The problem is that if you use fiscal measures to "encourage" having fewer children you are, by definition "punishing" those who have more. At the very least you are questioning the wisdom of having so many children.
You misunderstand. The reduction in birthrate I speak of has nothing whatsoever to do with punishment. No program is in place to ensure people like myself do not have many kids, and yet I can't think of a single person I've known within ten years of my age with more than 3. 1 or none is more often the case.
The cause isn't government programs, or social stigma, or any such bullshit, it's a reflection of reality. If you live in a developed country, you have an incentive (several actually), not to have as many kids. That's true whether you've just moved there from some other part of the world, or whether you've always lived there.
It takes time for culture to catch up to the reality. It always works that way, no matter what the reality and culture clashing with it are. But when it does, an immigrant or their offspring will cease to have as many children. This has happened before and will happen again, no matter how loudly both the immigrant groups and their opponents claim otherwise.
Immigrants typically have more children. Since questioning anything that is typical of immigrants is racist, much less actually punishing, this topic is verboten.
I can't think of a single way for a government to punish having kids that wouldn't be borderline totalitarian. Forget "racist" - "tyrannical" springs to mind. Better to let cultural assimilation do what it has always done, and assume they'll be at the average birthrate in a generation or so.
Nuclear power is complex. Maintaining a reaction takes experts with decades of education and years of training. Calculate the cost of education into the cost of nuclear power? You should.
Unless "decades of education" was meant to include their high school diploma, I think you're exaggerating. Not that I disagree with your fundamental point; a nuclear plant does pay good money for qualified staff, and that does include paying for some of their training.
You're correct that the level of expertise needed is particular to nuclear power, but it is part of a larger cost associate with staff. No means of power generation is fully automated. Even a system like the one in TFA presumably pays somebody's wages.
Compare "the worst that can happen" in nuclear power to the same with solar, wind, geothermal, or hydroelectric power. This alone should be enough to deter us from nuclear power, because no matter what, mistakes are always made and the unexpected occurs.
"Worst that could happen" for a hydro dam is a major flood. I'd call that unlikely, assuming the engineers and construction team did their jobs right. But then, I'd say the same about nuclear.
I'd agree that nuclear is dangerous, but disagree that the danger should deter us from using it at all. Like all technology that can go awry, caution must be used, safeguards put in place.
I'd suggest reading up on passive safety mechanisms in nuclear power. Look up "pebble bed reactors", which have the means to make the fuel fly apart if it gets too hot, halting the chain reaction. There is never a total absence of risk, but the risk can be made small enough for our purposes. The question is not: is it perfect? - the question is: is it worth it?
If the choice came down to a mix of passive power collection, coupled with either nuclear or coal, which would you pick? Assuming we could not meet all our energy needs with alternative energy alone and we needed one or the other.
Currently, the only method of cleaning a nuclear accident is to package and store all the radiated stuff underground. Did you see the article recently about the irradiated mud wasps? That is seriously messed up.
Didn't see the article. Got a link?
I am very much aware of the risks associated with radioactive contamination. I am also aware that it isn't the end of the world. There are living things in closer proximity to Chernobyl than we though possible; the assumption 20 years ago was that the reactor site and all around it would be sterile for centuries. Hiroshima and Nagasaki were both rebuilt and are home to people today, a bare sixty years after being nuked (and it's not like they were rebuilt yesterday either). Yes radiation is scary. No it is not reason enough to convince me that we must abandon nuclear power.
Before sending astronauts into space, every conceivable scenario is considered and plans are made for the just in case. Nuclear proponents never seem to want to finish solving the problems before plunging headlong into them.
On this... I actually agree with you. If new reactors are going to be built, they need to be designed with the utmost care, even if that means raising the cost considerably.
What you may not realize is that even the older, less safe, water moderated reactors currently in use have an excellent safety record. The major accidents - Chernobyl and Windscale - used designs known at the time to be less than safe. The sole accident I can think of for a light water moderated design was Three Mile Island, where the safety systems actually worked. Nobody died, no contamination was released - the worst problem was actually the hysteria associated with the words "nuclear" and "accident" in the same headline.
Nuclear power isn't perfect. It does have serious problems. These problems need to be definatively solved before the concept as a whole is a valid solu
This particular turbine isn't tethered. That's what makes it special - the earlier models work the way you describe.
The advantage of tidal is that it's cyclical and predictable; the drawback is that it's expensive and hard to maintain. I don't think attaching it to a wind based system would lessen the drawbacks much.
Now, attaching a wind turbine to some sort of nifty power storage device to equalize it's variable output, that would be useful. Wind power would pair nicely with a hydroelectric dam, since the reservoir can be used to store power during periods of low demand by pumping water back up into it.
In the very long-term (barring global catastrophes) humanity will have to start to settle the oceans, and this experiment will give us information as to how we might be able to do that in the far future.
Why?
Habitable space won't be the reason. To settle the ocean would require a fully artificial environment - one where we build every square meter we live in from the ground (or sea) up. If we're going to do that, we might as well build arcologies, and save ourselves the trouble of plugging leaks. Plus, the population growth rate is levelling off, lessening pressure to find new places to inhabit.
Because it's there? Space would be a better choice. Absence of pressure is easier to live with than overabundance of it. Solar energy is plentiful in the inner system. And an offworld colony has the virtue of surviving global catastrophes that would wipe out land and sea based habitats. Added bonus - no local ecology to damage, something the ocean most definitely has. We can colonize both of course, but I'm not sure I'd say we "have to".
Apart from all that, I'd say we already "colonized" the ocean, ages ago when we started building long-haul ships. We just don't live there all the time, or without land-based support. I doubt that will change.
I fail to see what immigration has to do with overpopulation. Or rather, I do see, but what I see is only shortsightedness.
A person moving from place A to place B does not increase the net population of AB, but does make their negative impact on the environment B's problem. So the attitude of "if we curb immigration, we reduce pollution" omits the reality that pollution does not obey national borders. It's the attitude of "somebody else's problem", which I could frankly do without.
Of course, you could argue that immigrants moving from a poor country to a rich one will use more resources once there. That is technically correct. But the counterpoint is that richer populations have fewer children, and in the long run that immigrant is going to assimilate. If not them, then their children. And part of that assimilation is the reduction in birthrate that comes from living in the developed world.
Minor quibble: The mining and transport of fuel for a nuclear reactor is a negligible cost. Uranium ore and fuel pellets are relatively safe items, at least as far as heavy metals go, and you don't need very much fuel for a reactor. Even processing it needn't be that costly, since you can use a heavy-water reactor with un-enriched or minimally enriched fuel. If you are using enriched fuel, it's still fairly cheap in terms of dollars spent per megawatt generated.
Reprocessing the waste does have a cost associated with it, and storing or disposing of the waste you can't or won't reprocess even more so, so that part of your post was correct. And of course the operational costs of a nuclear reactor are pretty high. But then, we don't know the operational costs of these new turbines yet (which is going to be higher than it ought to be, given it's a prototype).
The international community has threatened to prohibit the sale of Australian uranium because we don't store the spent rods, but we do reprocess them. This has non-proliferation consequences.
Okay, now I'm curious. What non-proliferation consequences are there to this policy?
You do know it's a prototype, right? The first design to float freely (as opposed to earlier designs that were anchored)?
The first version always costs more. Later versions are built at a fraction the price. Such is the nature of R&D.
So, patience. Expect a solution immediately, cheaply and bug-free, and you will be endlessly disappointed with what real life has to offer. But hey, it'll open up a career in management for you:-P
You do know that using wind power on the ocean goes back a ways, right? If we hadn't solved that tipping over problem some time ago, we'd never have build sailboats:-P
All that it takes is a wide keel and some ballast. You just need to be bottom heavy enough to have a low centre of gravity, and be wide enough that if one side starts to sink, buoyancy automatically corrects by lifting that side back to the water line.
For a non-moving station, these problems are simple, since you don't need to worry about maintaining mobility. Your buoy can be an air-filled plastic sphere with a lead weight bolted to the bottom. Easy. On a boat, you need to keep a more slender shape than a sphere in order to lower resistance, and you want your ballast to be as light as you can safely get away with to keep the keel fairly shallow (both for reducing resistance and weight, and allowing the ship to enter shallow water without grounding).
Well, too many could be a hazard to navigation, plus there's the whole cost-benefit business, and the high maintenance costs associated with anything left in saltwater. But I'm inclined to think such an energy solution is probably worth using where available - it certainly offers an answer to the question of where we're going to fit enough windmills to be useful. This is a problem that all forms of passive energy collection suffer from to some degree.
That being said, I could put your question back at you. Can you give me a credible reason not to build nuclear power plants? And don't just trot out Chernobyl or waste issues without elaborating - show some depth in your reasoning.
This is one instance where you can have a system that's cheap, redundant or sophisticated, pick 2. Cloud computing is the cheap, redundant option, in which case they may have cut corners on eventualities like lightning strikes.
I'm more curious as to why the servers were centralized enough to be vulnerable to this. Kinda defeats the purpose of redundancy, no? OTOH, it does sound like they had enough backups in place to get everything up and running again in short order, so maybe it's unfair to second-guess them.
I'm reading between the lines here (it doesn't actually say this in TFA), but it sounds like this was a direct hit. Not an outage, which is a different beast.
A UPS is about as useful in this instance as antibiotics against a virus - it's a solution to a different problem. Surge protectors don't help much either, not unless the strike was a fairly mild and/or remote one. You could switch over to a disconnected UPS system every time there's a thunderstorm on the horizon, but that seems needlessly complicated and expensive.
That being said, the GP referred to an outage, so you've quite correctly answered his question; it's just the wrong question to ask in this instance. And of course I could be misreading (or Amazon could be misrepresenting) the exact nature of the failure - if it were a regular outage, none of the above would apply.
I was never "in the loop". My interest stems from a personal gratification angle instead of a professional one - I like learning things. That does tend to result in my knowledge getting out of date however. This is especially true in fields that advance quickly.
Back on topic, I was aware that GRBs originate from several different sources, and are classed accordingly. My post was going to mention this, but I deleted it for the sake of shortness and simplicity.
It gives you something of sense of the scale of a supernova.
Point taken. I suppose I didn't consider the sheer quantity of statistically insignificant interactions.
That being said, I'd still like to see something a little more substantive on the subject than back of the envelope calculations (and that includes my own). It isn't that I doubt the math for the values given so much as I doubt the question of neutrino lethality is simple enough to answer that easily.
I'm aware of neutrino induced fission as a means of interaction, and the prospect of mass fissioning of matter in the path of a neutrino burst from a supernova inspires both awe and doubt. Not doubt that the result would be lethal so much that the situation would even be possible.
(And yes, I am very much aware that the other output from the nova would kill you at the distances involved, but that doesn't make the question any less interesting).
The neutrinos from a core collapse supernova would be lethal to humans at the distance of Jupiter
I'm not going to put an obnoxious citation needed tag here, but damned if I wasn't tempted. That's the first I've ever heard of neutrinos being deadly to anything at all. I'm understandably sceptical.
I don't suppose you remember the source for that? I'd be curious to see the details.
That being said, the distance between the sun and Jupiter is on the order of tens of light minutes, whereas here to Betelgeuse is hundreds of light years. They may both be, as you say, close to us in astronomical terms, but that isn't saying much. Not when stacked against a few orders of magnitude, anyway.
That assumption relies on a lot of theory. One things for sure, if that star goes bang our theories will improve at a rapid rate.
Well, put another way, the theories have to be wrong in exactly the right way for the results to be hazardous. If they're wrong in some other fashion (such as our misjudging what exactly causes a GRB), then hey, no problem. If the theories surrounding gamma ray bursts and supernovae are right, we're probably safe. They have to be mostly right, but get the directionality of the burst wrong, before we're in trouble. Or the star would have to shift on its axis and point precisely where we don't want it.
A supergiant going nova that close could be bad. Neutrinos wouldn't be the problem however - more likely it would be x-rays or gamma rays that would do Bad Things(TM) to the planet.
As mentioned elsewhere, there is some question as to whether observed long duration gamma ray bursts are the product of dying stars collapsing into a black hole. If that theory is correct, the final moments of a supergiant's demise produce two "jets" of gamma rays going in polar opposite directs - the "burst" is actually a far away beam that we're coincidentally in the path of. An unlikely event to be sure, but statistically not impossible, and given a large enough sample size of stars, we're bound to see a few.
The thing is, we see those events intergalacticly - stars dying in other galaxies produce GRBs visible here. Which should tell you how much energy they pack. At closer range, we'd be royally screwed. Though if such events were statistically likely, you'd expect life on earth to have been snuffed out repeatedly these past four billenia, which it has not been. There are a world of assumptions in that scenario, some of which may be disproved in the future.
First up, let me preface this by saying a supernova happening at six hundred light years is probably no big deal. Probably. However, there is some evidence that gamma ray bursts might be the product of a sufficiently massive star dying and producing a black hole, in which case we could be in trouble if we were struck be such an event at close range.
But having the bulk of the earth between yourself and such an event would not save you. Remember that we're talking about enough energy here to be detected over intergalactic distances using fairly rudimentary instruments. That much ionizing radiation will cause sufficient damage to the world's surface on the facing side to ensure the deaths of everyone globally.
However, this presumes that A) GRBs are in fact supernovae emanations, B) Betelgeuse will produce such an event if (when) it dies and C) the energy will be directed at us. There is some support for the idea that long GRBs occur as "jet" effects in two polar opposite directions, which would explain why we don't see them every time a star goes kaput. We need to be in the line of sight. If this were a common occurrence for the earth, it is very likely we would not be here at all.
Would the neutrinos affect us at all? Is this another doomsday scenario?
Please, please tell me this was a joke. Please tell me you actually understood what a neutrino is, and were intentionally posting something absurd.
In the off-chance you were serious, a neutrino doesn't interact with matter enough to do any damage. This is not a matter of any uncertainty. A single neutrino would have a chance of passing through several light years of solid lead without interacting with a single atom. Neutrinos are sleeting through your body right now from the centre of the sun; they pass through the suns outer layers unimpeded, and if the sun isn't overhead wherever you are right now, then they've also passed through the innards of the earth.
Neutrinos can't affect us. Or the earth, or much of anything, really.
It only takes a small subset who are immune to the industrial value meme (personal pleasure in exchange for having fewer kids).
In the US it is hispanic catholics. In Europe it is Islamics.
Sorry in advance for the long post, but I get a bit sick of this. Do you actually believe that, or were you simply told this fact by someone you thought wiser than yourself?
The only relevant separating factors that those two groups have from the places they've immigrated to are culture and religion. Neither of which survive unchanged in the long term (and when talking about population dynamics, it's the long term that matters). I'll focus on the former group for brevity's sake.
Among Catholics, there is a world of difference between what is practised among those in the developing and developed world. There is little difference between what is preached, and I want to emphasize that. Regardless of where you are, if you're Catholic, the Padre is going to tell you not to use birth control, ever. Yet this advice is casually disregarded among American and European Catholics. This wasn't always the case, but times have changed.
Why the difference in practises? Culture. Religion does not exist in a vacuum. It is a part of, and is interpreted by, a larger society of practitioners which may span multiple cultures. Barring small cults that enforce strict and total adherence to dogma (and I'm including some Christian fringe groups in my definition of "cult" here), every religion is practised differently in each culture that its adherents live in.
Immigrants adjust to the culture they've moved to. They don't think they will, and many people already living there don't think they will either either, but they do. Every single immigrant group thinks it's going to maintain separation and keep its own language and traditions - if this were true, then the people who think of themselves as local would still belong to some immigrant group themselves. There would be no "locals" anywhere at all.
The only exception I can think of to this is when the immigrating culture kicks out the existing one, such as what happened when Europeans came to North America, but we have a separate word for that - colonization - and it's not what generally goes on today. It took a huge gap in technology to allow that, coupled with massive migration from old world to new, such that the colonists both outgunned and outnumbered the locals.
If Hispanic Catholics were going to move into the United States and remain totally unaffected by the change in scenery, then I might agree with you. They aren't. Within a variable, but finite, time period, they will become akin to the current batch of American Catholics, who of course aren't reproducing nearly as fast as they would be if the followed all the dogma.
That would be more true were it not for the fact that medicine and modern living does more to strengthen our immune response than weaken it. Remember that people living without such luxuries are the ones who suffer the brunt of disease, and having immune systems weakened by chronic infection and malnutrition is a major factor in that.
I bet they don't have as many allergies however - that's more a problem for those of us who have immune systems that lack pathogens to expend their strength upon.
Also, while jumping species increases the danger of a pathogen turning into a major killer (see for example the AIDS epidemic), it is not because the time spent evolving in another organism makes the infection more deadly. Pathogens that kill their hosts are poorly adapted organisms; the best disease is the one that infects and prospers, at the host's expense, but not at the cost of their life (which would end that prosperity). If a disease is adapted to infecting, but not actually killing, an animal, then finds its way into a human, the situation changes. Whatever adaptations it had to cope with its previous host will no longer work.
This doesn't mean all zoonotic infections are deadly, but then, you never hear about the ones that aren't, do you?
*Sigh* I see this POV every time a novel plague story (fact or fiction) comes up...
First up, the widespread view in the popular media regarding "overpopulation" is riddled with errors, both factual and logical. So it is very likely you've already been given a skewed view of what the situation is.
If the global rate of reproduction had remained steady for the past two hundred years, we would not now be at close to seven billion, we'd be much more numerous. The rate at which people have kids is declining. The reasons are too numerous to list here, and range from per-capital wealth to modern sanitation to birth control, but a large part that your view on overpopulation overlooks is the fact that human beings are self-regulating.
We don't breed to the extent our biology allows - we are one of only a handful of species that exercises choice in the matter. 2 kids to the couple has become the norm in the developed world, and yet would have been considered extremely unusual even a hundred years back. The birthrates in the developing world are variable, but declining. The current continuation of growth is as much about population inertia as anything else, and is not a stable state.
This does not mean overpopulation isn't an issue. Growth is exponential, and if the human race all decided at once that having lots of kids was the way to go, we'd be in trouble. This is part of what happened in China under Mao; the one child policy came later, as a massive, scrambled overreaction to a nonetheless serious problem.
Even without such a radical shift, it is obvious we must be cautious of the dangers that large numbers, fragile ecologies and limited resources bring. But the Malthusian predictions of imminent, unstoppable doom date back to the nineteenth century and are just as foolish and as naive now as ever. It is not just that we can avert such disasters; by and large we have averted them, as evidence by our continued, comfortable existence. We should not let ourselves get too complacent or comfortable, but neither should we despair of humanity's inability to control itself when needed.
Second to this, pandemic disease was not, is not, and never will be a danger to our species. A massive plague like the black death in the medieval period still leaves more alive than dead, and that is about as bad as it can get. If a plague of equal strength hit the human race today, we'd be down to about 4-5 billion. Which is more people than lived even fifty years ago. Remember that even though the rate of reproduction is declining, it's still an exponential equation, and you don't have to go that far back to find populations a fraction of what they are today.
Finally, never personify nature. She hates that:-) When you hear people talk of the "forces of nature" or "forces of evolution" remind yourself that they would never have gotten through a rudimentary education in biology with that attitude and are therefor most likely speaking from their colon.
On top of that, a fairly large percentage also live in close proximity to either the coasts or the great lakes. Large bodies of water have a moderating effect on proximate climates - cooler in summer, warmer in winter.
Really, the "frozen canucks" business is pretty limited. There are northern inland cities that get damn cold in winter, and there are a few scattered people living in the territories, but something like 70-80% of the population never sees more snow than they get in new england.
Canada officially uses metric, and unofficially uses feet, inches and pounds only, for a number of applications where those units either make more sense or are holdovers from an earlier system. Think height or weight.
The population of the US does not, as a general rule, know or use metric. Metric is still used for things like scientific academia and engineering, where international interoperability matters, but beyond that it's not employed for much of anything. The average citizen knows metric only in terms of how it can be converted - kilometres into miles, or kilograms into pounds for example.
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The problem is that if you use fiscal measures to "encourage" having fewer children you are, by definition "punishing" those who have more. At the very least you are questioning the wisdom of having so many children.
You misunderstand. The reduction in birthrate I speak of has nothing whatsoever to do with punishment. No program is in place to ensure people like myself do not have many kids, and yet I can't think of a single person I've known within ten years of my age with more than 3. 1 or none is more often the case.
The cause isn't government programs, or social stigma, or any such bullshit, it's a reflection of reality. If you live in a developed country, you have an incentive (several actually), not to have as many kids. That's true whether you've just moved there from some other part of the world, or whether you've always lived there.
It takes time for culture to catch up to the reality. It always works that way, no matter what the reality and culture clashing with it are. But when it does, an immigrant or their offspring will cease to have as many children. This has happened before and will happen again, no matter how loudly both the immigrant groups and their opponents claim otherwise.
Immigrants typically have more children. Since questioning anything that is typical of immigrants is racist, much less actually punishing, this topic is verboten.
I can't think of a single way for a government to punish having kids that wouldn't be borderline totalitarian. Forget "racist" - "tyrannical" springs to mind. Better to let cultural assimilation do what it has always done, and assume they'll be at the average birthrate in a generation or so.
Nuclear power is complex. Maintaining a reaction takes experts with decades of education and years of training. Calculate the cost of education into the cost of nuclear power? You should.
Unless "decades of education" was meant to include their high school diploma, I think you're exaggerating. Not that I disagree with your fundamental point; a nuclear plant does pay good money for qualified staff, and that does include paying for some of their training.
You're correct that the level of expertise needed is particular to nuclear power, but it is part of a larger cost associate with staff. No means of power generation is fully automated. Even a system like the one in TFA presumably pays somebody's wages.
Compare "the worst that can happen" in nuclear power to the same with solar, wind, geothermal, or hydroelectric power. This alone should be enough to deter us from nuclear power, because no matter what, mistakes are always made and the unexpected occurs.
"Worst that could happen" for a hydro dam is a major flood. I'd call that unlikely, assuming the engineers and construction team did their jobs right. But then, I'd say the same about nuclear.
I'd agree that nuclear is dangerous, but disagree that the danger should deter us from using it at all. Like all technology that can go awry, caution must be used, safeguards put in place.
I'd suggest reading up on passive safety mechanisms in nuclear power. Look up "pebble bed reactors", which have the means to make the fuel fly apart if it gets too hot, halting the chain reaction. There is never a total absence of risk, but the risk can be made small enough for our purposes. The question is not: is it perfect? - the question is: is it worth it?
If the choice came down to a mix of passive power collection, coupled with either nuclear or coal, which would you pick? Assuming we could not meet all our energy needs with alternative energy alone and we needed one or the other.
Currently, the only method of cleaning a nuclear accident is to package and store all the radiated stuff underground. Did you see the article recently about the irradiated mud wasps? That is seriously messed up.
Didn't see the article. Got a link?
I am very much aware of the risks associated with radioactive contamination. I am also aware that it isn't the end of the world. There are living things in closer proximity to Chernobyl than we though possible; the assumption 20 years ago was that the reactor site and all around it would be sterile for centuries. Hiroshima and Nagasaki were both rebuilt and are home to people today, a bare sixty years after being nuked (and it's not like they were rebuilt yesterday either). Yes radiation is scary. No it is not reason enough to convince me that we must abandon nuclear power.
Before sending astronauts into space, every conceivable scenario is considered and plans are made for the just in case. Nuclear proponents never seem to want to finish solving the problems before plunging headlong into them.
On this... I actually agree with you. If new reactors are going to be built, they need to be designed with the utmost care, even if that means raising the cost considerably.
What you may not realize is that even the older, less safe, water moderated reactors currently in use have an excellent safety record. The major accidents - Chernobyl and Windscale - used designs known at the time to be less than safe. The sole accident I can think of for a light water moderated design was Three Mile Island, where the safety systems actually worked. Nobody died, no contamination was released - the worst problem was actually the hysteria associated with the words "nuclear" and "accident" in the same headline.
Nuclear power isn't perfect. It does have serious problems. These problems need to be definatively solved before the concept as a whole is a valid solu
This particular turbine isn't tethered. That's what makes it special - the earlier models work the way you describe.
The advantage of tidal is that it's cyclical and predictable; the drawback is that it's expensive and hard to maintain. I don't think attaching it to a wind based system would lessen the drawbacks much.
Now, attaching a wind turbine to some sort of nifty power storage device to equalize it's variable output, that would be useful. Wind power would pair nicely with a hydroelectric dam, since the reservoir can be used to store power during periods of low demand by pumping water back up into it.
In the very long-term (barring global catastrophes) humanity will have to start to settle the oceans, and this experiment will give us information as to how we might be able to do that in the far future.
Why?
Habitable space won't be the reason. To settle the ocean would require a fully artificial environment - one where we build every square meter we live in from the ground (or sea) up. If we're going to do that, we might as well build arcologies, and save ourselves the trouble of plugging leaks. Plus, the population growth rate is levelling off, lessening pressure to find new places to inhabit.
Because it's there? Space would be a better choice. Absence of pressure is easier to live with than overabundance of it. Solar energy is plentiful in the inner system. And an offworld colony has the virtue of surviving global catastrophes that would wipe out land and sea based habitats. Added bonus - no local ecology to damage, something the ocean most definitely has. We can colonize both of course, but I'm not sure I'd say we "have to".
Apart from all that, I'd say we already "colonized" the ocean, ages ago when we started building long-haul ships. We just don't live there all the time, or without land-based support. I doubt that will change.
I fail to see what immigration has to do with overpopulation. Or rather, I do see, but what I see is only shortsightedness.
A person moving from place A to place B does not increase the net population of AB, but does make their negative impact on the environment B's problem. So the attitude of "if we curb immigration, we reduce pollution" omits the reality that pollution does not obey national borders. It's the attitude of "somebody else's problem", which I could frankly do without.
Of course, you could argue that immigrants moving from a poor country to a rich one will use more resources once there. That is technically correct. But the counterpoint is that richer populations have fewer children, and in the long run that immigrant is going to assimilate. If not them, then their children. And part of that assimilation is the reduction in birthrate that comes from living in the developed world.
Minor quibble: The mining and transport of fuel for a nuclear reactor is a negligible cost. Uranium ore and fuel pellets are relatively safe items, at least as far as heavy metals go, and you don't need very much fuel for a reactor. Even processing it needn't be that costly, since you can use a heavy-water reactor with un-enriched or minimally enriched fuel. If you are using enriched fuel, it's still fairly cheap in terms of dollars spent per megawatt generated.
Reprocessing the waste does have a cost associated with it, and storing or disposing of the waste you can't or won't reprocess even more so, so that part of your post was correct. And of course the operational costs of a nuclear reactor are pretty high. But then, we don't know the operational costs of these new turbines yet (which is going to be higher than it ought to be, given it's a prototype).
The international community has threatened to prohibit the sale of Australian uranium because we don't store the spent rods, but we do reprocess them. This has non-proliferation consequences.
Okay, now I'm curious. What non-proliferation consequences are there to this policy?
You do know it's a prototype, right? The first design to float freely (as opposed to earlier designs that were anchored)?
The first version always costs more. Later versions are built at a fraction the price. Such is the nature of R&D.
So, patience. Expect a solution immediately, cheaply and bug-free, and you will be endlessly disappointed with what real life has to offer. But hey, it'll open up a career in management for you :-P
You do know that using wind power on the ocean goes back a ways, right? If we hadn't solved that tipping over problem some time ago, we'd never have build sailboats :-P
All that it takes is a wide keel and some ballast. You just need to be bottom heavy enough to have a low centre of gravity, and be wide enough that if one side starts to sink, buoyancy automatically corrects by lifting that side back to the water line.
For a non-moving station, these problems are simple, since you don't need to worry about maintaining mobility. Your buoy can be an air-filled plastic sphere with a lead weight bolted to the bottom. Easy. On a boat, you need to keep a more slender shape than a sphere in order to lower resistance, and you want your ballast to be as light as you can safely get away with to keep the keel fairly shallow (both for reducing resistance and weight, and allowing the ship to enter shallow water without grounding).
Well, too many could be a hazard to navigation, plus there's the whole cost-benefit business, and the high maintenance costs associated with anything left in saltwater. But I'm inclined to think such an energy solution is probably worth using where available - it certainly offers an answer to the question of where we're going to fit enough windmills to be useful. This is a problem that all forms of passive energy collection suffer from to some degree.
That being said, I could put your question back at you. Can you give me a credible reason not to build nuclear power plants? And don't just trot out Chernobyl or waste issues without elaborating - show some depth in your reasoning.
This is one instance where you can have a system that's cheap, redundant or sophisticated, pick 2. Cloud computing is the cheap, redundant option, in which case they may have cut corners on eventualities like lightning strikes.
I'm more curious as to why the servers were centralized enough to be vulnerable to this. Kinda defeats the purpose of redundancy, no? OTOH, it does sound like they had enough backups in place to get everything up and running again in short order, so maybe it's unfair to second-guess them.
I'm reading between the lines here (it doesn't actually say this in TFA), but it sounds like this was a direct hit. Not an outage, which is a different beast.
A UPS is about as useful in this instance as antibiotics against a virus - it's a solution to a different problem. Surge protectors don't help much either, not unless the strike was a fairly mild and/or remote one. You could switch over to a disconnected UPS system every time there's a thunderstorm on the horizon, but that seems needlessly complicated and expensive.
That being said, the GP referred to an outage, so you've quite correctly answered his question; it's just the wrong question to ask in this instance. And of course I could be misreading (or Amazon could be misrepresenting) the exact nature of the failure - if it were a regular outage, none of the above would apply.
*Shrug*
I was never "in the loop". My interest stems from a personal gratification angle instead of a professional one - I like learning things. That does tend to result in my knowledge getting out of date however. This is especially true in fields that advance quickly.
Back on topic, I was aware that GRBs originate from several different sources, and are classed accordingly. My post was going to mention this, but I deleted it for the sake of shortness and simplicity.
Thank you, that was exactly the sort of thing I wanted to find :-)
It gives you something of sense of the scale of a supernova.
Point taken. I suppose I didn't consider the sheer quantity of statistically insignificant interactions.
That being said, I'd still like to see something a little more substantive on the subject than back of the envelope calculations (and that includes my own). It isn't that I doubt the math for the values given so much as I doubt the question of neutrino lethality is simple enough to answer that easily.
I'm aware of neutrino induced fission as a means of interaction, and the prospect of mass fissioning of matter in the path of a neutrino burst from a supernova inspires both awe and doubt. Not doubt that the result would be lethal so much that the situation would even be possible.
(And yes, I am very much aware that the other output from the nova would kill you at the distances involved, but that doesn't make the question any less interesting).
The neutrinos from a core collapse supernova would be lethal to humans at the distance of Jupiter
I'm not going to put an obnoxious citation needed tag here, but damned if I wasn't tempted. That's the first I've ever heard of neutrinos being deadly to anything at all. I'm understandably sceptical.
I don't suppose you remember the source for that? I'd be curious to see the details.
That being said, the distance between the sun and Jupiter is on the order of tens of light minutes, whereas here to Betelgeuse is hundreds of light years. They may both be, as you say, close to us in astronomical terms, but that isn't saying much. Not when stacked against a few orders of magnitude, anyway.
That assumption relies on a lot of theory. One things for sure, if that star goes bang our theories will improve at a rapid rate.
Well, put another way, the theories have to be wrong in exactly the right way for the results to be hazardous. If they're wrong in some other fashion (such as our misjudging what exactly causes a GRB), then hey, no problem. If the theories surrounding gamma ray bursts and supernovae are right, we're probably safe. They have to be mostly right, but get the directionality of the burst wrong, before we're in trouble. Or the star would have to shift on its axis and point precisely where we don't want it.
Ah, ok.
A supergiant going nova that close could be bad. Neutrinos wouldn't be the problem however - more likely it would be x-rays or gamma rays that would do Bad Things(TM) to the planet.
As mentioned elsewhere, there is some question as to whether observed long duration gamma ray bursts are the product of dying stars collapsing into a black hole. If that theory is correct, the final moments of a supergiant's demise produce two "jets" of gamma rays going in polar opposite directs - the "burst" is actually a far away beam that we're coincidentally in the path of. An unlikely event to be sure, but statistically not impossible, and given a large enough sample size of stars, we're bound to see a few.
The thing is, we see those events intergalacticly - stars dying in other galaxies produce GRBs visible here. Which should tell you how much energy they pack. At closer range, we'd be royally screwed. Though if such events were statistically likely, you'd expect life on earth to have been snuffed out repeatedly these past four billenia, which it has not been. There are a world of assumptions in that scenario, some of which may be disproved in the future.
Won't matter much.
First up, let me preface this by saying a supernova happening at six hundred light years is probably no big deal. Probably. However, there is some evidence that gamma ray bursts might be the product of a sufficiently massive star dying and producing a black hole, in which case we could be in trouble if we were struck be such an event at close range.
But having the bulk of the earth between yourself and such an event would not save you. Remember that we're talking about enough energy here to be detected over intergalactic distances using fairly rudimentary instruments. That much ionizing radiation will cause sufficient damage to the world's surface on the facing side to ensure the deaths of everyone globally.
However, this presumes that A) GRBs are in fact supernovae emanations, B) Betelgeuse will produce such an event if (when) it dies and C) the energy will be directed at us. There is some support for the idea that long GRBs occur as "jet" effects in two polar opposite directions, which would explain why we don't see them every time a star goes kaput. We need to be in the line of sight. If this were a common occurrence for the earth, it is very likely we would not be here at all.
Would the neutrinos affect us at all? Is this another doomsday scenario?
Please, please tell me this was a joke. Please tell me you actually understood what a neutrino is, and were intentionally posting something absurd.
In the off-chance you were serious, a neutrino doesn't interact with matter enough to do any damage. This is not a matter of any uncertainty. A single neutrino would have a chance of passing through several light years of solid lead without interacting with a single atom. Neutrinos are sleeting through your body right now from the centre of the sun; they pass through the suns outer layers unimpeded, and if the sun isn't overhead wherever you are right now, then they've also passed through the innards of the earth.
Neutrinos can't affect us. Or the earth, or much of anything, really.
It only takes a small subset who are immune to the industrial value meme (personal pleasure in exchange for having fewer kids).
In the US it is hispanic catholics. In Europe it is Islamics.
Sorry in advance for the long post, but I get a bit sick of this. Do you actually believe that, or were you simply told this fact by someone you thought wiser than yourself?
The only relevant separating factors that those two groups have from the places they've immigrated to are culture and religion. Neither of which survive unchanged in the long term (and when talking about population dynamics, it's the long term that matters). I'll focus on the former group for brevity's sake.
Among Catholics, there is a world of difference between what is practised among those in the developing and developed world. There is little difference between what is preached, and I want to emphasize that. Regardless of where you are, if you're Catholic, the Padre is going to tell you not to use birth control, ever. Yet this advice is casually disregarded among American and European Catholics. This wasn't always the case, but times have changed.
Why the difference in practises? Culture. Religion does not exist in a vacuum. It is a part of, and is interpreted by, a larger society of practitioners which may span multiple cultures. Barring small cults that enforce strict and total adherence to dogma (and I'm including some Christian fringe groups in my definition of "cult" here), every religion is practised differently in each culture that its adherents live in.
Immigrants adjust to the culture they've moved to. They don't think they will, and many people already living there don't think they will either either, but they do. Every single immigrant group thinks it's going to maintain separation and keep its own language and traditions - if this were true, then the people who think of themselves as local would still belong to some immigrant group themselves. There would be no "locals" anywhere at all.
The only exception I can think of to this is when the immigrating culture kicks out the existing one, such as what happened when Europeans came to North America, but we have a separate word for that - colonization - and it's not what generally goes on today. It took a huge gap in technology to allow that, coupled with massive migration from old world to new, such that the colonists both outgunned and outnumbered the locals.
If Hispanic Catholics were going to move into the United States and remain totally unaffected by the change in scenery, then I might agree with you. They aren't. Within a variable, but finite, time period, they will become akin to the current batch of American Catholics, who of course aren't reproducing nearly as fast as they would be if the followed all the dogma.
That would be more true were it not for the fact that medicine and modern living does more to strengthen our immune response than weaken it. Remember that people living without such luxuries are the ones who suffer the brunt of disease, and having immune systems weakened by chronic infection and malnutrition is a major factor in that.
I bet they don't have as many allergies however - that's more a problem for those of us who have immune systems that lack pathogens to expend their strength upon.
Also, while jumping species increases the danger of a pathogen turning into a major killer (see for example the AIDS epidemic), it is not because the time spent evolving in another organism makes the infection more deadly. Pathogens that kill their hosts are poorly adapted organisms; the best disease is the one that infects and prospers, at the host's expense, but not at the cost of their life (which would end that prosperity). If a disease is adapted to infecting, but not actually killing, an animal, then finds its way into a human, the situation changes. Whatever adaptations it had to cope with its previous host will no longer work.
This doesn't mean all zoonotic infections are deadly, but then, you never hear about the ones that aren't, do you?
*Sigh* I see this POV every time a novel plague story (fact or fiction) comes up...
First up, the widespread view in the popular media regarding "overpopulation" is riddled with errors, both factual and logical. So it is very likely you've already been given a skewed view of what the situation is.
If the global rate of reproduction had remained steady for the past two hundred years, we would not now be at close to seven billion, we'd be much more numerous. The rate at which people have kids is declining. The reasons are too numerous to list here, and range from per-capital wealth to modern sanitation to birth control, but a large part that your view on overpopulation overlooks is the fact that human beings are self-regulating.
We don't breed to the extent our biology allows - we are one of only a handful of species that exercises choice in the matter. 2 kids to the couple has become the norm in the developed world, and yet would have been considered extremely unusual even a hundred years back. The birthrates in the developing world are variable, but declining. The current continuation of growth is as much about population inertia as anything else, and is not a stable state.
This does not mean overpopulation isn't an issue. Growth is exponential, and if the human race all decided at once that having lots of kids was the way to go, we'd be in trouble. This is part of what happened in China under Mao; the one child policy came later, as a massive, scrambled overreaction to a nonetheless serious problem.
Even without such a radical shift, it is obvious we must be cautious of the dangers that large numbers, fragile ecologies and limited resources bring. But the Malthusian predictions of imminent, unstoppable doom date back to the nineteenth century and are just as foolish and as naive now as ever. It is not just that we can avert such disasters; by and large we have averted them, as evidence by our continued, comfortable existence. We should not let ourselves get too complacent or comfortable, but neither should we despair of humanity's inability to control itself when needed.
Second to this, pandemic disease was not, is not, and never will be a danger to our species. A massive plague like the black death in the medieval period still leaves more alive than dead, and that is about as bad as it can get. If a plague of equal strength hit the human race today, we'd be down to about 4-5 billion. Which is more people than lived even fifty years ago. Remember that even though the rate of reproduction is declining, it's still an exponential equation, and you don't have to go that far back to find populations a fraction of what they are today.
Finally, never personify nature. She hates that :-) When you hear people talk of the "forces of nature" or "forces of evolution" remind yourself that they would never have gotten through a rudimentary education in biology with that attitude and are therefor most likely speaking from their colon.
On top of that, a fairly large percentage also live in close proximity to either the coasts or the great lakes. Large bodies of water have a moderating effect on proximate climates - cooler in summer, warmer in winter.
Really, the "frozen canucks" business is pretty limited. There are northern inland cities that get damn cold in winter, and there are a few scattered people living in the territories, but something like 70-80% of the population never sees more snow than they get in new england.
Canada officially uses metric, and unofficially uses feet, inches and pounds only, for a number of applications where those units either make more sense or are holdovers from an earlier system. Think height or weight.
The population of the US does not, as a general rule, know or use metric. Metric is still used for things like scientific academia and engineering, where international interoperability matters, but beyond that it's not employed for much of anything. The average citizen knows metric only in terms of how it can be converted - kilometres into miles, or kilograms into pounds for example.