You don't need the equivalent mass of dust thrown by volcanic eruptions. You need the equivalent *reflexive surface*. And that can be done with drastically smaller masses, provided that the size of the particles is much smaller than the average particle size thrown by volcanoes and thus the mass-to-surface ratio is tiny. In other words, engineered particles can be made fine enough so that you don't need unrealistic ammounts of them to produce some noticeable effect.
Hey, they are not talking about blocking the sun completely a la Matrix. It is just a few percent reduction in sunlight, without significant consequences for photosynthesis.
2) Countries which hate America (eg: Middle East, France and most of Europe, Brazil, even Canada....). They dont want you, and will make your life miserable.
Hey, that's untrue at least for Brazil. I would say that it is fair to state that Brazilians hate America, as in "the idea of a world-domination evil empire" (yes, that is the image in our collective unconscious;-). However, we do not hate *americans*. I have seen and assisted many Americans coming here in business travels (my city is a industry-techie-mining backyard with no touristic attractions) and I never saw any Brazilian making their lives "miserable"; actually the general attitude is of hospitality. Heck, one of those visitors even married a Brazilian girl that was one of my co-workers... In short, I would say that there is a sharp distinction between the political entity "America" and the *people* called "Americans", as we see it.
Well... Water would be a problem there. Why not Mars, where you can mine oxygen and water directly from the (thin and unbreathable) atmosphere? And with prospects of terraformation the value of your property would skyrocket!
It is a bit difficult to show a medicine bottle through the Internet, but you may take a look at this article. And no, the word used is "race" as opposed to "ancestry" - and by the way the two concepts are intertwined more often than not.
Anyhow, correlation of DNA alone is of little importance for defining groups of biological entities in evolutionary terms. *Phenotype* is the thing being selected by evolution, and evolution does not care if a given phenotype is produced by the change of one nucleotide or a thousand in a DNA strand; since races are groups of different phenotypes clusters inside the same species, then yes, they may be relevant in evolutive terms. And the phenotypes of human races are, let be sincere, *drasticly* different: aside from "visual" distinctions like color, shape, size, there are pronounced biochemical differences (and imunological), like this or that race group being unable to digest this or that nutrient, this or that race being more resistant to HIV, and so on. Heck, there are even *medicines* with instructions saying "this medicine is known to not work effectively on people from race X" - for fortunately medicine doctors apparently did not surrender science to political correctness like many biologists did...
Even though the social security systems in Europe are well working *now*, it is unlikely that they will keep working for the next decades. The main reason is the drastic aging of the population in Europe - it is becoming harder and harder for the ever-shrinking population in productive age to sustain the ever-growing elderly population.
The heat in the Core is not only "stored friction", in fact a great deal of it comes from the continual decaying of radioisotopes. Yes, Earth is something like a giant RTG...
In terms of survival rate in case of accident. When a passenger plane crashes, often close to 100% of people on board die. In the case of the Hindenburg accident, though, this rate was of 36%.
Also, your comment on hydrogen burning upwards is very adequate. In fact, considering that the danger of hydrogen flames tends to be overestimated, hydrogen is much cheaper and easier to manufacture than helium, and hydrogen provides more buyoancy than helium, I myself would rather use hydrogen instead of helium in an airship.
I think that fluffy menus are a feature *against* Blue Ray adoption by consumers at large. My personal experience is that most of my friends hate those fluffy DVD menus were you have to watch animations and hear sounds; plain objective menus were you can quickly get what you want are preferred.
Britain can simply build a floating launch plataform, go to some point of the Equator over international watesr and launch the rocket. Sea launch is already used, at least for launching satellites.
I was used to hate webmail until I knew GMail. Now I am a convert to the GMail approach and I would like desktop mail clients to copy GMail. And Yahoo! takes the inverse route and simply clones an Outlook interface using Ajax! Argh!
Now, as for this Mossberg guy commenting on "serious email users" and desktop clients, guess what? Most people that I know are not "serious email users", don't have a clue on how to use an email client and use webmail only; actually, most people that I know don't even *know* that it is possible to download emails in their own machines so that you can see them without having to plug into the Internet. So, for those people the simplicity and intuitiveness of GMail will look more appealing than Yahoo's kinda convoluted interface...
Yes, I think that filthy rich nerds will be there before 2018, making all this NASA plan pointless. And probably a private Moon trip will cost 100 million, not 100 *billion* dollars.
Perhaps NASA will even give it up and start to contract the private sector to deliver their astronauts and probes. Or so I hope.
Actually, small blimps shot with *rifles* take *weeks* to deflate significantly. I bet that this thing would continue to float even if punctured by a canonball.
That fits in my own anedoctal evidence. In recent months, I've got the impression that Google search is full of holes. There are even patological cases: if I look for a sequence of strings that I know for sure exists only in a certain blog at Blogger, then Googles return empty results! That is even more alarming considering that Google 0WNZ Blogger, and so should (intuitively) search better in there than in other places...
With a shield made of, say, lunar regolith, two or four meters would be enough to give you the same level of radiation of people living in high places such as the Andes or Himalaia. And I don't think that cancer incidence among them is particularly higher.
BTW, this article was one of the worst pieces of shit that New Scientist has ever published. There are a number of technical solutions known for a long time for this - you can make a ship with a thick shield, you can make a fast ship so that you will not have to stay in space for years, and so on. Besides, as was already mentioned here, even if no technical fix is implemented and if 10% of the guys die 10 or 20 years later from cancer, for starts 100% of the guys will think that the trip was worth risking their lives.
A big enough planet (like Earth or Venus), though, would generate enough internal heat (by decaying of radioisotopes) to have spots of liquid water, no matter how far way from the Sun. But of course that does not seems to be the case of this new planet.
The point is: if our Solar System turns out to have hundreds of planets (and many astronomers think that is a quite likely development, depending on the definition of "planet") then there will be no point in memorizing the names of all of them, in the same way that there is no point in memorizing the names and codes of all known stars of the Milk Way.
I for myself am favor to a physically meaningful definition of planet like "objet orbiting a star with mass enough to be spherical but not enough to shine". And something like that will likely imply in hundreds of planets.
Comparing the energy contained in known Uranium reserves to the energy contained in the known oil reserves is much like comparing a matchstick to a forest fire. Fissile materials could last for *billions* of years [www-formal.stanford.edu], and so fissiles should also be considered a renewable energy source as the sun - and this is taking into account an yearly energy consumption rate 25 times higher than present, more than if the whole world was as energy-hungry as the developed countries.
To do serious damage, we'll need a rock at least a few hundred meters across.
It depends on what you call "serious damage". The Tunguska event blasted thousands of square kilometers of Siberian forest and it is estimated that it was a meteor just 60 meters wide.
A similar impactor hitting a populated area would decimate a whole metropolis or even a small US state. I would call that "serious damage".
Earth's magnetic field exchange its poles from times to times, doesn't it?
So, a tentative explanation for the lack of a Martian magnetic field despite its molten core would be that Mars also exchange poles from times to times and coincidentally we are observing the planet during one of the transitions (when the magnetism would weaken and eventually reach zero).
Of course, in order to test this theory, geologic, or better saying, "areologic" evidence would have to be corrected. (The flips of Earth's magnetic field were discovered by analysing the magnetic alignment of the crystal in rocks of different ages, as far as I remember.)
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You don't need the equivalent mass of dust thrown by volcanic eruptions. You need the equivalent *reflexive surface*. And that can be done with drastically smaller masses, provided that the size of the particles is much smaller than the average particle size thrown by volcanoes and thus the mass-to-surface ratio is tiny. In other words, engineered particles can be made fine enough so that you don't need unrealistic ammounts of them to produce some noticeable effect.
Hey, they are not talking about blocking the sun completely a la Matrix. It is just a few percent reduction in sunlight, without significant consequences for photosynthesis.
2) Countries which hate America (eg: Middle East, France and most of Europe, Brazil, even Canada....). They dont want you, and will make your life miserable. Hey, that's untrue at least for Brazil. I would say that it is fair to state that Brazilians hate America, as in "the idea of a world-domination evil empire" (yes, that is the image in our collective unconscious ;-). However, we do not hate *americans*. I have seen and assisted many Americans coming here in business travels (my city is a industry-techie-mining backyard with no touristic attractions) and I never saw any Brazilian making their lives "miserable"; actually the general attitude is of hospitality. Heck, one of those visitors even married a Brazilian girl that was one of my co-workers... In short, I would say that there is a sharp distinction between the political entity "America" and the *people* called "Americans", as we see it.
Well... Water would be a problem there. Why not Mars, where you can mine oxygen and water directly from the (thin and unbreathable) atmosphere? And with prospects of terraformation the value of your property would skyrocket!
It is a bit difficult to show a medicine bottle through the Internet, but you may take a look at this article. And no, the word used is "race" as opposed to "ancestry" - and by the way the two concepts are intertwined more often than not.
Anyhow, correlation of DNA alone is of little importance for defining groups of biological entities in evolutionary terms. *Phenotype* is the thing being selected by evolution, and evolution does not care if a given phenotype is produced by the change of one nucleotide or a thousand in a DNA strand; since races are groups of different phenotypes clusters inside the same species, then yes, they may be relevant in evolutive terms. And the phenotypes of human races are, let be sincere, *drasticly* different: aside from "visual" distinctions like color, shape, size, there are pronounced biochemical differences (and imunological), like this or that race group being unable to digest this or that nutrient, this or that race being more resistant to HIV, and so on. Heck, there are even *medicines* with instructions saying "this medicine is known to not work effectively on people from race X" - for fortunately medicine doctors apparently did not surrender science to political correctness like many biologists did...
Even though the social security systems in Europe are well working *now*, it is unlikely that they will keep working for the next decades. The main reason is the drastic aging of the population in Europe - it is becoming harder and harder for the ever-shrinking population in productive age to sustain the ever-growing elderly population.
The heat in the Core is not only "stored friction", in fact a great deal of it comes from the continual decaying of radioisotopes. Yes, Earth is something like a giant RTG...
In terms of survival rate in case of accident. When a passenger plane crashes, often close to 100% of people on board die. In the case of the Hindenburg accident, though, this rate was of 36%. Also, your comment on hydrogen burning upwards is very adequate. In fact, considering that the danger of hydrogen flames tends to be overestimated, hydrogen is much cheaper and easier to manufacture than helium, and hydrogen provides more buyoancy than helium, I myself would rather use hydrogen instead of helium in an airship.
I think that fluffy menus are a feature *against* Blue Ray adoption by consumers at large. My personal experience is that most of my friends hate those fluffy DVD menus were you have to watch animations and hear sounds; plain objective menus were you can quickly get what you want are preferred.
Britain can simply build a floating launch plataform, go to some point of the Equator over international watesr and launch the rocket. Sea launch is already used, at least for launching satellites.
I was used to hate webmail until I knew GMail. Now I am a convert to the GMail approach and I would like desktop mail clients to copy GMail. And Yahoo! takes the inverse route and simply clones an Outlook interface using Ajax! Argh!
Now, as for this Mossberg guy commenting on "serious email users" and desktop clients, guess what? Most people that I know are not "serious email users", don't have a clue on how to use an email client and use webmail only; actually, most people that I know don't even *know* that it is possible to download emails in their own machines so that you can see them without having to plug into the Internet. So, for those people the simplicity and intuitiveness of GMail will look more appealing than Yahoo's kinda convoluted interface...
Yes, I think that filthy rich nerds will be there before 2018, making all this NASA plan pointless. And probably a private Moon trip will cost 100 million, not 100 *billion* dollars. Perhaps NASA will even give it up and start to contract the private sector to deliver their astronauts and probes. Or so I hope.
Actually, small blimps shot with *rifles* take *weeks* to deflate significantly. I bet that this thing would continue to float even if punctured by a canonball.
Simple: make the thing so DAMNED *BIG* that it can carry fighters - a flying aircraft carrier!
That fits in my own anedoctal evidence. In recent months, I've got the impression that Google search is full of holes. There are even patological cases: if I look for a sequence of strings that I know for sure exists only in a certain blog at Blogger, then Googles return empty results! That is even more alarming considering that Google 0WNZ Blogger, and so should (intuitively) search better in there than in other places...
With a shield made of, say, lunar regolith, two or four meters would be enough to give you the same level of radiation of people living in high places such as the Andes or Himalaia. And I don't think that cancer incidence among them is particularly higher. BTW, this article was one of the worst pieces of shit that New Scientist has ever published. There are a number of technical solutions known for a long time for this - you can make a ship with a thick shield, you can make a fast ship so that you will not have to stay in space for years, and so on. Besides, as was already mentioned here, even if no technical fix is implemented and if 10% of the guys die 10 or 20 years later from cancer, for starts 100% of the guys will think that the trip was worth risking their lives.
A big enough planet (like Earth or Venus), though, would generate enough internal heat (by decaying of radioisotopes) to have spots of liquid water, no matter how far way from the Sun. But of course that does not seems to be the case of this new planet.
The point is: if our Solar System turns out to have hundreds of planets (and many astronomers think that is a quite likely development, depending on the definition of "planet") then there will be no point in memorizing the names of all of them, in the same way that there is no point in memorizing the names and codes of all known stars of the Milk Way. I for myself am favor to a physically meaningful definition of planet like "objet orbiting a star with mass enough to be spherical but not enough to shine". And something like that will likely imply in hundreds of planets.
And, of course, TV sets that also work as teleporters for chocolate bars.
Comparing the energy contained in known Uranium reserves to the energy contained in the known oil reserves is much like comparing a matchstick to a forest fire. Fissile materials could last for *billions* of years [www-formal.stanford.edu], and so fissiles should also be considered a renewable energy source as the sun - and this is taking into account an yearly energy consumption rate 25 times higher than present, more than if the whole world was as energy-hungry as the developed countries.
To do serious damage, we'll need a rock at least a few hundred meters across.
It depends on what you call "serious damage". The Tunguska event blasted thousands of square kilometers of Siberian forest and it is estimated that it was a meteor just 60 meters wide.
A similar impactor hitting a populated area would decimate a whole metropolis or even a small US state. I would call that "serious damage".
Earth's magnetic field exchange its poles from times to times, doesn't it? So, a tentative explanation for the lack of a Martian magnetic field despite its molten core would be that Mars also exchange poles from times to times and coincidentally we are observing the planet during one of the transitions (when the magnetism would weaken and eventually reach zero). Of course, in order to test this theory, geologic, or better saying, "areologic" evidence would have to be corrected. (The flips of Earth's magnetic field were discovered by analysing the magnetic alignment of the crystal in rocks of different ages, as far as I remember.)