I just don't believe that there is incontrovertible evidence that climate change is man-made.
The whole "man-made" argument is crap. It was a way to add doubt to the "global warming" statement, which wouldn't be changed even if man wasn't spewing CO2 and Methane into the atmosphere. The fact is the planet is getting warmer. The fact is man has contributed (a lot) to that warming. Instead of playing the blame game for the last decade and a half, politicians on both sides should have been acting on the data. Then again we've only just recently gotten politicians old enough to remember learning about global warming in school, which might explain the sudden sense of urgency.
I do believe the climate is changing. I see enough anecdotal evidence alone to nearly convince myself.
Don't believe it: Know it. Read up on the subject from a wide array of sources and make your own conclusion. When you say "I do believe" you're saying "I haven't actually looked into it, but someone I trust told me so."
The cause is now a political agenda.
It's always been a political agenda since that's the only way anything will be done about it. The Kyoto Protocol was signed by governments, not scientists.
It sounds more like you don't like the side that's cheering that agenda, so this ends up a case of guilty by association.
It also happened in his newest trilogy. Their solution was to pump sea water into dry lake beds and deserts to create artificial seas (or recreate seas that existed thousands of years ago). They also pumped water back onto the eastern ice shelf of Antarctica where it froze again.
Once Defendant converted Plaintiffs' recording into the compressed.mp3 format... they are no longer the authorized copies distributed by Plaintiffs.
Here they are saying that ripping a CD to MP3 format is the creation of an 'unauthorized copy'. Technically, any copy not obtained from the plaintiff is unauthorized because they didn't distribute it.
and they [MP3s] are in his shared folder... Moreover, Defendant had no authorization to distribute Plaintiffs' copyrighted recordings from his KaZaA shared folder.
Here they are saying that this guy had his MP3s in his KaZaa shared folder, which is technically unauthorized distribution.
Uh, no, read it again. The first part of the sentence clearly states that ripping a CD to MP3 format is an infringement because it creates an 'unauthorized' copy that was not distributed by the record companies. Copyright holders are supposed to control the distribution of their works, so this could be seen as circumventing their right to distribute.
The problem is that the staff that handles returns are Luddites. Sure, they can start looking inside the boxes, but that doesn't mean they'll be able to differentiate a 500 GB hard drive from a 5 GB hard drive.
That space junk will one day be considered a valuable resource. After all, it's already up there, which makes it fairly valuable. Those junk satellites might not be functional, but the individual components and the materials they're made from will be able to be recycled and reused. Personally, I think salvaging the orbiting junkyards will turn out to be a fairly lucrative business some day.
When you're typing away on your computer late at night, do you consider yourself to be alone? Sure, you might be the only human in the room, but you are definitely not alone. There are insects and mites creeping around that room hidden from view. There are bacteria covering every surface of the room. So while a layperson would say "I'm here by myself" a biologist would smirk and keep quiet so they didn't scare you silly with all the bugs you're surrounded with.
Habitable planets mean just that: there's probably life on them, but not life you would ever think twice about. Many of those planets, if habitable, wouldn't look like they're life-bearing at all. Sure, they might have oxygen atmospheres which we could breath, and they might have liquid water, but toss in your fishing pole and you wouldn't catch any fish (or fish-like animals).
I'm really getting tired of all the sensationalist journalism that reports on findings like this. Sure, there's most likely habitable planets out there, and sure, there's probably life on them, but when you explain to a layperson what kinds of life, they say "oh, is that all?". Science fiction has embedded itself into our consciousness so that the only life we think about is animal life. Unless there are little green men running around on those planets, most people simply don't care (which is sad).
I can't wait until we find signs of life on Mars or Europa. Even bacteria would be the most important discovery in the history of humanity, but the mindless masses with simply shrug their shoulders and flip the channel to something a bit more their level.
How exactly is star wars somehow less scifi then firefly?
It isn't. They're both Space-Fantasy.
I'd wager that there is more theoretical technology and theoretical futuristic social structure in star wars then serenity and probably most of firefly.
You've got to be kidding. Light Sabers aren't theoretically, they're magical. Space ships flying through space as if aerodynamics mattered is magic. The entire aspect of the Jedi and Sith is magic.
The social structure in Star Wars was identical to that of the Roman Republic which turned into the Roman Empire...
I mean, it's fiction, about science.
It's fiction, I'll grant you that. It isn't based on science at all.
I've seen this on StarGate forums as well. A forum member will discover a web poll somewhere and rally the fans to make it the #1 pick. They'll even register multiple times with different email addresses so they can vote more than once. Pretty childish really, but I guess that's the world we live in.
Cochrane wasn't drunk, he was hung over. It wasn't acid, it was plasma coolant. First Contact was ok, not very good. Not better than Back to the Future. Not better than the Matrix, not better than Reloaded, but better than Revolutions.
I agree Star Wars is not Science Fiction. Space Fantasy is more accurate.
My primary theory is that SG-1 is getting canceled because of the Christian theme.
It isn't a Christian theme, it's a religious theme. The writers cherry-picked different aspects from several religions and came up with the Ori and their followers. You see Stargate bashing Christianity, probably because you're a Christian. A Muslim would see them bashing Islam. A Jew would see them bashing Judaism. I guess my point is, the writers wanted to show religious fundamentalists as the bad guys in order to parallel what is happening in real life.
What cracks me up is that when Stargate was bashing Ra, you didn't hear any Egyptians getting pissed off. When they made Thor a little gray alien, you didn't hear any northern Europeans bitching. Oh, that's right; it's because those religions are considered dead, while Christianity, Judaism and Islam are still around.
The moon is the first step.
Why? Because it's the closest large mass near the Earth. Going back there will get our space-legs back, and prepare us for Mars.
Colonizing the moon is a drastically different undertaking from colonizing Mars. You're right, it is different, but there will be dual-use technology gleaned from this.
The moon is essentially a vacuum. It's cold. It has no useful resources to speak of (and no, He3 won't be useful any time soon). 1/6th Earth's gravity. And it's fairly close. It being a vacuum is a good thing. It being cold is a good thing. It has plenty of resources like Aluminium and Titanium, solar energy, and there may be water at the poles (a return there will give us the answer). The low gravity would probably make Luna a popular place for old people in the future, and colonists would adapt or die (their choice). Low gravity would also allow those resources to be put to use off the surface of Luna, which makes them valuable.
Colonizing Luna would teach us how to live on large moons, and give us the knowledge to visit and colonize all the other large moons in the solar system.
Once you get past Mars it's all large moons, which would be dwarf planets if they orbited the sun, so in that regard, Luna is the first step in learning how to colonize a dwarf planet. Mars is the first step in learning how to colonize a planet. I'm guessing sometime around Mars we'll learn how to colonize asteroids as well.
We've got a lot of resources and a lot of needs, why do we have to favor Geothermal over Nuclear or Solar or Wind? Why can we invest heavily into all of them?
People like one solution for all their problems. 3000 years ago, folks had to pray to one god for good health and another god for plentiful harvests and good weather. Now-a-days most folks all pray to the same god for everything regardless of the situation, and they like it that way. They don't want to have to weigh benifits of going one route or another. They don't want to have to think about their options at all.
Maybe one day we'll be able to get past the "one solution to all our problems" fixation we have, but it won't happen any day soon.
Moderates of any belief system are the ones that allow fundamentalism/extremism to exist and flourish. The sad thing is that if fundamentalists were able to defeat all their opposition, they would then turn on the moderates for "not being fundamental enough".
SG-1 will end with a cliffhanger. I know it will piss a lot of viewers off, but the series finale was likely already completed several weeks before SCIFI decided to cancel the series.
The first SG-1 movie will deal with wrapping up the Ori story arc, with the Ori being defeated once and for all by the end.
The second movie has been referred to as a time-travel story that Brad Wright (executive producer of SG-1 & SG-A) has wanted to tell for some time, which will most likely set the stage for the new series and will probably premiere in July of 2008.
We've already found the few pieces places that are easiest to terraform, namely Mars, Venus, and perhaps Europa.
Terraforming Mars is by far the easiest on your list. If it has a decent amount of water under the surface, we could probably terraform in hundreds or perhaps thousands of years.
Venus will prove to be the toughest on your list, simply due to it's dense atmosphere, lack of water, and its rotation. If we had the technology to build a massive solar shade and place it in the L1 position between it and the sun, we could freeze the atmosphere into dry ice which would snow to the surface. That leaves the lack of water and rotation.
I've heard some folks talk about dragging comets and smashing them into the surface on an angle to speed up Venus' rotation and add water and other volatiles, but that would require a massive amount of time and effort. I imagine "terraforming" Venus would take thousands to tens of thousands of years.
Europa cannot be terraformed in the traditional sense. With the radiation Jupiter spits out, living on the surface would be a waste of time and effort. The only way to survive long-term on Europa would be to colonize the oceans beneath the surface ice. So you have ocean colonies, not terraformation.
I think the most interesting part about all this talk of terraforming other worlds is that we only live on one-quarter of our planet. The oceans are nearly devoid of human life. Here's a thought: How about we move into underwater habitats and work on colonizing the rest of our planet before we get all excited about other planets?
Nonetheless, a planet will make a star vibrate ever-so-slightly-and-slowly, whereas a black whole will make who masses of stuff rotate around it, and suck them in.
I don't mean to be pedantic, but blacks holes don't "suck" anything towards them. Objects fall towards them, just like you fall towards Earth when you jump off a diving board into a pool.
Ah, nevermind. The Earth doesn't rotate, the sky revolves around us, and the sun rises and sets every day.
I agree that Venus would be more earth-like once the job was finished, but actually terraforming the planet would take tens of thousands of years, compared to Mars being terraformed in thousands, or possibly hundreds.
Venus' rotation is so slow that its day is longer than its year. I don't know the numbers, but you'd have to bombard it continuously with large masses for hundreds of years just to get any noticeable change in it's rotation. And of course, the sun would rise in the west and set in the east, because it's rotation is reverse from the Earth, not that there's anything wrong with that.
Getting the atmosphere under control would be a matter of building a massive solar shade in the L1 position, but we don't even know if it's technically possible.
You don't need to combine the mirror and the mole holes from Red Mars. The mole holes were designed to heat the atmosphere of Mars using the internal heat of the planet:
Step 1: Dig a hole a kilometer wide and 20 kilometers deep.
Step 2: Release internal heat into the Martian Atmosphere.
Step 3: Profit!
For an added bonus, you could build colonies into the walls of the mole hole, that way you have heat and protection from nasty radiation. Now all we need to do is figure out how to build automated construction robots that could dig a 20 kilometer hole all by themselves, and then a rocket to get them to Mars safely...
Domes aren't all that impractical. Instead of creating a framework with glass (heavy!), you make an inflatable dome that uses the internal air pressure to do all the lifting. This was the idea behind the dome cities in the Mars Trilogy by Kim Stanley Robinson, and would probably work quite well on the moon.
Yeah, they should use something like E=MC^2 as an analogy. That way they could say "The flare from II Pegasi was equal to X kilos of mass being converted into energy". That might give us a better idea of the kinds of energies they're talking about.
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It sounds more like you don't like the side that's cheering that agenda, so this ends up a case of guilty by association.
It also happened in his newest trilogy. Their solution was to pump sea water into dry lake beds and deserts to create artificial seas (or recreate seas that existed thousands of years ago). They also pumped water back onto the eastern ice shelf of Antarctica where it froze again.
It's hard to put a price on discoveries.
Here they are saying that this guy had his MP3s in his KaZaa shared folder, which is technically unauthorized distribution.
Uh, no, read it again. The first part of the sentence clearly states that ripping a CD to MP3 format is an infringement because it creates an 'unauthorized' copy that was not distributed by the record companies. Copyright holders are supposed to control the distribution of their works, so this could be seen as circumventing their right to distribute.
The problem is that the staff that handles returns are Luddites. Sure, they can start looking inside the boxes, but that doesn't mean they'll be able to differentiate a 500 GB hard drive from a 5 GB hard drive.
Laugh-a while you can, monkey-boy!
That space junk will one day be considered a valuable resource. After all, it's already up there, which makes it fairly valuable. Those junk satellites might not be functional, but the individual components and the materials they're made from will be able to be recycled and reused. Personally, I think salvaging the orbiting junkyards will turn out to be a fairly lucrative business some day.
When you're typing away on your computer late at night, do you consider yourself to be alone? Sure, you might be the only human in the room, but you are definitely not alone. There are insects and mites creeping around that room hidden from view. There are bacteria covering every surface of the room. So while a layperson would say "I'm here by myself" a biologist would smirk and keep quiet so they didn't scare you silly with all the bugs you're surrounded with.
Habitable planets mean just that: there's probably life on them, but not life you would ever think twice about. Many of those planets, if habitable, wouldn't look like they're life-bearing at all. Sure, they might have oxygen atmospheres which we could breath, and they might have liquid water, but toss in your fishing pole and you wouldn't catch any fish (or fish-like animals).
I'm really getting tired of all the sensationalist journalism that reports on findings like this. Sure, there's most likely habitable planets out there, and sure, there's probably life on them, but when you explain to a layperson what kinds of life, they say "oh, is that all?". Science fiction has embedded itself into our consciousness so that the only life we think about is animal life. Unless there are little green men running around on those planets, most people simply don't care (which is sad).
I can't wait until we find signs of life on Mars or Europa. Even bacteria would be the most important discovery in the history of humanity, but the mindless masses with simply shrug their shoulders and flip the channel to something a bit more their level.
It isn't. They're both Space-Fantasy.
I'd wager that there is more theoretical technology and theoretical futuristic social structure in star wars then serenity and probably most of firefly.
You've got to be kidding. Light Sabers aren't theoretically, they're magical. Space ships flying through space as if aerodynamics mattered is magic. The entire aspect of the Jedi and Sith is magic.
The social structure in Star Wars was identical to that of the Roman Republic which turned into the Roman Empire...
I mean, it's fiction, about science.
It's fiction, I'll grant you that. It isn't based on science at all.
I've seen this on StarGate forums as well. A forum member will discover a web poll somewhere and rally the fans to make it the #1 pick. They'll even register multiple times with different email addresses so they can vote more than once. Pretty childish really, but I guess that's the world we live in.
Cochrane wasn't drunk, he was hung over. It wasn't acid, it was plasma coolant. First Contact was ok, not very good. Not better than Back to the Future. Not better than the Matrix, not better than Reloaded, but better than Revolutions.
I agree Star Wars is not Science Fiction. Space Fantasy is more accurate.
It isn't a Christian theme, it's a religious theme. The writers cherry-picked different aspects from several religions and came up with the Ori and their followers. You see Stargate bashing Christianity, probably because you're a Christian. A Muslim would see them bashing Islam. A Jew would see them bashing Judaism. I guess my point is, the writers wanted to show religious fundamentalists as the bad guys in order to parallel what is happening in real life.
What cracks me up is that when Stargate was bashing Ra, you didn't hear any Egyptians getting pissed off. When they made Thor a little gray alien, you didn't hear any northern Europeans bitching. Oh, that's right; it's because those religions are considered dead, while Christianity, Judaism and Islam are still around.
Colonizing Luna would teach us how to live on large moons, and give us the knowledge to visit and colonize all the other large moons in the solar system. Once you get past Mars it's all large moons, which would be dwarf planets if they orbited the sun, so in that regard, Luna is the first step in learning how to colonize a dwarf planet. Mars is the first step in learning how to colonize a planet. I'm guessing sometime around Mars we'll learn how to colonize asteroids as well.
People like one solution for all their problems. 3000 years ago, folks had to pray to one god for good health and another god for plentiful harvests and good weather. Now-a-days most folks all pray to the same god for everything regardless of the situation, and they like it that way. They don't want to have to weigh benifits of going one route or another. They don't want to have to think about their options at all.
Maybe one day we'll be able to get past the "one solution to all our problems" fixation we have, but it won't happen any day soon.
Moderates of any belief system are the ones that allow fundamentalism/extremism to exist and flourish. The sad thing is that if fundamentalists were able to defeat all their opposition, they would then turn on the moderates for "not being fundamental enough".
SG-1 will end with a cliffhanger. I know it will piss a lot of viewers off, but the series finale was likely already completed several weeks before SCIFI decided to cancel the series. The first SG-1 movie will deal with wrapping up the Ori story arc, with the Ori being defeated once and for all by the end. The second movie has been referred to as a time-travel story that Brad Wright (executive producer of SG-1 & SG-A) has wanted to tell for some time, which will most likely set the stage for the new series and will probably premiere in July of 2008.
We've already found the few pieces places that are easiest to terraform, namely Mars, Venus, and perhaps Europa.
Terraforming Mars is by far the easiest on your list. If it has a decent amount of water under the surface, we could probably terraform in hundreds or perhaps thousands of years.
Venus will prove to be the toughest on your list, simply due to it's dense atmosphere, lack of water, and its rotation. If we had the technology to build a massive solar shade and place it in the L1 position between it and the sun, we could freeze the atmosphere into dry ice which would snow to the surface. That leaves the lack of water and rotation.
I've heard some folks talk about dragging comets and smashing them into the surface on an angle to speed up Venus' rotation and add water and other volatiles, but that would require a massive amount of time and effort. I imagine "terraforming" Venus would take thousands to tens of thousands of years.
Europa cannot be terraformed in the traditional sense. With the radiation Jupiter spits out, living on the surface would be a waste of time and effort. The only way to survive long-term on Europa would be to colonize the oceans beneath the surface ice. So you have ocean colonies, not terraformation.
I think the most interesting part about all this talk of terraforming other worlds is that we only live on one-quarter of our planet. The oceans are nearly devoid of human life. Here's a thought: How about we move into underwater habitats and work on colonizing the rest of our planet before we get all excited about other planets?
Nonetheless, a planet will make a star vibrate ever-so-slightly-and-slowly, whereas a black whole will make who masses of stuff rotate around it, and suck them in.
I don't mean to be pedantic, but blacks holes don't "suck" anything towards them. Objects fall towards them, just like you fall towards Earth when you jump off a diving board into a pool.
Ah, nevermind. The Earth doesn't rotate, the sky revolves around us, and the sun rises and sets every day.
I agree that Venus would be more earth-like once the job was finished, but actually terraforming the planet would take tens of thousands of years, compared to Mars being terraformed in thousands, or possibly hundreds.
Venus' rotation is so slow that its day is longer than its year. I don't know the numbers, but you'd have to bombard it continuously with large masses for hundreds of years just to get any noticeable change in it's rotation. And of course, the sun would rise in the west and set in the east, because it's rotation is reverse from the Earth, not that there's anything wrong with that.
Getting the atmosphere under control would be a matter of building a massive solar shade in the L1 position, but we don't even know if it's technically possible.
You don't need to combine the mirror and the mole holes from Red Mars. The mole holes were designed to heat the atmosphere of Mars using the internal heat of the planet:
Step 1: Dig a hole a kilometer wide and 20 kilometers deep.
Step 2: Release internal heat into the Martian Atmosphere.
Step 3: Profit!
For an added bonus, you could build colonies into the walls of the mole hole, that way you have heat and protection from nasty radiation. Now all we need to do is figure out how to build automated construction robots that could dig a 20 kilometer hole all by themselves, and then a rocket to get them to Mars safely...
Domes aren't all that impractical. Instead of creating a framework with glass (heavy!), you make an inflatable dome that uses the internal air pressure to do all the lifting. This was the idea behind the dome cities in the Mars Trilogy by Kim Stanley Robinson, and would probably work quite well on the moon.
Yeah, they should use something like E=MC^2 as an analogy. That way they could say "The flare from II Pegasi was equal to X kilos of mass being converted into energy". That might give us a better idea of the kinds of energies they're talking about.
Star Wars Galaxies is also twitch-based. It has been for quite a few months now.