>Sooner or later we would have the new problem of efficiently radiating all that extra heat (the energy would turn into heat sooner or later) off this planet.
Interestingly, Larry Niven's known space stories had a race of cowardly technologists called Piersons Puppeteers who ran into this problem (that and overpopulation and a biology that could not accomodate birth control of any kind). They used fusion for their power needs and had a population of over a trillion. Over the course of tens of thousands of years, their waste heat rose until that had no choice but to move their world outwards from it's parent star. Spaceflight to another world wasn't an acceptable option to them; they're terrified of the risks involved (but apparently willing to risk moving their world to avoid certain death). Later, they left their home system altogether after the star expanded into a red giant, taking their homeworld with them, as well as five agricultural worlds with fusion light sources in orbit for photosynthesis.
>I propose that we catch trolls like you and use them for medical expeirments. These experiments will produce far better results than rat experiments.
But then we might accidentally unleash a new breed of troll savants! Cabable of ruining even the most enlightened/. discussion (snicker!) Can you imagine lab trolls escaping and wreaking havoc? No bridge would be safe to walk under; no goat would go unmollested! No one would be able to converse without starting a flame war. It'd be the end of civilization!:-(
Hmm... where's my +1 obscure Niven/Pournelle reference mod when I need it? Bravo, that was easily to most obscure thing I've seen on/. or at least the wierdest that I actually recognized.
Well, for one thing, you'd spit out fast neutrons like no tommorow. Annihilate protons in the nucleus and it'll shatter. An anti-proton stream directed at nuclear waste would be kinda like a gasoline hose directed at a smouldering fire. To be fair, this would destroy the waste, and would leave few remnants behind, but you'd irradiate the containment vessel by neutron activation, and you'd be generating enourmous amounts of heat.
The other problem is _getting_ antimatter. You need as much power to produce the stuff as you get by annihilating it. So, giver conservation of energy and the laws of thermodynamics, the waste disposal system wouldn't even come close to breaking even. Any lost power would manifest as heat.
This would leave you with a huge amount of waste heat, a massive energy deficit, an irradiated container that held the waste, and god knows what sort of final by-products. For the effort you'd gone to it'd be easier to just dump the stuff into he planet's core, or eject it into the sun (in terms of final disposal).
As a Canadian, I'd point out that Canada is largely urbanized, and that most of the population is in the southern belt running east to west (not far from the border). Thus the distances aren't that much greater than they are in the 'States, except from city to city. That being said, we do tend to be more energy effecient per capita (less to do with neccessity and more to do with lifestlye).
The original poster is right though, the US could conserve a huge portion of it's energy budget by simply doing common sense things (like applying the same emmision regulations to SUVs that it does to station wagons). And I'm generally in favour of nuclear energy as an altenative to fossil fuels; fusion would be preferable, but I'd settle for well regulated fission power.
>They believe the bible is the word of god because it says that it is the word of god.
First, to understand recursion, you must first understand recursion...
Oh well, maybe their "logic" will go in ever diminishing circles until it undergoes gravitational collape and the resulting singularity causes their collective skulls to implode.
Actually, you've hit on one of the biggest problems in getting people to accept evolutionary biology. The "ick" factor.
I've only ever discussed the matter with one creationist (I'm Canadian; we don't have as many as the 'States). As far as I can tell, the major resistance to evolution among much of the public is that it's humiliating to think that we have such humble, slimy origins. If it were just a matter of scripture, then why does the big bang theory, which blatanty contradicts their bible, not get nearly as much opposition? Blind faith is only half the problem.
The other half of the problem is that we keep getting knocked away from the center of the universe. Earth was the center of the solar system before Galileo, we were created in the image of god before Darwin. People (especially religious fundamentalists) are prideful creatures, and the thought that we are not special is humbling. Evolution not only demonstrates this fact, it drives it home by showing the mechanism behind our existance to be grossly humiliating. Primordial goop? Ick! Natural selection amounts to a genetic lottery that favours the opportunists and kills off the rest. And don't even get them started on apes and pre-human hominids.
I remember asking the creationist in question why god would equip humans with an appendix, tailbone and wisdom teeth. The fact of the matter is that we are only greasy organic meatbag humans, intelligent animals, and that's a hard pill to swallow for many people.
Fry: "Hey, as long as you don't make me smell Uranus." *laughs* Leela: "I don't get it." Professor: "I'm sorry, Fry, but astronomers renamed Uranus in 2620 to end that stupid joke once and for all." Fry: "Oh. What's it called now?" Professor: "Urectum. Here, let me locate it for you." Fry: "Hehe, no, no, I think I'll just smell around a bit over here."
Among the midget hominid remains in Indonesia, a gold ring was also discovered.
"Antropologists are perplexed as to how a ring found it's way into the hands of a species lacking basic metallurgy or fire. One scientist was quoted as saying 'The precious, er I mean artifact, is a remarkable lovely find. So bright, so beautiful...' He was later heard to remark 'mine, mine, get away!! Filthy little grad students!!'"
I like my aribags to deploy without first having to click through "Are you sure?" screens. And how would the EULA read? "Microsoft reserves the right to tamper with your brakes at any time, and without notification. You may only use gasoline in this tank and this tank only; to tranfer your fuel rights you must first uninstall the engine and tank from this model."
Bluntly we get enough highway congestion without adding rebooting to the mix. Bring on the stick shift throwbacks!
Well, I've always said that games are not stories per se, but rather are just plain _games_. Most of us play games for the enjoyable challenge to our brain and reflexes, not for in depth narrative. At it's core every game boils down to pong or chess (an oversimplification to be sure, but still true).
That being said, games with a compelling story, even one that would never work as a book/movie/TV series, are generally better than games that lack story. Story in a game is a nice bonus that fleshes out the universe that you're playing in. It adds much needed substance. But it's not a prerequisite for a good game.
Doom/Quake (all of them) Half Life, UT etc have little in the way of storytelling (HL has plot, but no narrative or character), yet these are highly praises and successful games. On the opposite side, KOTOR, System Shock, Planescape, BG II and the like have very good story, strong character development, and are generally well written, yet also have solid gameplay behind them. Partly it's a genre thing (the "vicarious experience" is definitely a FPS convention), but mostly it's a matter of gameplay first, story second.
Planescape Torment is a damn good story and a fine game. It's easily my favorite RPG.
(For those who don't know what I'm talking about, this is a Black Isle game from the late nineties, using the same engine as Baldur's Gate. Great reviews, devoted following, lousy sales).
Well technically you can't get energy from nowhere. The basic energy input is required whether it's provided by human muscles, domestic animals, chemical combustion or nuclear fission/fusion. So conservation _reduces_ pollution, but unless we get truely nonpolluting power (and no, solar doesn't cut it) we'll still be producing some kind of waste.
That being said, I don't think solar energy and conservation are "futile". Just inadeqaute on their own. Solar only works well as a distributed means of power generation (you'll get way less milage if you try to build centralized plants), and it requires a lot of energy just to build the damn panels. Conservation saves energy, so it helps but still doesn't fix the problem. We need fusion, bluntly, or failing that some viable plan B like pebble bed reactors.
There's plenty of Uranium in spent fuel rods. Trouble is, the Uranium is not longer "enriched" and cannot be used in a conventional nuclear reactor. You can build reactors to run off the waste, and you can re-proccess waste to get the fuel out, but both approaches lead to their own problems.
Also, the grandparent seems not to realize that the "main isotope" of Urainium is U-238, which is mostly harmless (you'll notice I didn't say "totally harmless"). You can't built a fission bomb out of it, it's worthless as fuel and it hardly glows at all (the radioactivity is feeble). U-235, the stuff in "enriched" Urainium is the weapons grade stuff (and the fuel in fuels rods). Highly radioactive/short lived (relative to U-238).
Waste still has U-235 and sometimes Plutonium as well, but the real trouble is the fission by-products you get from using it. The by-products in question are short lived, radioactive and often have other nasty characteristics. Luckily, they can be contained until harmless (decades to centuries typically, nothing like 200,000 years).
So who says you gotta get rid of every last millirem? Hate to burst you bubble, but you're probably carrying around a few rads right now. And if radiation scares you that much don't ever go near an x-ray machine.
If this process can hold the nastier stuff inside until it decays into something harmless (I'm thinking Strontium 90 here) I'm happy. Remember the _really_ nasty stuff is the least stable. By extension it is the shortest lived (half-lives in decades instead of millenia). And if vitrification (which is what TFA is reffering to) can manage to protect the waste for a few centuries longer, so much the better.
Some radiation is harmless; it's concentrated radiation and biologically active radio-isotopes (again, Strontium 90) that'll kill ya. Get rid of those and you get rid of the problem. Who the fsck cares about U-238? Smoking will kill you quicker.
Actually boomer = nuclear missile submarine. Like the Typhoon (remember "the hunt for Red October?). However the grandparent is still BSing; the cold war is over and the policies that made sense then are no longer sound.
Nothing, and I do mean _nothing_, the president of the united states can do in five minutes will make the slightest difference in the "war on terror". The conflict at the moment is over civilians launching terror attacks against targets on US (and other nations) soil. Really the people who will make the US safe are not the prez and the dept of homeland security, but rather the law enforcement/intelligence agencies (CIA, FBI etc). These are the people who can stop the terrorist, not some HomeSec gestapo. And Bush has damaged the credibility of the States' military intelligence with the whole weapons of mass destruction lie.
You want to stop the terrorists? Then stop electing warmongering cowboys. Really, the United States need not fuel the hatred of extremists by giving them free propaganda. Acting out of fear, and allowing yourselves to be cowed by a snake oil salesmen who claims he will make you "safe" will only make things worse. Kick the bum out of office. And stop picking fights with pissant countries a fraction of your size; it makes you look like a schoolyard bully.
I don't think anyone here is surprised. And I'm glad to see a report that supports what has been a rather undereported debate.
What concerns me though is: if we do away with patents what will replace them? Have any/.ers seen or thought of a solution to this problem? I'm all for making software as "free" as possible, but I'm also of the mind that there would have to be some kind of IP structure in place.
My thinking has always been that too much control of too much information has been in the hands of too few individuals. Software patents, as they're presently implimented, worsen this problem by allowing exclusivity and ownership of ideas that are otherwise easy to disribute. What concerns me is that those ideas don't come from nowhere; creativity is required at some stage. Even if the originator of an idea doesn't own it, (s)he was still presumably paid for it. Do we, the geeks, beleive that total freedom of information will leave an incentive to actually invent anything new? I've seen the argument that the benefit will come from somewhere else, like geeks supporting the software, bands getting paid by touring, etc. Ultimately you can't get something for nothing, though, and unless I'm mistaken the above shift would have us bitching about ludicrous ticket prices and support charges.
Has anyone run into an IP scheme that would balance the creator/user relationship? Our present system is skewed and prone to monopolism, and a total absence of ownership would entail its own set of problems. We have to pay for something, somewhere (not that I'm a free market capitalist, but when the flow of money stops people starve).
>Mars would be reasonable if it had a working greenhouse effect. Temperatures on Venus would be reasonable (although a _little_ on the warm side) if it didn't.
OT: actually this is not strictly true; a greenhouse effect is the least of Venus's problems. Venus is an Earth-sized world which never underwent a large collision in it's formation and never aquired a lunar body. Earth, conversely, had a small planetoid smack into it some four billion years ago, blasting away most of the atmosphere and putting enough debris in orbit to form a very large moon. The impact combined with the subesquent lunar gravity skimming away the upper atmosphere ensued that the Earth wound up with a _very_ thin atmosphere for a body it's size.
In the case of Mars, the planet is much smaller (around 40% the size of Earth or Venus IIRC). Furthermore Mars has not one but two samll moons in orbit (unlike ours, they're really just captured asteroids but that's beside the point). And Mars has no protective magnetic field, and is consequently exposed to charged solar radiation, further thinning the atmosphere. Thus the pressure on the surface is way lower than terrestrial norms, whereas on Venus the pressure is obscenely high by our standards. The temerature differences are a matter of insulation largely (and solar proximity) but a greenhouse effect is almost moot. You might as well say that lunar nights would be warmer if the moon had a greenhouse effect; it's true but misleading given that the major issue is the simple presence or absence of a gas envelope. And no, the greenhouse effect does not refer to just insulation; it refers to the presence of gases that are trasparent to visible light but reflective to InfraRed (IIRC).
The theory I've heard is that Mars had a higher pressure and surface water at one point before its magnetic field quit. At this stage it would have still been fairly cold, but otherwise suitable for limited life. Life could have evolved then and subsequently died off; the interesting question is whether any life could have survived in niche environments.
Any astrophysicists or biologists care to elaborate/correct?
Re:Rather quite expensive in the long term
on
Antarctic Telescope?
·
· Score: 0, Troll
And how much antarctic sunbathing do you do exactly? Was it that small before, or did it shrink?
Plus, never forget that nuclear waste is far worse for human health than it is for the environment. For a variety of biological reasons we are especially vulnerable to radiation, whereas most plant and animal species are not. A nuclear disaster would be devastating for human nations, but the ecosystem(s) involved would recover. And while the life expectancy of nuclear by-products is long when compared to human civilization, ten thousand years is an eyeblink from a global ecological perspective. What greens fail to realize is that humans fuck up the environment by introducing _fast_ change, not because the environment is inherently fragile.
That being said, I would much prefer a fusion economy to a fission one, since that would solve our energy production problems in short order.
Slashdot Mirror
>Sooner or later we would have the new problem of efficiently radiating all that extra heat (the energy would turn into heat sooner or later) off this planet.
Interestingly, Larry Niven's known space stories had a race of cowardly technologists called Piersons Puppeteers who ran into this problem (that and overpopulation and a biology that could not accomodate birth control of any kind). They used fusion for their power needs and had a population of over a trillion. Over the course of tens of thousands of years, their waste heat rose until that had no choice but to move their world outwards from it's parent star. Spaceflight to another world wasn't an acceptable option to them; they're terrified of the risks involved (but apparently willing to risk moving their world to avoid certain death). Later, they left their home system altogether after the star expanded into a red giant, taking their homeworld with them, as well as five agricultural worlds with fusion light sources in orbit for photosynthesis.
I've been trying to invent a perpetual motion machine for ten years. Ironically I can't seem to stop. :-)
(old joke, I know)
>I propose that we catch trolls like you and use them for medical expeirments. These experiments will produce far better results than rat experiments.
/. discussion (snicker!) Can you imagine lab trolls escaping and wreaking havoc? No bridge would be safe to walk under; no goat would go unmollested! No one would be able to converse without starting a flame war. It'd be the end of civilization! :-(
But then we might accidentally unleash a new breed of troll savants! Cabable of ruining even the most enlightened
Hmm... where's my +1 obscure Niven/Pournelle reference mod when I need it? Bravo, that was easily to most obscure thing I've seen on /. or at least the wierdest that I actually recognized.
And what would we call whats left of the 'States? The United States of the Midsouthwest? Jesusland? Dubyakzastan?
(laugh, it's a joke... actually come to think of it it's a touch to serious to be funny).
Well, for one thing, you'd spit out fast neutrons like no tommorow. Annihilate protons in the nucleus and it'll shatter. An anti-proton stream directed at nuclear waste would be kinda like a gasoline hose directed at a smouldering fire. To be fair, this would destroy the waste, and would leave few remnants behind, but you'd irradiate the containment vessel by neutron activation, and you'd be generating enourmous amounts of heat.
The other problem is _getting_ antimatter. You need as much power to produce the stuff as you get by annihilating it. So, giver conservation of energy and the laws of thermodynamics, the waste disposal system wouldn't even come close to breaking even. Any lost power would manifest as heat.
This would leave you with a huge amount of waste heat, a massive energy deficit, an irradiated container that held the waste, and god knows what sort of final by-products. For the effort you'd gone to it'd be easier to just dump the stuff into he planet's core, or eject it into the sun (in terms of final disposal).
As a Canadian, I'd point out that Canada is largely urbanized, and that most of the population is in the southern belt running east to west (not far from the border). Thus the distances aren't that much greater than they are in the 'States, except from city to city. That being said, we do tend to be more energy effecient per capita (less to do with neccessity and more to do with lifestlye).
The original poster is right though, the US could conserve a huge portion of it's energy budget by simply doing common sense things (like applying the same emmision regulations to SUVs that it does to station wagons). And I'm generally in favour of nuclear energy as an altenative to fossil fuels; fusion would be preferable, but I'd settle for well regulated fission power.
>They believe the bible is the word of god because it says that it is the word of god.
First, to understand recursion, you must first understand recursion...
Oh well, maybe their "logic" will go in ever diminishing circles until it undergoes gravitational collape and the resulting singularity causes their collective skulls to implode.
Actually, you've hit on one of the biggest problems in getting people to accept evolutionary biology. The "ick" factor.
I've only ever discussed the matter with one creationist (I'm Canadian; we don't have as many as the 'States). As far as I can tell, the major resistance to evolution among much of the public is that it's humiliating to think that we have such humble, slimy origins. If it were just a matter of scripture, then why does the big bang theory, which blatanty contradicts their bible, not get nearly as much opposition? Blind faith is only half the problem.
The other half of the problem is that we keep getting knocked away from the center of the universe. Earth was the center of the solar system before Galileo, we were created in the image of god before Darwin. People (especially religious fundamentalists) are prideful creatures, and the thought that we are not special is humbling. Evolution not only demonstrates this fact, it drives it home by showing the mechanism behind our existance to be grossly humiliating. Primordial goop? Ick! Natural selection amounts to a genetic lottery that favours the opportunists and kills off the rest. And don't even get them started on apes and pre-human hominids.
I remember asking the creationist in question why god would equip humans with an appendix, tailbone and wisdom teeth. The fact of the matter is that we are only greasy organic meatbag humans, intelligent animals, and that's a hard pill to swallow for many people.
(from everyone's favorite sci-fi comedy show)
Fry: "Hey, as long as you don't make me smell Uranus." *laughs*
Leela: "I don't get it."
Professor: "I'm sorry, Fry, but astronomers renamed Uranus in 2620 to end that stupid joke once and for all."
Fry: "Oh. What's it called now?"
Professor: "Urectum. Here, let me locate it for you."
Fry: "Hehe, no, no, I think I'll just smell around a bit over here."
Among the midget hominid remains in Indonesia, a gold ring was also discovered.
"Antropologists are perplexed as to how a ring found it's way into the hands of a species lacking basic metallurgy or fire. One scientist was quoted as saying 'The precious, er I mean artifact, is a remarkable lovely find. So bright, so beautiful...' He was later heard to remark 'mine, mine, get away!! Filthy little grad students!!'"
Peter Jackson was not available for comment.
I like my aribags to deploy without first having to click through "Are you sure?" screens. And how would the EULA read? "Microsoft reserves the right to tamper with your brakes at any time, and without notification. You may only use gasoline in this tank and this tank only; to tranfer your fuel rights you must first uninstall the engine and tank from this model."
Bluntly we get enough highway congestion without adding rebooting to the mix. Bring on the stick shift throwbacks!
That whistling sound you heard was a cultural reference going over your head.
And that whistling sound the parent poster hears is the black helecopters landing on his lawn 'cos the secret service didn't get it either...
Well, I've always said that games are not stories per se, but rather are just plain _games_. Most of us play games for the enjoyable challenge to our brain and reflexes, not for in depth narrative. At it's core every game boils down to pong or chess (an oversimplification to be sure, but still true).
That being said, games with a compelling story, even one that would never work as a book/movie/TV series, are generally better than games that lack story. Story in a game is a nice bonus that fleshes out the universe that you're playing in. It adds much needed substance. But it's not a prerequisite for a good game.
Doom/Quake (all of them) Half Life, UT etc have little in the way of storytelling (HL has plot, but no narrative or character), yet these are highly praises and successful games. On the opposite side, KOTOR, System Shock, Planescape, BG II and the like have very good story, strong character development, and are generally well written, yet also have solid gameplay behind them. Partly it's a genre thing (the "vicarious experience" is definitely a FPS convention), but mostly it's a matter of gameplay first, story second.
Planescape Torment is a damn good story and a fine game. It's easily my favorite RPG.
(For those who don't know what I'm talking about, this is a Black Isle game from the late nineties, using the same engine as Baldur's Gate. Great reviews, devoted following, lousy sales).
Well technically you can't get energy from nowhere. The basic energy input is required whether it's provided by human muscles, domestic animals, chemical combustion or nuclear fission/fusion. So conservation _reduces_ pollution, but unless we get truely nonpolluting power (and no, solar doesn't cut it) we'll still be producing some kind of waste.
That being said, I don't think solar energy and conservation are "futile". Just inadeqaute on their own. Solar only works well as a distributed means of power generation (you'll get way less milage if you try to build centralized plants), and it requires a lot of energy just to build the damn panels. Conservation saves energy, so it helps but still doesn't fix the problem. We need fusion, bluntly, or failing that some viable plan B like pebble bed reactors.
There's plenty of Uranium in spent fuel rods. Trouble is, the Uranium is not longer "enriched" and cannot be used in a conventional nuclear reactor. You can build reactors to run off the waste, and you can re-proccess waste to get the fuel out, but both approaches lead to their own problems.
Also, the grandparent seems not to realize that the "main isotope" of Urainium is U-238, which is mostly harmless (you'll notice I didn't say "totally harmless"). You can't built a fission bomb out of it, it's worthless as fuel and it hardly glows at all (the radioactivity is feeble). U-235, the stuff in "enriched" Urainium is the weapons grade stuff (and the fuel in fuels rods). Highly radioactive/short lived (relative to U-238).
Waste still has U-235 and sometimes Plutonium as well, but the real trouble is the fission by-products you get from using it. The by-products in question are short lived, radioactive and often have other nasty characteristics. Luckily, they can be contained until harmless (decades to centuries typically, nothing like 200,000 years).
So who says you gotta get rid of every last millirem? Hate to burst you bubble, but you're probably carrying around a few rads right now. And if radiation scares you that much don't ever go near an x-ray machine.
If this process can hold the nastier stuff inside until it decays into something harmless (I'm thinking Strontium 90 here) I'm happy. Remember the _really_ nasty stuff is the least stable. By extension it is the shortest lived (half-lives in decades instead of millenia). And if vitrification (which is what TFA is reffering to) can manage to protect the waste for a few centuries longer, so much the better.
Some radiation is harmless; it's concentrated radiation and biologically active radio-isotopes (again, Strontium 90) that'll kill ya. Get rid of those and you get rid of the problem. Who the fsck cares about U-238? Smoking will kill you quicker.
Actually boomer = nuclear missile submarine. Like the Typhoon (remember "the hunt for Red October?). However the grandparent is still BSing; the cold war is over and the policies that made sense then are no longer sound.
Nothing, and I do mean _nothing_, the president of the united states can do in five minutes will make the slightest difference in the "war on terror". The conflict at the moment is over civilians launching terror attacks against targets on US (and other nations) soil. Really the people who will make the US safe are not the prez and the dept of homeland security, but rather the law enforcement/intelligence agencies (CIA, FBI etc). These are the people who can stop the terrorist, not some HomeSec gestapo. And Bush has damaged the credibility of the States' military intelligence with the whole weapons of mass destruction lie.
You want to stop the terrorists? Then stop electing warmongering cowboys. Really, the United States need not fuel the hatred of extremists by giving them free propaganda. Acting out of fear, and allowing yourselves to be cowed by a snake oil salesmen who claims he will make you "safe" will only make things worse. Kick the bum out of office. And stop picking fights with pissant countries a fraction of your size; it makes you look like a schoolyard bully.
I don't think anyone here is surprised. And I'm glad to see a report that supports what has been a rather undereported debate.
/.ers seen or thought of a solution to this problem? I'm all for making software as "free" as possible, but I'm also of the mind that there would have to be some kind of IP structure in place.
What concerns me though is: if we do away with patents what will replace them? Have any
My thinking has always been that too much control of too much information has been in the hands of too few individuals. Software patents, as they're presently implimented, worsen this problem by allowing exclusivity and ownership of ideas that are otherwise easy to disribute. What concerns me is that those ideas don't come from nowhere; creativity is required at some stage. Even if the originator of an idea doesn't own it, (s)he was still presumably paid for it. Do we, the geeks, beleive that total freedom of information will leave an incentive to actually invent anything new? I've seen the argument that the benefit will come from somewhere else, like geeks supporting the software, bands getting paid by touring, etc. Ultimately you can't get something for nothing, though, and unless I'm mistaken the above shift would have us bitching about ludicrous ticket prices and support charges.
Has anyone run into an IP scheme that would balance the creator/user relationship? Our present system is skewed and prone to monopolism, and a total absence of ownership would entail its own set of problems. We have to pay for something, somewhere (not that I'm a free market capitalist, but when the flow of money stops people starve).
>Okay, I have a photo of QEII and Margaret Thatcher around here somewhere....
:-)
That is the worst mental image anyone has given me in a long time. I demand you stick to the necrophilia!
>Mars would be reasonable if it had a working greenhouse effect. Temperatures on Venus would be reasonable (although a _little_ on the warm side) if it didn't.
OT: actually this is not strictly true; a greenhouse effect is the least of Venus's problems. Venus is an Earth-sized world which never underwent a large collision in it's formation and never aquired a lunar body. Earth, conversely, had a small planetoid smack into it some four billion years ago, blasting away most of the atmosphere and putting enough debris in orbit to form a very large moon. The impact combined with the subesquent lunar gravity skimming away the upper atmosphere ensued that the Earth wound up with a _very_ thin atmosphere for a body it's size.
In the case of Mars, the planet is much smaller (around 40% the size of Earth or Venus IIRC). Furthermore Mars has not one but two samll moons in orbit (unlike ours, they're really just captured asteroids but that's beside the point). And Mars has no protective magnetic field, and is consequently exposed to charged solar radiation, further thinning the atmosphere. Thus the pressure on the surface is way lower than terrestrial norms, whereas on Venus the pressure is obscenely high by our standards. The temerature differences are a matter of insulation largely (and solar proximity) but a greenhouse effect is almost moot. You might as well say that lunar nights would be warmer if the moon had a greenhouse effect; it's true but misleading given that the major issue is the simple presence or absence of a gas envelope. And no, the greenhouse effect does not refer to just insulation; it refers to the presence of gases that are trasparent to visible light but reflective to InfraRed (IIRC).
The theory I've heard is that Mars had a higher pressure and surface water at one point before its magnetic field quit. At this stage it would have still been fairly cold, but otherwise suitable for limited life. Life could have evolved then and subsequently died off; the interesting question is whether any life could have survived in niche environments.
Any astrophysicists or biologists care to elaborate/correct?
And how much antarctic sunbathing do you do exactly? Was it that small before, or did it shrink?
Plus, never forget that nuclear waste is far worse for human health than it is for the environment. For a variety of biological reasons we are especially vulnerable to radiation, whereas most plant and animal species are not. A nuclear disaster would be devastating for human nations, but the ecosystem(s) involved would recover. And while the life expectancy of nuclear by-products is long when compared to human civilization, ten thousand years is an eyeblink from a global ecological perspective. What greens fail to realize is that humans fuck up the environment by introducing _fast_ change, not because the environment is inherently fragile.
That being said, I would much prefer a fusion economy to a fission one, since that would solve our energy production problems in short order.
Ah, Mr Roberts, I presume?