Re:what a hard-nosed skeptic you are
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Oceans Empty By 2048?
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Crichton's State of Fear is a now infamous piece of pseudo-science. Never cite it if you want to be taken seriously.
I'm honestly amazed that people cite Crichton at all in a serious discussion. Not because I have anything against the man personally, but because he's a fiction writer.
It's like citing Stephen King on the subject of, say, epidemiology. Does anyone think The Stand is a reputable source of scientific information? No? Then why would State of Fear be? Again, nothing wrong with liking a book, but there is no sensible reason to cite fiction as if it were fact. Crichton doesn't belong in a discussion of climate change.
Plus, Crichton himself isn't a very good science fiction writer. He gets his facts muddled in his other books; Jurrasic Park screwed up both archeology and biology - the Velociraptors being an example of the former, and "life will find a way" Lamarkism being an example of the latter. I could see citing a scifi author on a subject like technology in the future, but only if that author did his research.
I'm not saying that Bully should be banned. But there should be full disclosure of homosexual content.
Being in the news (as in TFA) isn't full disclosure? Given how many idiot parents can't seem to read the ESRB labels, I'd say having this in the news will alert more people to the "objectionable" content than any label would.
If Mario suddenly ripped off Luigi's head and started raping the eye sockets
...then the game would get a AO rating, and nobody would stock it. How many hetai games can you buy at your local EB?
The system works fine for nudity, sex, extreme violence and other content that people get riled up about. If anything, games are held to a higher standard than movies or TV; Wal-mart & co will stock R rated movie, but balks at M rated games. If movies aren't required (by law or by common practice) to have a "Warning: men kissing" label, then why on earth would games?
Plus, you can't skip content in a movie except by fast forwarding, whereas you can avoid content in a game. Fallout 1&2 let me gun down innocent children, yet oddly I somehow I've never chosen to do so. Does the fact I can make the game wrong in some way, or is it my choice whether to play as a good or evil character? Likewise, bully doesn't require you to kiss boys. If you do, then it is implicitly assumed that you are playing your character as though he was gay. The decision is yours, which is more than a movie allows.
And Bully gets a Teen rating.
It has no carnage. No serious violence. No nudity. And no depictions of sexuality beyond kissing (which is below the radar of the ESRB). Why would it get a rating higher than teen?
Rockstar tried pushing the envelope in GTA and got burnt. So, they just picked a different letter and moved it very slowly.
Got burnt? Yeah, they cried all the way to the bank! Those poor, maligned success stories....
Seriously, Jackass here is the best thing that ever happened to them. As long as he keeps up his "crusade", they get free press, and a reputation that will attract people purely for the controversy.
What's more, they've now made it a political issue by shifting the controversial content from sex and violence (which both the political left and right oppose on "moral" grounds) to homosexuality (which will piss off the right, but get sympathy support from the left). I wouldn't pity these guys. They know how to sell a game, ethically or otherwise.
You missed the Monty Python reference in the parent post. What you said is quite a bit like what John Cleese sang in The Meaning of Life, during the "organ donor" sketch. Turn in your geek card buddy:-)
Nevertheless, the person I replied to indicated that (s)he thought stem cells came from aborted fetuses. Ie, that you start with an unwanted pregnancy, you abort, and harvest the cells from what's left. I've run into so many people who believe that nonsense, and I was correcting it here; stem cells come from IVF clinics, not abortion clinics. If you want to oppose stem cell research, fine, but to be ethically consistant you must likewise oppose the disposal of unimplanted embryos at IVF clinics (something that politicians opposed to stem cell research are notably silent on, since being factually or ethically consistant isn't part of their agenda).
The misconception about where stem cells come from is widespread, and the blame lies soley with those who seek to polarize the debate for their own ends (well, to be fair, scientific illiteracy plays a part as well, but you can't very well blame anyone for that). There are legitimate ethical questions to be debated no doubt, but we can't very well discuss them if both sides are so poorly informed that they equate stem cell harvesting with abortion (which is a largely a seperate issue).
Embryonic stem cells DO NOT COME FROM THE WOMB. At all. At any stage. Period. Can I make this clearer?
When you do a procedure called in vitro fertilization (IVF), you extract unfertalized eggs from a woman's ovaries. Note the words "unfertalized", and "ovaries"; no unborn child is removed from the womb.
You then combine these eggs with sperm in a test tube (no special procedure is required to get the sperm, guys are well equiped to provide their own sample). You now have N embryoes outside the human body, which can be frozen to preserve them.
You take some of those fertilized eggs and implant them back into a host body (often the same woman who donated the unfertilized eggs, but not always). If the first batch takes, then you're still left with (N - variable number) embryoes in a test tube in the freezer. Those embryoes are destined for the medical trash can. The "mother" is already pregnant at this stage, so the leftovers are no longer needed. Usually they're discarded as medical waste, but in the case of stem cell research, they're instead used to provide embryonic stem cells. Then they're still discarded as medical waste, the same way they would be if no stem cell research existed.
Got it? No fetus was aborted from the womb, as it was never in there in the first place. There is no abortion involved at any stage, according to the legal, technical, and generally understood meaning of "abortion". No pregancy was terminated.
Now, some folks believe life begins at conception. They have every right to oppose stem cell research, but they should also oppose IVF, since a much larger number of "lives" will get flushed down the drain with or without stem cell extraction first. Some people who are inforned about the issues do in fact oppose both, but they're in the minority, and they aren't motivated by politics. Politicians gloss over these facts because facts are often inconvienient for their goals of getting elected.
People who only oppose abortion when the embryo has a chance to develop into a child, for example, should have no ethical problem with stem cell research. However they do have a problem because politicians have lied to them. They've been told that stem cells come from abortion. This lie is so widely believed that it's polarized the entire debate. It's even more amazing that somebody who supports stem cell reseach would fall for this.
Get back to us when you have a way to strip a planet of most of its atmosphere. Remember that Venus has enough air that the surface pressure is akin to the bottom of the ocean on Earth. How are you going to get rid of that? Where do you plan on moving it to?
Oh, and you might want to look into how you'd go about giving Venus a useful rotational period (it's something godawfully long now, 240 odd days), and a protective magnetic field. Otherwise, you can pretty much forget about living on the surface; you'd fry in daylight, freeze at night, and get radiated if you went out unshielded during the day.. While you're at it, I'd reccomend finding someplace to get several oceans worth of liquid water, and finding a way to move that water across interplanetary distances.
Terraforming Venus is a task that makes terraforming Mars look downright easy by way of comparison.
One thing that I continually like to point out is that "life" at a basic level is agressively replicant. If there is any life that is a little successful, it explodes and tries to fill every nook and cranny and does it as fast as it can.
That assumption is working from Earthlike conditions. Life is successful here for reasons that don't apply offworld; namely the abundance of liquid water, plentiful useful chemical compounds in the air, and a thick atmosphere coupled with a magnetic field that blocks most harmful radiation. Without those advantages, Earth could only support a handful of extremophiles.
Mars lacks liquid water on its surface. The atmosphere is thin, meaning that lifeforms would have to make do with less Co2 (and no free Oxygen). The thin atmosphere coupled with the lack of a magnetic field means that surface radiation is unhealthy by terrestrial standards, at least during the day.
Now, what that means is that logically, the chances of there being any life at all on Mars are slim. The odds are against there even being simple bacteria. But if there is life, there most certainly aren't the conditions for abundant, successful life. Scant resources and unfavourable surface conditions make Mars an environment only suited to simple, minimal biology. And the surface would be the wrong place to look for it; we'd have to dig down to find it, if it even exists.
Simply looking for signs of aggregate life, or looking for massive biological activity, won't work.
Why go to all that trouble? If we want hydrogen, and are prepared to accept nuclear power, we can do it far more easily with high temperature electrolysis.
The way they make it sound in TFA suggests that the amount of hydrogen produced relative to the amount of natural radiation present is small. Conversely, the amount of hydrogen that could be produced by a dedicated nuke plant is large, and the amount of radioactive material present in the reactor is small.
Plus, if you expose nuclear waste to water, then you run into problems with the water getting contaminated, and the waste getting corroded. Just because something occurs naturally does not mean it would meet our safety standards if we were to duplicate it.
People keeps saying 'of course,' and they're always wrong.
Of course the sky is blue. Of course the earth revolves around the sun. Of course illogical blanket statements are meaningless. Are those statements wrong, simply because I've prefaced them with "of course"?
It is quite possible to be sufficiently knowledgeable about either biology or physics to state that no bacteria can "catalyze" a nuclear reaction. This isn't cutting edge physics or complex biology; fission reactions aren't catalyzed by chemical ones. At all. That doesn't leave enough wiggle room for you to be right.
I could maybe, possibly, see bacteria concentrating fissile material. That would speed up the rate of fission, increasing both decay and radioactivity. Wouldn't work with all forms of radioactive decay though - not everything radioactive is fissile. And you'd be trading 1X years of 1Y radiation for 1/2X years of 2Y radiation; you'd just turn long lived low hazard waste into short lived high hazard waste.
But catalyze a nuclear reaction with a chemical one? Not a chance in hell. You can't change a compound's nuclear properties by chemical proccesses. Unless you want to give medival alchemy a shot, you are SOL.
A better comparison for games would be alcohol. Most drinkers aren't alcoholics, and most gamers aren't gaming addicts.
Most smokers OTOH are de facto smoking addicts. Ditto heroin, or any number of other highly addictive substances. It isn't just about what the consequences for use are, it's about how hard it is to stop. What seperates heroin from smoking is the monetary cost; you don't need to break the law to pay for ciggarettes.
Booze and games both have large "user" bases that aren't hooked. The addicts are the exception, not the rule. That doesn't deny the existance of alcoholics (I know a few, and chances are you do to), rather it says that only a small fraction of those who drink will become dependant.
To refer to any heavy use of something as "addiction" is to lower the standards of addiction to the point where most couch potatoes would qualify as "TV addicts". A heavy drinker is not neccesarily an alcoholic. A heavy gamer isn't neccesarily a gaming addict. A heavy smoker is almost certainly a tobbaco addict. See the distinction?
...you'd prefer they LARP for the benefit of an ethereal third party instead of play an MMO? Whether you're grinding faction with god or with dwarves, it's all the same shit. Just a different carrot on a stick.
You know, I think you've just found the real reason why fundies don't like D&D. It's a competing franchise! Jack Chick makes so much more sense as an astroturfer...
This modern age has taught him that he's just an animal that happened to evolve, with no significance. And he's been taught that there's nothing beyond this life to hold him accountable.
Sounds like an improvement over previous eras to me. Would he somehow be better off living in superstitious fear of divine wrath, and firmly beleiving in his own superiority?
People who beleive that they are superior, or that god is on their side, are dangerous. And that doesn't just hold true for religion; people who hold to non-religious ideologies that maintain a view of self-superiority are just as bad (see: fascism in the 20th century and social darwinism in the 19th as examples of ideology that gave it's adherants a warm fuzzy feeling of superiority). A little humbleness could do the human race some good.
Plus, I've seen what happens when the only thing driving morality is fear of the afterlife. If a fanatic honestly believes that god wants them to do something immoral, then they'll do it, and to hell with whoever they hurt or kill in the process. Is this somehow better than the apathy displayed by the GP?
Humans are humans. Regardless of reason, religion or era, they have the capacity for evil. To suggest that somehow the modern era is worse than the previous eras is to ignore all the apathy, ignorance and violence of those time periods. To suggest that any religion or ideology can prevent evil is to ignore mankinds capacity for fanaticism. At best it's rose-coloured glasses, and at worst it's an unhealthy desire to return to the bad old days.
Not to say we've improved very much mind you, but I take issue with the idea that there was some better era centuries or millenia past.
The amount of energy coming from the sun is not a problem. And converting it to something usable isn't really a problem either.
Which was kinda my point. Perhaps I should have been clearer when I said "solar" - I didn't mean the sun wasn't going to cut it, I meant commercial solar power generation wasn't going to cut it.
Perhaps he meant something like this, which, as you can see, may or may not quite be there yet from an economic standpoint. Interesting, though.
Ah cool. I'd never run into that before. I'll have to go find some more info on it. Thanks for the link:-)
Perhaps I should have added "and is acceptable to the general public" to that list. Clean is a relative measure - the perception of nuclear power as dirty is a more important barrier to building nuke plants than the actual cost of the waste. That's not to say there isn't also a signifigant cost associated with reproccessing and/or disposing of the waste products, but the larger issue is nuclear's bad reputation.
Additionally, I'm not so sure it fits the criteria for cheap. Remember that what we're talking about here is generating power for the purpose of making hydrogen. The energy required to replace gasoline is enormous. Nuclear power is an effecient choice for hydrogen production, since you can use high temperature electrolysis, but the cost per unit of hydrogen produced may still be prohibitive.
Yeah, that's true about the moon, but if we want raw materials, I think the asteroid belt makes as much sense. That still gives us the advantage of free-fall, constant sunlight sans lunar night, and no gravity well to climb out of on the other end.
It's worth remembering also that we'd have to ship up an enormous amount of hardware to make any commercial space exploration possible, so getting raw materials locally might not be a particular advantage. I'm not sure at what stage sending mining and refining equiptment to the moon beats out sending proccessed materials into orbit for industrial work. OTOH, mining is a dirty job to begin with, so if the goal is to move polluting industries off-world, then it makes a little more sense (though I'd still go for the belt first).
As for fusion, we don't have to leave earth for that. Deuterium is in abundance here already, and if we really want to go elsewhere for fuel, there's helium-3 under the lunar surface (He3+D fusion is the easiest neutron free reaction to generate). In fact, fusion fuel is one of the stronger arguements for lunar mining, since we don't have much helium-3 here - most of the helium on earth is helium-4.
I don't know what isotopes are available, or easily accessable, in Jupiter's atmosphere, but if its mostly got He4 and H1, then it doesn't do us a lot of good (the most common kinds of hydrogen and helium make poor fusion fuels).
Earth orbit makes more sense than the moon. For one thing, the travel time to just get into orbit is shorter than the travel time get from orbit to the moon. For another going to the moon involves entering and exiting a gravity well at both ends. Plus there are industries that would benefit from free-fall, and we'd be able to use solar power 24/7 instead of having to wait out the two weeks of lunar night.
As for the "where do we get the hydrogen" debate, I'm amazed that people actually think the hydrogen is used up when we burn it in a fuel cell. Burning hydrogen produces water. Every liter of water we electrolysize on earth to get hydrogen becomes a liter of water vapour when the fuel cell uses the hydrogen. The "fuel" is unlimited; it's the energy to extract it from water that's the challenge.
I beleive that device is called a "helicopter". You may have seen such high tech marvels yourself:-)
Seriously, the flying car thing is a red herring. Flying cars, or homescale nuclear power, or moon colonies were never just engineering problems, even in the 50s and 60s. They were never realized for reasons that had far more to do with politics, practicalities, and economics.
What we can do with technology, and what we choose to do, are not the same thing.
I don't think you quite grasp the amount of power we're talking about here. Solar isn't going to cut it. Nuclear might, but good luck selling the general public on that.
The best approach would doubtless be Artificial Photosynthesis. Go straight from the solar to the hydrogen. Eliminate the steps in the middle.
Got a link? I'm curious to see whether this "artificial photosynthesis" exists, and if so, what properties it has. I haven't heard of it, but if somebody has developed a process of using sunlight to produce hydrogen directly without electrolysis (which is horribly ineffecient), then I'm interested.
Now all mankind has to do is find the catalyst, and the carrier to transport the hydrogen with. Instant hydrogen economy.
You make it sound as if you think these things are trivial. They aren't.
Storage is a problem, though a solvable one. Hydrogen atoms are tiny, and tend to leak out of just about anything. And hydrogen is a gas at any reasonable terrestrial temperature. We're on our way to solving this problem, but we're not there yet.
Generating hydrogen in useful quantities is the bigger problem, at least if we want to maintain our current energy usage in the transportation sector. It isn't as simple as laying out solar panels and electrolysizing water - we can generate hydrogen that way, but the amount we'd need is far greater than the amount we could reasonably produce with such methods.
What we'd really want first is cheap and clean (or cleaner) electricity in abundant quantities first. I know of no method for producing electricity that combines low price, low pollution and high output.
Not the study, but rather the first linked article.
First, they make the classic error of attributing causation when the study found correlation. If that was in the original study, then I'd question the researcher's methodology, but I suspect the blame lies with whoever wrote the article. Testing people's intelligence and comparing their weight does not show a causitive link between wieght and intellect. It could just as easily show that poor judgement translates into bad eating habits and low IQ.
Second, the criticism they reported came from a politician who tried to use anecdotal evidence to debunk the link. That's right, she said she knew witless skinny people and clever fat people, so the study must therefor be wrong. Someone ought to tell her that the plural of "anecdote" is not "evidence".
isn't it depressing that all of the medical technology in the world can't give one of the greatest minds in the world a semblence of a healthy body?
Why single out Hawking? He isn't the only person in the world with ALS. Nor is he the only person who has contributed to our scientific knowledge to suffer or die from an incurable disease.
It's not like the medical technology we have today is miraculous. Advanced, yes, but medicine is still a work in progress, and probably always will be. People still die of all sorts of things we can't cure, and sometimes can't even slow down. That's not likely to change anytime soon, and what advances we do make will inevitably be slow.
I wouldn't call that depressing. I'd call that reality.
Eh, I wouldn't worry about DU's radioactivity. I'd worry about its toxicity.
After all, the stuff barely gives off radiation, and what it does emit is alpha particles, so what you really have to worry about is getting it into your system (it can't irradiate you through your skin). And if you do ingest/inhale it, you've got far worse things to worry about than radiation damage - heavy metal poisoning is far more likely.
What I don't get is why DU gets all the bad press, and white phosphorous, lead and napalm don't. Hell, if you want to look at the really nasty stuff left over after a war ends, landmines beat all of the above. Why does it only become "nasty" when it's got the slightest hint of radioactivity? Oh right, because it's that evil nucular stuff, so it must be worse... somehow.
IIRC, what you're talking about is the theory that low levels of radiation are dealt with fully by cellular repair mechanisms up to a certain threshold, which makes perfect sense if you think about it. The older linear model of radiation exposure assumes that nothing can repair the damage caused by exposure, which ignores the fact we've been dealing with low levels of background radiation for all of our evolutionary history.
But that isn't restricted to humans. Background radiation is pervasive, and every form of life would have to develop some mechanism to deal with it. People are still more vulnerable than average for the reasons I listed in the GP; it just turns out we're probably able to tolerate low levels better than we used to believe.
The basic point I was trying to make was that a major nuclear accident, or war, would have far worse implications for humans (and other long lived apex predators) than for the rest of life on earth. What would be a disasterous level of fallout for us would be far less serious for animals that breed faster, or live shorter lives, or are otherwise in a good position to deal with the aftermath.
It seems to me that if you could damage and capture one of these planes, you could lay your hands on 4 nuclear bombs. Something that would be a bit of a security risk.
Who'd want to? In 1966 the bad guys were the USSR, and they didn't need another piddling 4 nukes when they already had thousands. Plus downing a nuclear-armed bomber without anyone noticing or retaliating would have been difficult.
As for why it was there, the US had plenty of nukes in western Europe, with the idea that if a war broke out, those bombs would be headed into Russia. Where this particular plane was going I do not know, but it wasn't alone or out of place over Spain.
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It's like citing Stephen King on the subject of, say, epidemiology. Does anyone think The Stand is a reputable source of scientific information? No? Then why would State of Fear be? Again, nothing wrong with liking a book, but there is no sensible reason to cite fiction as if it were fact. Crichton doesn't belong in a discussion of climate change.
Plus, Crichton himself isn't a very good science fiction writer. He gets his facts muddled in his other books; Jurrasic Park screwed up both archeology and biology - the Velociraptors being an example of the former, and "life will find a way" Lamarkism being an example of the latter. I could see citing a scifi author on a subject like technology in the future, but only if that author did his research.
...then the game would get a AO rating, and nobody would stock it. How many hetai games can you buy at your local EB?
The system works fine for nudity, sex, extreme violence and other content that people get riled up about. If anything, games are held to a higher standard than movies or TV; Wal-mart & co will stock R rated movie, but balks at M rated games. If movies aren't required (by law or by common practice) to have a "Warning: men kissing" label, then why on earth would games?
Plus, you can't skip content in a movie except by fast forwarding, whereas you can avoid content in a game. Fallout 1&2 let me gun down innocent children, yet oddly I somehow I've never chosen to do so. Does the fact I can make the game wrong in some way, or is it my choice whether to play as a good or evil character? Likewise, bully doesn't require you to kiss boys. If you do, then it is implicitly assumed that you are playing your character as though he was gay. The decision is yours, which is more than a movie allows.
It has no carnage. No serious violence. No nudity. And no depictions of sexuality beyond kissing (which is below the radar of the ESRB). Why would it get a rating higher than teen?
Seriously, Jackass here is the best thing that ever happened to them. As long as he keeps up his "crusade", they get free press, and a reputation that will attract people purely for the controversy.
What's more, they've now made it a political issue by shifting the controversial content from sex and violence (which both the political left and right oppose on "moral" grounds) to homosexuality (which will piss off the right, but get sympathy support from the left). I wouldn't pity these guys. They know how to sell a game, ethically or otherwise.
You missed the Monty Python reference in the parent post. What you said is quite a bit like what John Cleese sang in The Meaning of Life, during the "organ donor" sketch. Turn in your geek card buddy :-)
Nevertheless, the person I replied to indicated that (s)he thought stem cells came from aborted fetuses. Ie, that you start with an unwanted pregnancy, you abort, and harvest the cells from what's left. I've run into so many people who believe that nonsense, and I was correcting it here; stem cells come from IVF clinics, not abortion clinics. If you want to oppose stem cell research, fine, but to be ethically consistant you must likewise oppose the disposal of unimplanted embryos at IVF clinics (something that politicians opposed to stem cell research are notably silent on, since being factually or ethically consistant isn't part of their agenda).
The misconception about where stem cells come from is widespread, and the blame lies soley with those who seek to polarize the debate for their own ends (well, to be fair, scientific illiteracy plays a part as well, but you can't very well blame anyone for that). There are legitimate ethical questions to be debated no doubt, but we can't very well discuss them if both sides are so poorly informed that they equate stem cell harvesting with abortion (which is a largely a seperate issue).
I can't believe I still have to post this....
Embryonic stem cells DO NOT COME FROM THE WOMB. At all. At any stage. Period. Can I make this clearer?
When you do a procedure called in vitro fertilization (IVF), you extract unfertalized eggs from a woman's ovaries. Note the words "unfertalized", and "ovaries"; no unborn child is removed from the womb.
You then combine these eggs with sperm in a test tube (no special procedure is required to get the sperm, guys are well equiped to provide their own sample). You now have N embryoes outside the human body, which can be frozen to preserve them.
You take some of those fertilized eggs and implant them back into a host body (often the same woman who donated the unfertilized eggs, but not always). If the first batch takes, then you're still left with (N - variable number) embryoes in a test tube in the freezer. Those embryoes are destined for the medical trash can. The "mother" is already pregnant at this stage, so the leftovers are no longer needed. Usually they're discarded as medical waste, but in the case of stem cell research, they're instead used to provide embryonic stem cells. Then they're still discarded as medical waste, the same way they would be if no stem cell research existed.
Got it? No fetus was aborted from the womb, as it was never in there in the first place. There is no abortion involved at any stage, according to the legal, technical, and generally understood meaning of "abortion". No pregancy was terminated.
Now, some folks believe life begins at conception. They have every right to oppose stem cell research, but they should also oppose IVF, since a much larger number of "lives" will get flushed down the drain with or without stem cell extraction first. Some people who are inforned about the issues do in fact oppose both, but they're in the minority, and they aren't motivated by politics. Politicians gloss over these facts because facts are often inconvienient for their goals of getting elected.
People who only oppose abortion when the embryo has a chance to develop into a child, for example, should have no ethical problem with stem cell research. However they do have a problem because politicians have lied to them. They've been told that stem cells come from abortion. This lie is so widely believed that it's polarized the entire debate. It's even more amazing that somebody who supports stem cell reseach would fall for this.
Get back to us when you have a way to strip a planet of most of its atmosphere. Remember that Venus has enough air that the surface pressure is akin to the bottom of the ocean on Earth. How are you going to get rid of that? Where do you plan on moving it to?
Oh, and you might want to look into how you'd go about giving Venus a useful rotational period (it's something godawfully long now, 240 odd days), and a protective magnetic field. Otherwise, you can pretty much forget about living on the surface; you'd fry in daylight, freeze at night, and get radiated if you went out unshielded during the day.. While you're at it, I'd reccomend finding someplace to get several oceans worth of liquid water, and finding a way to move that water across interplanetary distances.
Terraforming Venus is a task that makes terraforming Mars look downright easy by way of comparison.
Mars lacks liquid water on its surface. The atmosphere is thin, meaning that lifeforms would have to make do with less Co2 (and no free Oxygen). The thin atmosphere coupled with the lack of a magnetic field means that surface radiation is unhealthy by terrestrial standards, at least during the day.
Now, what that means is that logically, the chances of there being any life at all on Mars are slim. The odds are against there even being simple bacteria. But if there is life, there most certainly aren't the conditions for abundant, successful life. Scant resources and unfavourable surface conditions make Mars an environment only suited to simple, minimal biology. And the surface would be the wrong place to look for it; we'd have to dig down to find it, if it even exists.
Simply looking for signs of aggregate life, or looking for massive biological activity, won't work.
Why go to all that trouble? If we want hydrogen, and are prepared to accept nuclear power, we can do it far more easily with high temperature electrolysis.
The way they make it sound in TFA suggests that the amount of hydrogen produced relative to the amount of natural radiation present is small. Conversely, the amount of hydrogen that could be produced by a dedicated nuke plant is large, and the amount of radioactive material present in the reactor is small.
Plus, if you expose nuclear waste to water, then you run into problems with the water getting contaminated, and the waste getting corroded. Just because something occurs naturally does not mean it would meet our safety standards if we were to duplicate it.
It is quite possible to be sufficiently knowledgeable about either biology or physics to state that no bacteria can "catalyze" a nuclear reaction. This isn't cutting edge physics or complex biology; fission reactions aren't catalyzed by chemical ones. At all. That doesn't leave enough wiggle room for you to be right.
I could maybe, possibly, see bacteria concentrating fissile material. That would speed up the rate of fission, increasing both decay and radioactivity. Wouldn't work with all forms of radioactive decay though - not everything radioactive is fissile. And you'd be trading 1X years of 1Y radiation for 1/2X years of 2Y radiation; you'd just turn long lived low hazard waste into short lived high hazard waste.
But catalyze a nuclear reaction with a chemical one? Not a chance in hell. You can't change a compound's nuclear properties by chemical proccesses. Unless you want to give medival alchemy a shot, you are SOL.
A better comparison for games would be alcohol. Most drinkers aren't alcoholics, and most gamers aren't gaming addicts.
Most smokers OTOH are de facto smoking addicts. Ditto heroin, or any number of other highly addictive substances. It isn't just about what the consequences for use are, it's about how hard it is to stop. What seperates heroin from smoking is the monetary cost; you don't need to break the law to pay for ciggarettes.
Booze and games both have large "user" bases that aren't hooked. The addicts are the exception, not the rule. That doesn't deny the existance of alcoholics (I know a few, and chances are you do to), rather it says that only a small fraction of those who drink will become dependant.
To refer to any heavy use of something as "addiction" is to lower the standards of addiction to the point where most couch potatoes would qualify as "TV addicts". A heavy drinker is not neccesarily an alcoholic. A heavy gamer isn't neccesarily a gaming addict. A heavy smoker is almost certainly a tobbaco addict. See the distinction?
People who beleive that they are superior, or that god is on their side, are dangerous. And that doesn't just hold true for religion; people who hold to non-religious ideologies that maintain a view of self-superiority are just as bad (see: fascism in the 20th century and social darwinism in the 19th as examples of ideology that gave it's adherants a warm fuzzy feeling of superiority). A little humbleness could do the human race some good.
Plus, I've seen what happens when the only thing driving morality is fear of the afterlife. If a fanatic honestly believes that god wants them to do something immoral, then they'll do it, and to hell with whoever they hurt or kill in the process. Is this somehow better than the apathy displayed by the GP?
Humans are humans. Regardless of reason, religion or era, they have the capacity for evil. To suggest that somehow the modern era is worse than the previous eras is to ignore all the apathy, ignorance and violence of those time periods. To suggest that any religion or ideology can prevent evil is to ignore mankinds capacity for fanaticism. At best it's rose-coloured glasses, and at worst it's an unhealthy desire to return to the bad old days.
Not to say we've improved very much mind you, but I take issue with the idea that there was some better era centuries or millenia past.
Ah cool. I'd never run into that before. I'll have to go find some more info on it. Thanks for the link
Perhaps I should have added "and is acceptable to the general public" to that list. Clean is a relative measure - the perception of nuclear power as dirty is a more important barrier to building nuke plants than the actual cost of the waste. That's not to say there isn't also a signifigant cost associated with reproccessing and/or disposing of the waste products, but the larger issue is nuclear's bad reputation.
Additionally, I'm not so sure it fits the criteria for cheap. Remember that what we're talking about here is generating power for the purpose of making hydrogen. The energy required to replace gasoline is enormous. Nuclear power is an effecient choice for hydrogen production, since you can use high temperature electrolysis, but the cost per unit of hydrogen produced may still be prohibitive.
Yeah, that's true about the moon, but if we want raw materials, I think the asteroid belt makes as much sense. That still gives us the advantage of free-fall, constant sunlight sans lunar night, and no gravity well to climb out of on the other end.
It's worth remembering also that we'd have to ship up an enormous amount of hardware to make any commercial space exploration possible, so getting raw materials locally might not be a particular advantage. I'm not sure at what stage sending mining and refining equiptment to the moon beats out sending proccessed materials into orbit for industrial work. OTOH, mining is a dirty job to begin with, so if the goal is to move polluting industries off-world, then it makes a little more sense (though I'd still go for the belt first).
As for fusion, we don't have to leave earth for that. Deuterium is in abundance here already, and if we really want to go elsewhere for fuel, there's helium-3 under the lunar surface (He3+D fusion is the easiest neutron free reaction to generate). In fact, fusion fuel is one of the stronger arguements for lunar mining, since we don't have much helium-3 here - most of the helium on earth is helium-4.
I don't know what isotopes are available, or easily accessable, in Jupiter's atmosphere, but if its mostly got He4 and H1, then it doesn't do us a lot of good (the most common kinds of hydrogen and helium make poor fusion fuels).
Earth orbit makes more sense than the moon. For one thing, the travel time to just get into orbit is shorter than the travel time get from orbit to the moon. For another going to the moon involves entering and exiting a gravity well at both ends. Plus there are industries that would benefit from free-fall, and we'd be able to use solar power 24/7 instead of having to wait out the two weeks of lunar night.
As for the "where do we get the hydrogen" debate, I'm amazed that people actually think the hydrogen is used up when we burn it in a fuel cell. Burning hydrogen produces water. Every liter of water we electrolysize on earth to get hydrogen becomes a liter of water vapour when the fuel cell uses the hydrogen. The "fuel" is unlimited; it's the energy to extract it from water that's the challenge.
I beleive that device is called a "helicopter". You may have seen such high tech marvels yourself :-)
Seriously, the flying car thing is a red herring. Flying cars, or homescale nuclear power, or moon colonies were never just engineering problems, even in the 50s and 60s. They were never realized for reasons that had far more to do with politics, practicalities, and economics.
What we can do with technology, and what we choose to do, are not the same thing.
Got a link? I'm curious to see whether this "artificial photosynthesis" exists, and if so, what properties it has. I haven't heard of it, but if somebody has developed a process of using sunlight to produce hydrogen directly without electrolysis (which is horribly ineffecient), then I'm interested.
You make it sound as if you think these things are trivial. They aren't.
Storage is a problem, though a solvable one. Hydrogen atoms are tiny, and tend to leak out of just about anything. And hydrogen is a gas at any reasonable terrestrial temperature. We're on our way to solving this problem, but we're not there yet.
Generating hydrogen in useful quantities is the bigger problem, at least if we want to maintain our current energy usage in the transportation sector. It isn't as simple as laying out solar panels and electrolysizing water - we can generate hydrogen that way, but the amount we'd need is far greater than the amount we could reasonably produce with such methods.
What we'd really want first is cheap and clean (or cleaner) electricity in abundant quantities first. I know of no method for producing electricity that combines low price, low pollution and high output.
Not the study, but rather the first linked article.
First, they make the classic error of attributing causation when the study found correlation. If that was in the original study, then I'd question the researcher's methodology, but I suspect the blame lies with whoever wrote the article. Testing people's intelligence and comparing their weight does not show a causitive link between wieght and intellect. It could just as easily show that poor judgement translates into bad eating habits and low IQ.
Second, the criticism they reported came from a politician who tried to use anecdotal evidence to debunk the link. That's right, she said she knew witless skinny people and clever fat people, so the study must therefor be wrong. Someone ought to tell her that the plural of "anecdote" is not "evidence".
It's not like the medical technology we have today is miraculous. Advanced, yes, but medicine is still a work in progress, and probably always will be. People still die of all sorts of things we can't cure, and sometimes can't even slow down. That's not likely to change anytime soon, and what advances we do make will inevitably be slow.
I wouldn't call that depressing. I'd call that reality.
(A better question: What would the silos look like?)
Eh, I wouldn't worry about DU's radioactivity. I'd worry about its toxicity.
After all, the stuff barely gives off radiation, and what it does emit is alpha particles, so what you really have to worry about is getting it into your system (it can't irradiate you through your skin). And if you do ingest/inhale it, you've got far worse things to worry about than radiation damage - heavy metal poisoning is far more likely.
What I don't get is why DU gets all the bad press, and white phosphorous, lead and napalm don't. Hell, if you want to look at the really nasty stuff left over after a war ends, landmines beat all of the above. Why does it only become "nasty" when it's got the slightest hint of radioactivity? Oh right, because it's that evil nucular stuff, so it must be worse... somehow.
IIRC, what you're talking about is the theory that low levels of radiation are dealt with fully by cellular repair mechanisms up to a certain threshold, which makes perfect sense if you think about it. The older linear model of radiation exposure assumes that nothing can repair the damage caused by exposure, which ignores the fact we've been dealing with low levels of background radiation for all of our evolutionary history.
But that isn't restricted to humans. Background radiation is pervasive, and every form of life would have to develop some mechanism to deal with it. People are still more vulnerable than average for the reasons I listed in the GP; it just turns out we're probably able to tolerate low levels better than we used to believe.
The basic point I was trying to make was that a major nuclear accident, or war, would have far worse implications for humans (and other long lived apex predators) than for the rest of life on earth. What would be a disasterous level of fallout for us would be far less serious for animals that breed faster, or live shorter lives, or are otherwise in a good position to deal with the aftermath.
As for why it was there, the US had plenty of nukes in western Europe, with the idea that if a war broke out, those bombs would be headed into Russia. Where this particular plane was going I do not know, but it wasn't alone or out of place over Spain.