Yes, of course there is. How did you think all that coal and petroleum got down under those rock layers in the first place.
Problem is, it takes several millions of years to do it the natural way (in a manner of speaking, since the Carboniferous (notice the origin of the name) geological era).
I could be wrong, but I think it goes like this: anoxyc swamp with dead plants -> peat -> Brown coal -> coal -> anthracite. The reaction goes to the right with: oodles of time, high temperature, and high pressure.
As far as I'm aware, there are two modern ideas to store carbon in less than geological time;
and the other are "white elephant" projects called CCS (Carbon Capture and Storage) whereby a large petrochemical company builds an experimental reactor to (1) take coal out of the ground (2) burn it for the energy (3) collect the much less dense CO2 (4) separate it from the acidic and poisonous shit (SOx, NOx, fly ash) (5) ??? (6) profit!... (999) somehow compress it and put it back under the ground again where it came from in the first place if they hadn't dug it out. You can keep the mountains of fly ash and surplus sulphuric acid this generates.
I don't like the idea of CCS of CO2, how can you prevent the risk of another Lake Nyos "burp"?
I don't think that Nd2Fe14B magnets decay with time, smartass! At least if you keep it under the Curie temperature. So when his/her Prius goes to the scrap yard, the magnets are taken out and sold to someone who can use them (Toyota might be interested).
Remember the three-arrow symbol U+2672 stands for the slogan "Reduce, Re-use, Recycle".
Another thing I forgot to mention: most of the expensive infrastructure (palaces, musea, libraries, ministeries, universities, factories) are west of Utrecht so the whole country would basically be a write-off and people would just evacuate, just like they came knocking on my grandma's door in 1953.
Venice is interesting because it is unique; it is very beautiful (though it smells bad), and Amsterdam is "the Venice of the North", but I can't see it happening that half of the country does a "Venice". It would just cost too much. Hello, German neighbours! Budge up!
It might cause some economic harm, but it's not going to be a tragedy.
That's true. But the only reason why it's true, is because the Dutch collectively decided to build the Delta Works from 1953 -- 1997. (And they need to be upgraded now because of Global Warming).
So far, so good. Now *PLEASE* note the following important points:
The project duration was 44 years of work. That's longer than a few election periods.
The project cost € 5 billion. That's between 500 and 300 per citizen (50% increase in # of citizens in that time period!).
The project was started 8 years after a devastating war, when the whole country was in need of repair anyway. The sea doesn't wait for people to be ready.
Now please read the "current plans" paragraph of the Wikipedia article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delta_Works#Current_status, it talks about the necessity of continued work for the coming 190 years.
That's also longer than a few election periods.
The "owner" can only exert control so long as something is entirely within their possession. After it leaves that state, there is no good moral or ethical argument for placing the rights of the "artiste" above everyone elses.
That's a very good point, publishing something means casting your pearls of wisdom before the swine of society;-)
But in copyright laws in european countries I think there are some differences: in USA the focus is on the right to copy the work (hence the name copyright), in e.g. the Netherlands I thought the focus is more on the right to be the author (Auteurswet), to keep some say over the work's place in society even after it's published. Those rights have good moral and ethical arguments that they should belong to the author; IANAL but I think they were the following:
The right to be recognized as the author of the work
The right to ask the state to forbid plagiarism of the work (copying without attribution of the source)
The right to ask the state to forbid parodies or modifications of the work if they can be mistaken for the author's work (this is a bit of a gray area)
Ooh nice one! Or even Zwaluw ach Zwaluw by Max & Betsie Anders. WARNING: NSFPWFE (Not suitable for people with functioning ears).
But that would probably violate their corporate motto "do no evil".
2. Make URL's Unicode strings so they are usable across as many languages as possible.
You probably mean UTF-8, I'm assuming, not UCS-2 or UTF-16 or UTF-32 or UTF-EBCDIC.
It sounds nice but I'm a bit worried the spoofers would love it, too.. see Armenian codepoint U+057D and U+0585 for example.
http://hdl.handle.net/2060/20100014348 this one looks like a primary source; but its only a NASA presentation. on p. 19 under "risk of EVAC" the IMM simulation data table on the left side, lists most likely reason "medical illness" (71%), and in the list of 6 conditions mentioned, nr. 1 is "Dental Abscess". So that explains the exploding teeth:-) Nothing about scars opening in space though.
Maybe there is Soviet or Russian info on space medicine that talks about that: can a kind soul who reads Russian report if http://www.imbp.ru/ (Windows-1251 charset encoding) has any more information?
Conclusion: forget what I said about the scars opening in space.
O yeah, I read today that she then became a Hero of the Soviet Union, as well; interesting story really, bit of a role model: Valentina Tereshkova
N.B. that photo looks like you'd REALLY not want to pick a fight with her. Or accidentally eat her cosmonaut ration. Or look at her in a funny way.
As I understand it, no scars and perfect teeth are also because you don't want your scars to open in zero-g (including C-section scars) and you can't have a root canal filling or exploding fillings (because of air pocket) in space. I read a while ago that the astronauts and cosmonauts for the ISS also get a dental check-up before they're allowed to launch.
Was there something about being a woman that made it problematic being in space?
Actually, IIRC women are more at risk from developing cancer (of the ovaries and breasts) as a result of radiation, and in space you're much more exposed to radiation.
I think you are approaching the mining problem from a wrong perspective:
From all that you say, the conclusion should be that we need a small solar panel factory first. And in order to mine its raw material, we need to tape a shovel to its side so the astronauts can shovel regolith dust into its input funnel.
No need to start launching or building something like Bagger 293 until you have a need for 240 000 m^3 of raw material per day!
Assuming the production needs are for one or two buildings and a dozen small rockets per year, a "fool's stick" (metal shovel on one end and a fool on the other) should suffice for the ore collection phase.
Maybe a small table-top factory that can produce a crude amorphous Silicon solar cell the size of a large button, with Calcium or Aluminium wires, can be built somehow(*). Then you need a small robot to arrange and solder the solar cell buttons outside in the sunlight and presto, you've got a growing power source.
Time is probably much cheaper in the beginning than raw power. Germany built those Bagger (in German) things because their heavy industry in the Ruhrgebiet had a large need for "Braunkohl" in the '70s. On the Moon you only need industry for your own base and maybe to launch volatiles and fuel to Moon orbit where they can be tugged to orbital destination or attached to a large (Mars) rocket.
Apropos, anybody here on Slashdot who actually read De Re Metallica by Georgius Agricola? I'm a bit too lazy, but that level of technology (16th century) probably gives hints for energy-appropriate resource extraction methods. Although fire and water are probably hard to come by on the Moon:-)
I've got the modern English translation from Project Gutenberg but haven't got around to studying it yet.
I'm actually sorry about my parent comment, it was too much flame-bait, and didn't add constructively to the discussion.
You said:
Part of the problem is that it is actually illegal in some areas for schools to allow access to Wikipedia.
That comment shocked me, to be honest. But can you please inform us in which areas of which country this happened? Was it a girls school in Afghanistan?
Part of the problem is that it is actually illegal in some areas for schools to allow access to Wikipedia.
I can imagine how in the north of Mali, in Timbuktu, the new islamist rulers would want to block access to Wikipedia (which ones? the french, or arabic wikipedia?), but surely most of the world population is quite happy that their children have access to this valuable resource--or would be happy if their children were allowed to access it.
Can you actually name an area or a school or a country where Wikipedia is illegal? Besides such epitomes of freedom such as North Korea, Burma, and Saudi Arabia, I mean?
Maybe the USA "Conservapedia" can help out for those countries (that website really exists! this is *NOT* a joke! I think... although you'd doubt it, reading the Wikipedia entry about it).
Just like the Wikipedia content is divided out over multiple different languages, the "Conservapedia" could cater for the USA Christian Fundamentalists, Al-Qaida wannabees, Salafists, Taliban etc. etc.
Imagine that you've lived your whole life in the far north somewhere. It is always very cold outside and inside your house as well, so you always sleep under 3 thin blankets. This makes you feel nice & cozy and you sleep very well under your three thin blankets. It's how you and all your ancestors grew up.
Now lately, you have been given a fourth blanket. You still sleep under all of them, you can't take them off without lots of effort, but it's less comfortable now; you notice that you feel a little bit too warm sometimes, although it's really not that big of a problem. You and your family have too many bigger problems to worry about.
Now imagine that your descendents for at least the coming 500 years are forced to sleep under six blankets, unless you change certain of your behaviours that look like they have nothing to do directly with blankets or sleeping.
How many people would go "I don't care, it isn't proven, why should I be the only one who has to change, it's a government conspiracy, and besides I'm much too tired and hot to think about all this crap!"
And who is going to spend the billions, possibly trillions of dollars, to build the grid to move terawatts of power between continents?
That's an easy question: the peoples that will still thrive in the 21st century, after the Age of Cheap Oil is slowly petering out.
I think this evasive answer to your question is called a "tautology" but I could be wrong:-).
If your politicians don't encourage electricity infrastructure to be built *NOW* (now that it's still cheap to do so), you've voted for the wrong politicians.
This is the plan: European Super Grid, it remains to be seen how feasible it is going to be, but you're probably right that it WILL cost billions, and the European economies will probably continue to limp along for several more years with the Eurocrisis... we'll just have to hope for the best.
Just like DESERTEC, it's a hypothetical expansion of the existing Synchronous grid of Continental Europe.
I don't know what the plan is with DESERTEC now three of the countries involved have had revolutions, but I'd imagine they'd still go through with it anyway:-)
"Passivhaus" is a German word.
There is still an enormous amount of "low-hanging-fruit" in energy conservation by better insulation with modern materials.
A long term solution to power needs to replace *all* form of non-renewable, CO2-generating energy...
Yes, agreed. And also better storage technology is needed, especially with intermittant renewables such as solar and wind.
I don't know.. there's probably loads of research to be done before the actual launch of the actual base.
Russia did recently organize (together with ESA) the Mars 500 experiment. It's not as "sexy" as actually sending a mission to Mars, but I am always impressed when all the more boring preparatory work just gets quietly and calmly worked on.
There's no hurry. If there is no large budget, focus first on life-support systems, on the right worms for regolith agriculture, lubrication of machinery in vacuum and moondust conditions, on how large the solar panels need to be for the miniature solar-panel-baking-oven, how well Calcium works as electricity wire, etc. etc.
They can always team up with their neighbours the Poles (Krakow moon radio station) or their other neighbours the Chinese (Chang'e program).
Every launch on the SpaceX manifest through 2017 [spacex.com] is happening via a US government launch complex, and for good reason.
Question: why don't they launch from the equator, e.g. Kourou or Sea Launch?
And, talking about "capabilities gained", the Falcon burns kerosene and liquid oxygen, which presumably is a *lot* cheaper to organize the plumbing for than e.g. the Ariane 5's liquid oxygen and *cryogenic* liquid hydrogen. AFAIK you only need pressure to keep oxygen liquid. Sure, the Ariane 5 and Space Shuttle may have larger payload capacity, but at the cost of much higher complexity to keep the fuel cold before use, I think. Compare the picture of the Ariane 5 Vulcain rocket engine (here) to the picture of the SpaceX Merlin rocket engine; the latter looks a lot simpler to my untrained eye.
And what's the point of a solid rocket booster; you can't turn the thing off when you need to, you have to wait until it's burned out??
Lastly, I'd be nervous if a commercial company used hydrazine (eeewwwwww...) in huge quantity so we should be happy they use kerosene.
IANARS, but I thought that all modern rockets work like this: burn the largest, first-stage rocket using oxygen from the air, when it's burnt empty then you push the empty metal stage away (I don't know how; maybe explosive bolts or something), then you're already well above the troposphere and stratosphere, after the (heaviest) first stage has been dropped off it exposes the engines for the second stage (don't know if they use oxygen from the air at this altitude or oxydant fuel they took along from the ground), you burn them for the large delta-V push to get you into orbit (large push because the spaceship itself has significantly less mass at this point). If necessary repeat for a third stage (in case of the Space Shuttle, that would be its own engines).
I'm thinking, the air resistance must depend mainly on the surface area of the projection viewed from above of the launching spaceship, that must push the corresponding column of atmosphere to the side. If it's all stacked on top like e.g. a Saturn V, Ariane 5 or Soyuz, it's a minimal surface, but if it's two thingies bolted next to each other, surely that's twice as big. Maybe that only matters in the troposphere though, because the density of the air drops off quickly (what's the equation for that, actually: gas pressurized by gravity. is it exponential?)
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, of course there is. How did you think all that coal and petroleum got down under those rock layers in the first place.
... (999) somehow compress it and put it back under the ground again where it came from in the first place if they hadn't dug it out. You can keep the mountains of fly ash and surplus sulphuric acid this generates.
Problem is, it takes several millions of years to do it the natural way (in a manner of speaking, since the Carboniferous (notice the origin of the name) geological era).
I could be wrong, but I think it goes like this: anoxyc swamp with dead plants -> peat -> Brown coal -> coal -> anthracite. The reaction goes to the right with: oodles of time, high temperature, and high pressure.
As far as I'm aware, there are two modern ideas to store carbon in less than geological time;
one is based on centuries long work by Brazilian indians ("Terra Preta" soil), using incompletely burned plants (yeach) and charcoal,
and the other are "white elephant" projects called CCS (Carbon Capture and Storage) whereby a large petrochemical company builds an experimental reactor to (1) take coal out of the ground (2) burn it for the energy (3) collect the much less dense CO2 (4) separate it from the acidic and poisonous shit (SOx, NOx, fly ash) (5) ??? (6) profit!
I don't like the idea of CCS of CO2, how can you prevent the risk of another Lake Nyos "burp"?
I don't think that Nd2Fe14B magnets decay with time, smartass! At least if you keep it under the Curie temperature. So when his/her Prius goes to the scrap yard, the magnets are taken out and sold to someone who can use them (Toyota might be interested).
Remember the three-arrow symbol U+2672 stands for the slogan "Reduce, Re-use, Recycle".
Re-use is quite environmentally friendly.
Another thing I forgot to mention: most of the expensive infrastructure (palaces, musea, libraries, ministeries, universities, factories) are west of Utrecht so the whole country would basically be a write-off and people would just evacuate, just like they came knocking on my grandma's door in 1953.
Venice is interesting because it is unique; it is very beautiful (though it smells bad), and Amsterdam is "the Venice of the North", but I can't see it happening that half of the country does a "Venice". It would just cost too much. Hello, German neighbours! Budge up!
That's true. But the only reason why it's true, is because the Dutch collectively decided to build the Delta Works from 1953 -- 1997. (And they need to be upgraded now because of Global Warming).
So far, so good. Now *PLEASE* note the following important points:
Now please read the "current plans" paragraph of the Wikipedia article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delta_Works#Current_status, it talks about the necessity of continued work for the coming 190 years.
That's also longer than a few election periods.
Well, I don't mean to complain, but they DO use those RPM packages instead of the blessèd tasty .deb packages.
Besides, have you ever tried to eat a fedora hat? Well then.
That's a very good point, publishing something means casting your pearls of wisdom before the swine of society ;-)
But in copyright laws in european countries I think there are some differences: in USA the focus is on the right to copy the work (hence the name copyright), in e.g. the Netherlands I thought the focus is more on the right to be the author (Auteurswet), to keep some say over the work's place in society even after it's published. Those rights have good moral and ethical arguments that they should belong to the author; IANAL but I think they were the following:
Ooh nice one!
Or even Zwaluw ach Zwaluw by Max & Betsie Anders.
WARNING: NSFPWFE (Not suitable for people with functioning ears).
But that would probably violate their corporate motto "do no evil".
You probably mean UTF-8, I'm assuming, not UCS-2 or UTF-16 or UTF-32 or UTF-EBCDIC.
It sounds nice but I'm a bit worried the spoofers would love it, too.. see Armenian codepoint U+057D and U+0585 for example.
It's true that I'm no expert, so I aped what I read somewhere else. I'll look it up for you now.
Conclusion: forget what I said about the scars opening in space.
A chundernaut?
O yeah, I read today that she then became a Hero of the Soviet Union, as well; interesting story really, bit of a role model: Valentina Tereshkova
N.B. that photo looks like you'd REALLY not want to pick a fight with her. Or accidentally eat her cosmonaut ration. Or look at her in a funny way.
As I understand it, no scars and perfect teeth are also because you don't want your scars to open in zero-g (including C-section scars) and you can't have a root canal filling or exploding fillings (because of air pocket) in space. I read a while ago that the astronauts and cosmonauts for the ISS also get a dental check-up before they're allowed to launch.
Actually, IIRC women are more at risk from developing cancer (of the ovaries and breasts) as a result of radiation, and in space you're much more exposed to radiation.
You can extract those from the .deb, like so:
I think you are approaching the mining problem from a wrong perspective:
:-)
From all that you say, the conclusion should be that we need a small solar panel factory first. And in order to mine its raw material, we need to tape a shovel to its side so the astronauts can shovel regolith dust into its input funnel.
No need to start launching or building something like Bagger 293 until you have a need for 240 000 m^3 of raw material per day!
Assuming the production needs are for one or two buildings and a dozen small rockets per year, a "fool's stick" (metal shovel on one end and a fool on the other) should suffice for the ore collection phase.
Maybe a small table-top factory that can produce a crude amorphous Silicon solar cell the size of a large button, with Calcium or Aluminium wires, can be built somehow(*). Then you need a small robot to arrange and solder the solar cell buttons outside in the sunlight and presto, you've got a growing power source.
Time is probably much cheaper in the beginning than raw power. Germany built those Bagger (in German) things because their heavy industry in the Ruhrgebiet had a large need for "Braunkohl" in the '70s. On the Moon you only need industry for your own base and maybe to launch volatiles and fuel to Moon orbit where they can be tugged to orbital destination or attached to a large (Mars) rocket.
Apropos, anybody here on Slashdot who actually read De Re Metallica by Georgius Agricola? I'm a bit too lazy, but that level of technology (16th century) probably gives hints for energy-appropriate resource extraction methods. Although fire and water are probably hard to come by on the Moon
I've got the modern English translation from Project Gutenberg but haven't got around to studying it yet.
(*) Please disregard the hand-waving.
I say bring on the robot poetry!
Did you go Christmas shopping in Amsterdam? :-)
The following sketch was from a 1980s Dutch humor show, aimed at a general audience, nothing shocking, so let's label it "NSFW" nowadays:
(NSFW, Dutch, notveryfunny) sketch from André van Duin & Corrie van Gorp Christmas Show: "that's why they haven't got wicks!"
You said:
That comment shocked me, to be honest. But can you please inform us in which areas of which country this happened? Was it a girls school in Afghanistan?
I can imagine how in the north of Mali, in Timbuktu, the new islamist rulers would want to block access to Wikipedia (which ones? the french, or arabic wikipedia?), but surely most of the world population is quite happy that their children have access to this valuable resource--or would be happy if their children were allowed to access it.
Can you actually name an area or a school or a country where Wikipedia is illegal? Besides such epitomes of freedom such as North Korea, Burma, and Saudi Arabia, I mean?
Maybe the USA "Conservapedia" can help out for those countries (that website really exists! this is *NOT* a joke! I think... although you'd doubt it, reading the Wikipedia entry about it).
Just like the Wikipedia content is divided out over multiple different languages, the "Conservapedia" could cater for the USA Christian Fundamentalists, Al-Qaida wannabees, Salafists, Taliban etc. etc.
Imagine that you've lived your whole life in the far north somewhere. It is always very cold outside and inside your house as well, so you always sleep under 3 thin blankets. This makes you feel nice & cozy and you sleep very well under your three thin blankets. It's how you and all your ancestors grew up.
Now lately, you have been given a fourth blanket. You still sleep under all of them, you can't take them off without lots of effort, but it's less comfortable now; you notice that you feel a little bit too warm sometimes, although it's really not that big of a problem. You and your family have too many bigger problems to worry about.
Now imagine that your descendents for at least the coming 500 years are forced to sleep under six blankets, unless you change certain of your behaviours that look like they have nothing to do directly with blankets or sleeping.
How many people would go "I don't care, it isn't proven, why should I be the only one who has to change, it's a government conspiracy, and besides I'm much too tired and hot to think about all this crap!"
That's an easy question: the peoples that will still thrive in the 21st century, after the Age of Cheap Oil is slowly petering out. :-).
:-)
I think this evasive answer to your question is called a "tautology" but I could be wrong
If your politicians don't encourage electricity infrastructure to be built *NOW* (now that it's still cheap to do so), you've voted for the wrong politicians.
This is the plan: European Super Grid, it remains to be seen how feasible it is going to be, but you're probably right that it WILL cost billions, and the European economies will probably continue to limp along for several more years with the Eurocrisis... we'll just have to hope for the best.
Just like DESERTEC, it's a hypothetical expansion of the existing Synchronous grid of Continental Europe.
I don't know what the plan is with DESERTEC now three of the countries involved have had revolutions, but I'd imagine they'd still go through with it anyway
There is still an enormous amount of "low-hanging-fruit" in energy conservation by better insulation with modern materials.
Yes, agreed. And also better storage technology is needed, especially with intermittant renewables such as solar and wind.
I don't know.. there's probably loads of research to be done before the actual launch of the actual base.
Russia did recently organize (together with ESA) the Mars 500 experiment. It's not as "sexy" as actually sending a mission to Mars, but I am always impressed when all the more boring preparatory work just gets quietly and calmly worked on.
There's no hurry. If there is no large budget, focus first on life-support systems, on the right worms for regolith agriculture, lubrication of machinery in vacuum and moondust conditions, on how large the solar panels need to be for the miniature solar-panel-baking-oven, how well Calcium works as electricity wire, etc. etc.
They can always team up with their neighbours the Poles (Krakow moon radio station) or their other neighbours the Chinese (Chang'e program).
Question: why don't they launch from the equator, e.g. Kourou or Sea Launch?
And, talking about "capabilities gained", the Falcon burns kerosene and liquid oxygen, which presumably is a *lot* cheaper to organize the plumbing for than e.g. the Ariane 5's liquid oxygen and *cryogenic* liquid hydrogen. AFAIK you only need pressure to keep oxygen liquid. Sure, the Ariane 5 and Space Shuttle may have larger payload capacity, but at the cost of much higher complexity to keep the fuel cold before use, I think. Compare the picture of the Ariane 5 Vulcain rocket engine (here) to the picture of the SpaceX Merlin rocket engine; the latter looks a lot simpler to my untrained eye.
And what's the point of a solid rocket booster; you can't turn the thing off when you need to, you have to wait until it's burned out??
Lastly, I'd be nervous if a commercial company used hydrazine (eeewwwwww...) in huge quantity so we should be happy they use kerosene.
IANARS, but I thought that all modern rockets work like this: burn the largest, first-stage rocket using oxygen from the air, when it's burnt empty then you push the empty metal stage away (I don't know how; maybe explosive bolts or something), then you're already well above the troposphere and stratosphere, after the (heaviest) first stage has been dropped off it exposes the engines for the second stage (don't know if they use oxygen from the air at this altitude or oxydant fuel they took along from the ground), you burn them for the large delta-V push to get you into orbit (large push because the spaceship itself has significantly less mass at this point). If necessary repeat for a third stage (in case of the Space Shuttle, that would be its own engines).
I'm thinking, the air resistance must depend mainly on the surface area of the projection viewed from above of the launching spaceship, that must push the corresponding column of atmosphere to the side. If it's all stacked on top like e.g. a Saturn V, Ariane 5 or Soyuz, it's a minimal surface, but if it's two thingies bolted next to each other, surely that's twice as big. Maybe that only matters in the troposphere though, because the density of the air drops off quickly (what's the equation for that, actually: gas pressurized by gravity. is it exponential?)