer on the other hand would never see you cross the horizon due to other effects, just see you falling ever more slowly into it as the light from you takes ever longer to reach them. You'd see some odd effects from crossing the event horizon but you'd continue to observe things.
http://casa.colorado.edu/~ajsh/singularity.html
http://jila.colorado.edu/~ajsh/insidebh/schw.html
The event horizon is precisely the point at which you will be traveling at the speed of light...
No it's not. Matter cannot go at the speed of light and never does. Nothing can go faster than light. That's the whole bloody point of relativity. Stop watching bad sci-fi movies. There are I believe odd effects for certain observers who might see you but practically speaking you'd just be moving at just something like 0.99c. But that's just due to the acceleration of the black hole and it will continue to increase even after you cross the event horizon.
As soon as the flashlight passes through the event horizon, it'll disappear: not even the light from it will be able to reach you.
Nope, you continue seeing the flashlight. Well in some way at least. The event horizon for you has receded. Another way to think of it is that while the light is no longer moving towards you, sort of hovers at the event horizon, you're now moving towards the light. Relative velocity is all that matters. You'll get some odd relativistic distortions I believe, makes me wonder if a human nervous system even survive them, but you'll continue to observe things that went before you through the even horizon.
Originally, that pipe guided a drilling shaft with a drilling head. Shove the shaft back down the hole, this time with an inflatable head. After the flow stops, start pumping in mud/concrete.
It takes THOUSANDS of tons to keep it in check, an inflatable head wouldn't last a split second. In fact, that's what was used to push the drilling head down in the first place. Given all the damage it's unlikely they manage to get anything in there without ripping open the whole top of the pipe which would be a disaster of a whole new scale.
I've come to the conclusion that BP doesn't want to plug the hole. They would lose millions if not billions in drilling cost. What they want to do is cap the drill head and continue to profit from the oil pumped out.
To put it mildly, you're delusional and irrational. In the full sense of the word. A five year old probably has a better grasp on basic logic than you do. They're already drilling two other wells just to close this one and they're losing tons of oil they'll never get back. The oil they do get back is horribly contaminated and if they ever use it will be after absurdly expensive cleanup. Plus every second the oil is leaking out they're losing tons of money from all the equipment they have there trying to clean things up. By trivial logic it'd be cheaper for them to close this well now and drill a new well near it. Now they save the cost of a two wells (which they're drilling now and which won't ever provide them with oil) and they can get even more oil at a fraction of the cost. The lost lost opportunity cost from all the surface ships they got around this well alone is probably more than they'd ever make from it even if it had worked perfectly.
Basically this well is useless, it's too damaged to do anything with in the long run except permanently seal up which they'll do once the relief wells are done. The relief wells won't be of much use either I believe so that will be three wells they'd have dug that can never provide them with much oil.
So in summary, you might consider seeing a psychiatrist for your irrational thoughts.
It looks sort of like this in cross section:
Seafloor
Muddy Seabed
Rock
Oil
BP drilled a pipe all the way from the seafloor to the oil, problem is that a lot of that pipe is above the rocky layer. Plus there other stuff I'm guessing like the hole weakening the rock and so on.
And as you said, the general goal is to plug the hole. However the hole is 6000 or so feet deep and what's at the bottom really wants to get out. The normal method is to fill the hole with heavy mud and then shove concrete plugs in there. The heavy mud, like the rock that used to be there, keeps the pressure in check due to it's own mass and gravity.
If you just try plugging the top then you'll have a lot of pressure right at the top where there is no natural barrier around the pipe. With mud in the pipe there is no excessive pressure on the pipe near the top. Only the mass of a few hundred feet of heavy mud which isn't that much. I think even the BOP, had it gone off and worked as it should have, would have been temporary until they pumped the thing full of mud for that reason. You don't want the massive pressure of all that oil pushing against the top of the well. Or really anywhere in the well.
So basically, in the end you really want the thing filled with heavy mud or it's going to leak sooner or later. If nothing else, small earthquake and it's probably all over.
The top kill tried to do that from the top of the well, pumping in mud and then cealing, but it failed.
The bottom kill on the other hand method does what you describe, it stops the oil starting in the rocky region. However to use it you must first reach that area which requires separate wells to be dug to get there. That takes time.
Awwww, how nice, it's one of the very idiots I mentioned in my post. Note that I never said if Obama was doing a good job or not, simply that ranting like a spoiled kid in general isn't how you respond to these sorts of things and means absolutely nothing. He may be doing a good job or a bad job, don't bloody know to be honest since I generally find politicians to be all liars not worth listening to. His external response however is perfectly fine and is what you should want from a politician. That was my point.
If you want to argue about how good of a job he is doing than provide arguments as to his failing or what he could have done better. Rational arguments. Not fifth grader "he's not yelling obscenities so he's not doing anything" bullshit
The people who love to memorize train and bus schedules are probably the descendants of the people that first figured out things like how to predict eclipses.
No, those people would have starved to death or been eaten by wolves. On the other hand the socially able and cunning ancient jock survived by organizing his village into an efficient force for fighting against natural and human enemies.
Honestly, if fixing an eventuality is that impossible maybe they shouldn't have been allowed to drill in the first place.
It's actually well known how to best fix this. It just takes something like six months to implement it. Relief wells and a bottom kill. Granted it shouldn't have happened in the first place if BP didn't cut corners. The government oversight agencies didn't do their job, if we're lucky they were corrupt and not just institutionally incompetent. Hell, if I remember correctly, some countries require relief wells to be drilled while the main well is being drilled just in case.
Here's the thing, a lot of things can have horrid nearly irreparable damage if every single safety fails. We still use them. Nuclear power plants? Have fun with a Chernobyl. Dam? Have fun with a city eliminating flood if it bursts. Levies? Prepare to lose a city if they break in a hurricane. Chemical plants? Hope you can hold your breath for a few hours at least. Large office building? A fast fire, earthquake or errant airplane might kill you. Medicine? Just look at all the medical mistakes that happen, hard to bring the dead back to life. Automobiles? Well I think I don't need to go on.
And yes I'm an armchair underwater mining engineer (but an actual, licensed, systems engineer) and I can't quite believe that BP can't drop a hundred tons of rock over the spill, I'm pretty sure they're trying to find the most "cost effective" way of dealing with it.
100 Tons? If I did the math wrong you'd need somewhere over 1000tons to counter the pressure of the oil. Then it'd just leak out of somewhere else, it's mud down there, you think with that pressure the oil won't make it's own path out?
That said plugging the hole isn't that implausibly difficult. Plugging it so the pipe doesn't burst 100 feet down and leak oil out of every ocean floor crack within 500 feet is. That's what they're really worried about.
They're not being cost effective, they're being paranoid. What is happening now is bad. What can happen if they mess up is much worse.
And do what? Rave and spit like a spoiled 5 year old? Throw a tantrum? Yell at people? Piss on the grave of some BP founder? Seriously, why do people want him to act like a spoiled angry kid? Are you that insane and irrational as to be incapable of even comprehending what rational responses to situations are?
And then you bitch about politicians not thinking ahead, caving in to interests and in all other ways acting like short sighted idiots. And when they don't, you're pissed because they're not acting like short sighted idiots. Lovely.
My electricity company ramps up charges as you use more. Sort of like how taxes work.
We work significantly less than we did a century, roughly 60 hours then versus 40 now, and we, in general, do so in significantly better conditions. Granted we have a larger workforce as a fraction of population, thanks to woman joining in, but if you count the very much non trivial amount of housework a century ago I'm pretty sure even woman work less.
The whole city of Mountain View can probably get a google ip thanks to google's free wifi there.
Won't help you much:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expatriation_Tax
First of all, let's ignore the fact that the probe does not generate enough power during winter even without any ice for minimal heating much less storing anything. That pretty much kills your proposal.
Second of all, all operations cannot be shut off. Mars is cold. The sort of cold that is outside the safe temperature zone for even specially designed electronics and batteries. So you've got a constant power drain or your chance of anything working after winter are very low. Which as I said is in practice more than the sun will provide but let's say the solar panels are enough to provide minimal heating.
But ignoring all those things.
There will be periods where the battery is drained more than charged, but the lack of (or minimisation of) ice will ensure some charge is still gained during the Martian winter - net drain, sure.
No it won't, your batteries will never charge. That's the whole point of my argument. That you can't comprehend conservation of energy it is not my concern but let's try once again.
Let's say the sun puts 20k W onto the panels and the rover captures 1k W of that. The total is still 20k W. My point was that even the full 20k W of energy is not enough to keep the panels free from ice. As a result you need more than 20k W of energy on the panels to keep them ice free. The sun only provides 20k W. If you use batteries than you can achieve that but there will never be a surplus. You will always be draining your batteries. If 1kW goes into the batteries than there is only 19kW left for heating by the sun. So you need to put in at least 1kW of heating to break even which means you're using at least the 1kW you just stored.
As a result you'll never be able to charge anything, there is simply no left over energy. Ever.
When I said batteries are a short term energy source I meant you can never sanely stuff enough of them to provide heating for all of winter. Even a month at a pathetic 100W will give you batteries massing twice what the lander does. In practice it'd probably take more to keep that panels ice free than you'd get from the panels so there's no point.
This isn't nighttime heating, this is winter. Your argument only works if the temperature is below freezing only part of the day or week or whatever. I seriously doubt that is the case especially once you get into the deep winter.
Sigh, honestly. I give people the benefit of the doubt in terms of logical thinking and this is the replies I get.
Mars!=Earth. If we had a magical energy storage device we could have the lander run at full power 24/7 without any problems. Clearly we don't in this one, I figured it went without saying. Batteries are very much short term. A RTG would work but the rover doesn't have one and the question was limited to the current situation.
It's all practical questions in these sorts of cases. Saying "in a magical world where X is true" is a foolish attempt to escape ones own stupidity.
Defrosting wires use external energy stored beforehand by other means or generated by other means. The Mars lander does not have this sort of energy.
The Mars lander has one long term energy source from the sun at roughly 5% efficiency I'm guessing. The same energy source that heats the environment. The environment absorbs more than 5% of the energy and is nonetheless below freezing. The panels cannot get above freezing for long durations with solar power alone. There is no other source of power.
If you used solar energy to heat a proportionally small insulated object such as electronics it'd work perfectly fine. It does work perfectly fine on most of Mars. The problem here is that the area you heat is the same as the energy you gather energy on. And it's not insulated in any way. Energy that on it's own is not enough to keep that area over freezing. 5% of that won't keep it above freezing.
Once you get frost on the panels you're screwed. Energy absorption, converted to electricity and plain heat, drops due to reflection. Ergo you need to keep the panels above freezing 24/7. Short term and one off solutions won't work. And as I pointed out in my reply to the other guy once you get any decent amount of ice it won't come off unless you sublime a sizable chunk of it. Even if you could you can't afford to wait for it to build up because you need that constant solar power to just keep the rest of the systems warm.
The full power of the sun cannot accomplish this. A smaller percentage of that won't accomplish it. There is no other long term energy source. You use your batteries and how will you magically recharge them? There isn't enough solar energy to just keep the panels defrosted so where the heck would you get the energy to recharge the batteries?
There's a difference between backups and redundancies failing, and backups and redundancies effectively not existing. The later is not an unexpected failure. You cannot claim to have backups and redundancies in that case.
An airplane hitting the WTC is an unexpected failure that goes beyond any sane planning. Not checking your batteries and letting the fuel rot in the tank for 20 years is a lack of backups and redundancies.
First of all, ice doesn't slide down just because you heat what it's on. Due to the whole objects having a tip and ice building on them like a cap on someone's head. Of course once you got a meaningful amount of ice on the rover would probably be a hunk of dead metal due to lack of electricity and thus heating of electronics.
Second of all, you're gonna need a lot more than a couple watts to do anything. Likely many orders of magnitude more than what you'd get from the solar panels.
Third of all, given the lack of sunlight you'd likely be covered in ice again long before you managed to recharge your batteries.
Practically speaking, the craft is dead ice or no ice. Mars winter is death to unheated electronics and solar panels simply don't provide enough energy to do enough with.
The solar panels provide power. You cannot provide more heating power than the sun does. The sun is putting energy into everything. Everything is still frozen. I hope you can work out the rest of the logic yourself.
I'm curious if you could list those known failed safety systems? I don't think you can, because there were none that I have found in my research.
There are various allegations of long term safety problems such as schematics that were not up to date. The pressure in the well was not kept track of. The BOP was not designed to cut through roughly 10% of the pipe as it was too thick. Probably other such long term issues that lower the chance of multiple failures from "astronomical" to just "unlikely."
Until the BOP didn't work, they thought it was working normally.
There are claims that the BOP rubber seal was damaged a few weeks before and the damage was ignored.
Until the cement failed, it seemed to be working normally.
The claim is that the cement was a new untested mix which means it wasn't a safety system. Again more of a long term safety issue but one that they should have been aware of.
Since that's such a common failure mode of complicated systems, its likely that happened here, just based on odds. Don't want to ruin the environment with oil based drilling mud, and don't want to let the mud interfere with the top plug of cement, so lets pump it out. Ooops, no happy ending like safety folks claimed, this time.
They had two options. Cap and then pump out mud, or pump out mud and then cap. The later is faster and thus more profitable. The former is safer. They chose the later. They considered the choice, not just blindly picked the usual choice. The well had previous problems with gas but they figured the concrete already there would contain things.
Vent flares for Methyl isocyanate don't work because somebody shut them off and you get a Bhopal disaster.
Hahahahaha, congratulations on using the single worst example ever to try and prove your point. The Bhopal was the result of a massive series of outright safety breaches, cost cutting design decisions and the cost saving disabling of multiple safety systems. The vent tower was, for example, underdesigned and even if it had worked would not have stopped the disaster.
So no, the Bhopal disaster happened because of such things as: lack of skilled operators due to the staffing policy; reduction of safety management due to reducing the staff; insufficient maintenance of the plant; lack of emergency response plans; choosing a dangerous method of manufacturing pesticides; large-scale storage of MIC before processing; location close to a densely populated area; under-dimensioning of the safety features; dependence on manual operations.
Exactly like the BP well, the safety mechanisms were broken and ignored in the name of profit. Failure analysis is a decently well understood field, neither BP or Union Carbine had any excuse for not knowing what turning of all those safety features could cause.
With other software, you can just buy the software, and know that since you paid money you have a reasonable right to use it.
Use does not mean modify. Use does not mean distribute. Go ahead, sell home made copies of windows and see how long till you get sued.
Hell, using windows isn't simple. The EULA tells you how you can sue it and it's anything but simple. Do I need a license for each uses who connects to a server? Can I run it in a vm? Can I run it in a non-microsoft vm? How many vms can I run of this software? Can I install it on multiple machines if only one is used at a time? If I have a student version when do I need to stop using it? If I have an OEM version, what hardware do I need to hold on to so I can legally use it?
Except the ipad cpu which was manufactured by apple and is claimed to also be in the new iphone.
Well almost right. The 50MT one had a maximum yield of 100MT. However there was no remotely safe place to test a 100MT bomb without irradiating more people than even the Soviets were willing to sacrifice. So they simply replaced the third, and possibly second, fission stages (ie: uranium originally) of the 100MT bomb with lead.
Granted it was utterly impractical weapon, the bomber used to drop it was specially modified by having it's bay doors removed since the bomb simply couldn't fit inside. Probably the only way to use that thing in a war would be to detonate it in your own territory when the wind is blowing towards your enemy. Wouldn't put it past the Soviets but still not very useful.