Here is some insight about Arp - his observations and theories (and a comment about eccentric science would-be-vindicators).
Arp noticed some real peculiarities in astronomical and astrophysical data that started piling up in the 1950s. He observed that red shifts appeared to be "quantized" - to appear in buckets along a line-of-sight instead of being continuous. He also observed that high red shifted objects seemed to be statistically too numerous near brighter, less red shifted galaxies.
He was right about both observations, but he proposed a complex but poorly worked out set of hypotheses to explain them (calling them a "theory" credits them with too much coherence). He proposed the red-shift were not due to the Doppler effect but to some brand new physics (which he could not explain), and that red-shifted objects near closer galaxies were actually ejected from them.
We have since learned that the quantized red-shifts is due to the cellular structure of the Universe, there are vast voids and walls and filaments of galaxies, so there are no red-shifts in the voids, but then they are clustered together in walls and filaments. And the anomalous association of high-red shifted objects is due to gravitational lensing (an explanation that Arp rejected, without having a good argument for doing so). There is a lot of interconnecting data that supports all of this now.
Arp tended to undermine acceptance of his valid observations by insisting on fringey and poorly reasoned theories to explain them, rather than simply pushing astronomy to take them seriously and look for possible causes.
Observing some quasars that appear to turn off too fast may resemble some aspects of Arp's hypotheses, and do require explanation, but they cannot be used to "vindicate" a ramshackle theory that was always weak and has since completely collapsed.
90% of photons from stars end up in a fog. Ok. And that fog absorbs gamma rays.
What kind of fog is that? Photons don't absorb photons, do there must be other matter involved.
From the actual article in Science: "Gamma rays with sufficient energy can annihilate when they collide with EBL photons and produce electron-positron pairs (i.e., the reaction e+e–), effectively being absorbed as a result of the interaction." So yes they do, under the right conditions.
Maybe you are wrong and the people funding them know better. Do you think people like to lose money?
In the U.S. you are arguing over the properties of the empty set, everything is vacuously true! This is amusing, here for example we have a web page devoted to new coal plant construction in North America and there is nothing listed. Investors do not like to lose money and as a result there are no coal plants being build! The money has spoken.
Virtually all planned coal plant construction is in China or India, where they are more strongly influence by government policy than profit-and-loss.
By the same token, not wanting to lose money, there are currently only two nuclear power units under construction in the U.S. (the Vogtle 3 and 4 units) , both massively over budget (planned cost $1 billion each, actual cost $9 billion each). Seven other plant projects that started at about the same time have bailed out. That the two Vogtle units are still being completed is due to the sunk cost fallacy and the political effect of having multiple minority owners (the decision to cancel and eat the cost is too difficult for too many, and so it continues. Getting any more nuclear power plants built in the U.S. requires finding a way to make them profitable. No hippies are holding them back.
Not if you don't own the mineral rights. And for quite awhile developers of residential properties have been holding on to mineral rights. And in most states, sellers aren’t legally required to disclose to home buyers whether they are severing the mineral rights to a property, you have to go down to city hall and check separate filings to find out.
This is an excellent point. Without standards and, yes, regulation how would you know a home automation system installed by someone else was actually under your complete control?
I have heard of "back doors" being left in nuclear power plants.
If I were buying a house an automation system might not only have negative value to me, but be a show stopper, unless it was removed as a condition of sale.
No, it "implied" nothing. It clearly stated that Bolsonaro's announced policies are likely to make this problem worse:
During the 2018 election campaign, Mr Bolsonaro pledged to limit fines for damaging forestry and to weaken the influence of the environmental agency. An aide for the president-elect has also announced the administration will merge the agriculture and environment ministries
This is not a strategy to fix the problem. But you seem to have a problem with people mentioning that fact.
A really odd tack to take, complaining about "wahtaboutism" when this sub-thread exists entirely because of your own whataboutist post upthread, seeking to haul in unrelated "whatabouts".
Now please tell me where we get planes capable of lifting 5000 tons.
Forget the airplane flights, we could do this much more easily and cheaply with high altitude artillery, similar to what is presently in use by the world's militaries for anti-aircraft roles. We already have auto-cannons capable of firing shells into the stratosphere. It should be possible to setup a network of remote artillery bases with automatic loading and firing controlled by computer and firing more or less continuously. In fact, this would probably be much cheaper than maintaining a fleet of heavy lift airplanes. Each shell would be loaded with a designated quantity of sulfur compounds and set to detonate automatically at the prescribed altitude or after a set amount of time. This technology was available in it's basic form during World War I, over 100 years ago, and has by now reached a very refined and technically mature status.
You are thinking too literally. Yes, ballistic launching. But they wouldn't be explosive shells, they would just be sulfur dioxide tanks that release their payload at altitude then parachute back to Earth to fall into an impact area for refilling and relaunch. Think Falcon rockets, to make things cheap, make them reusable. And we could launch them with vertical launch tubes in the ground using hydrogen and oxygen as the propellant mixture. The muzzle velocity would be relatively slow for artillery, maybe 700 m/sec to reach the ~20 km needed. The Paris Gun way back in 1918 reached an altitude of 42.3 km and it wasn't even pointed vertically (a century ago, but still an impressive feat of artillery engineering).
It may come to doing this (or something very like it) as things get bad enough if we don't accelerate our progress on reduction targets.
But that shouldn't be our major plan.
It is like going in for leg surgery - amputation may be required, but that shouldn't be your initial strategy.
Mars may not be the perfect destination, but at least for now, it is the ultimate libertarian paradise.
The ultimate Libertarian paradise. You don't know how right you are.
Libertarian paradises are always pure fantasy.
You don't know regulation until you know how closely controlled all human behavior has to be inside an small enclosed artificial environment with other people where one mistake, or equipment failure, could kill everyone.
No, they aren't. They value of the richest asteroid ore known is worth about $3/kg. This makes them worth less than some Earth ores (the Cameco uranium mine, and the Klondex gold mine). The cost of retrieving said ore to Earth where it can be used is much higher, much higher than this. The only asteroid retrieval scheme anyone has been willing to quote a price for was about $5,000/kg.
Since that kilogram of asteroid ore is, instead of being worth $3, is really worth -$4,997, it would be more accurate to talk about asteroids containing "negative quadrillions of dollars".
When Europeans started going to the New World to extract wealth, they did it in ordinary commercial vessels, simply going on somewhat longer voyages than average, but much shorter than the voyages being made to Africa and Asia. The cost was not unusual for any sort of commercial shipping operation, and the goods could be obtained at fairly low cost.
I define colony the way everyone else does. A permanent settlement where you live your life there, and have children.
My dictionary says:
1) A country or area under the full or partial political control of another country, typically a distant one, and occupied by settlers from that country.
2) A group of people of one nationality or ethnic group living in a foreign city or country.
3) A community of animals or plants of one kind living close together or forming a physically connected structure.
Nothing about "living your life there" or "having children".
(and no, "settlers" doesn't imply those things either, a settlement is a "group of people living in the same place")
Woah there Nelly!
You have damned strange ideas about what the term "settler" and "settling" means. Mirriam-Webster's defines this as "someone who settles in a new region or colony" and the definition first two definitions of "settle" are "1 : to place so as to stay" and "2a : to establish in residence, b : to furnish with inhabitants ".
The whole idea behind settlers and settling is that they go there and they stay there. People who go there for a while then leave are "visitors" or "explorers" or perhaps "failed settlers" but they aren't "settlers". Yes living their life there is the whole idea, and having children too, if they don't want their colony to disappear when they die.
Want to tell me a story? Write it down. Then I might read it.
And I have never watched a pre-roll video. Try to force an animated ad of some kind on me, and I close the window and do something else (sometimes reluctantly, if I really wanted to read the actual content).
Too bad Slashdot doesn't do images (or maybe not, goatse and all). Looking at the map in the article the glacier perimeter actually follows the crater rim for about 40% of its circumference. The rim must be stabilizing the glacier right now.
H-B11 fusion is an alternative, but requires huge amounts of energy to initiate, though that appears to have been circumvented thanks to insanely powerful (10PW) lasers. See doi:10.1088/1742-6596/717/1/012095 (since I don't wish to link directly to a pdf).
What you mean is that a theoretical technique that might possibly be made to work has been proposed.
As the first sentence in the paper reminds us: "Compared with the deuterium tritium (DT) fusion, the environmentally clean fusion of protons with 11B is extremely difficult". And the introduction also says: "In discussing this option, Crandall mentioned that an enormous further work would be necessary to achieve this goal. The following views may summarize some of the tasks."
So the paper's authors themselves merely claim to summarize "some of the tasks" that need to be carried out as part of " enormous further work" before any claim to feasibility (much less practical implementation) can be made for a problem that is "extremely difficult" even compared to D-T fusion which is decades away.
They're trying several methods. Laser fusion is one, the Chinese reactor is another.
"Laser fusion" is dead. The actual general technology is properly known as inertial confinement fusion (ICF) and lasers are only one possible method of providing the driving energy.
The original ICF idea of direct drive laser fusion is completely dead - it does not work. All ICF schemes now use indirect drive, using an external energy pulse to create thermal X-rays inside a little metal capsule (hohlraum) which then drives the implosion. You don't necessarily need lasers to provide that energy pulse, particle beams promise to be much more efficient and cost effective. Unfortunately even approach this has turned out to be more difficult than expected, the National Ignition Facility at LLNL was supposed to be a factor of 3 above break-even, but came in a factor of 3 below, even when extremely elaborate hohlraums (costs $10,000 each) were used.
Once it became clear that indirect drive was necessary, it made the whole ICF project questionable. The original idea was that you only needed to make cheap little bubbles of frozen fuel. Once it turned out that each explosion required a high-precision manufactured multi-part unit, the cost effectiveness of the idea collapsed. Each explosion can cost no more than about a penny, and you need to set off hundreds of them each second. No one has any idea how this could be done, even if the driver problem is completely solved.
There aren't any ICF projects comparable to the current magnetic confinement fusion work going on any more. No one has any plans for a workable ICF demo plant.
Also you are rating the human metabolic rate about a factor of 3 too high, is is about 1000 W/m^3, so the ratio of heat output per unit volume is 25 times higher for humans. But the density of the solar core is 160 g/cm^3, so the energy output per unit mass in the Sun is 6 times higher than in humans.
It isn't going "round and round" it is going forward, step by step. Each issue that is solved is one less issue. There have been at least 226 tokamaks built to date, and each one advances knowledge about some aspect of design and operation. That is how extremely complex systems are developed. There is a lot of work to be done to build and operate the first true break-even tokamak -- about 20 years and $20 billion worth.
Slashdot Mirror
Yep. Pretty much this.
As the summary says the far-side.
Despite what certain progressive rock bands would have you (metaphorically) believe there is no "dark side of the Moon".
Here is some insight about Arp - his observations and theories (and a comment about eccentric science would-be-vindicators).
Arp noticed some real peculiarities in astronomical and astrophysical data that started piling up in the 1950s. He observed that red shifts appeared to be "quantized" - to appear in buckets along a line-of-sight instead of being continuous. He also observed that high red shifted objects seemed to be statistically too numerous near brighter, less red shifted galaxies.
He was right about both observations, but he proposed a complex but poorly worked out set of hypotheses to explain them (calling them a "theory" credits them with too much coherence). He proposed the red-shift were not due to the Doppler effect but to some brand new physics (which he could not explain), and that red-shifted objects near closer galaxies were actually ejected from them.
We have since learned that the quantized red-shifts is due to the cellular structure of the Universe, there are vast voids and walls and filaments of galaxies, so there are no red-shifts in the voids, but then they are clustered together in walls and filaments. And the anomalous association of high-red shifted objects is due to gravitational lensing (an explanation that Arp rejected, without having a good argument for doing so). There is a lot of interconnecting data that supports all of this now.
Arp tended to undermine acceptance of his valid observations by insisting on fringey and poorly reasoned theories to explain them, rather than simply pushing astronomy to take them seriously and look for possible causes.
Observing some quasars that appear to turn off too fast may resemble some aspects of Arp's hypotheses, and do require explanation, but they cannot be used to "vindicate" a ramshackle theory that was always weak and has since completely collapsed.
90% of photons from stars end up in a fog. Ok. And that fog absorbs gamma rays. What kind of fog is that? Photons don't absorb photons, do there must be other matter involved.
From the actual article in Science: "Gamma rays with sufficient energy can annihilate when they collide with EBL photons and produce electron-positron pairs (i.e., the reaction e+e–), effectively being absorbed as a result of the interaction." So yes they do, under the right conditions.
Maybe you are wrong and the people funding them know better. Do you think people like to lose money?
In the U.S. you are arguing over the properties of the empty set, everything is vacuously true! This is amusing, here for example we have a web page devoted to new coal plant construction in North America and there is nothing listed. Investors do not like to lose money and as a result there are no coal plants being build! The money has spoken.
Virtually all planned coal plant construction is in China or India, where they are more strongly influence by government policy than profit-and-loss.
By the same token, not wanting to lose money, there are currently only two nuclear power units under construction in the U.S. (the Vogtle 3 and 4 units) , both massively over budget (planned cost $1 billion each, actual cost $9 billion each). Seven other plant projects that started at about the same time have bailed out. That the two Vogtle units are still being completed is due to the sunk cost fallacy and the political effect of having multiple minority owners (the decision to cancel and eat the cost is too difficult for too many, and so it continues. Getting any more nuclear power plants built in the U.S. requires finding a way to make them profitable. No hippies are holding them back.
Jaw dropping?
Click-bait much?
All the way down, actually.
Not if you don't own the mineral rights. And for quite awhile developers of residential properties have been holding on to mineral rights. And in most states, sellers aren’t legally required to disclose to home buyers whether they are severing the mineral rights to a property, you have to go down to city hall and check separate filings to find out.
This is an excellent point. Without standards and, yes, regulation how would you know a home automation system installed by someone else was actually under your complete control?
I have heard of "back doors" being left in nuclear power plants.
If I were buying a house an automation system might not only have negative value to me, but be a show stopper, unless it was removed as a condition of sale.
No, it "implied" nothing. It clearly stated that Bolsonaro's announced policies are likely to make this problem worse:
During the 2018 election campaign, Mr Bolsonaro pledged to limit fines for damaging forestry and to weaken the influence of the environmental agency. An aide for the president-elect has also announced the administration will merge the agriculture and environment ministries
This is not a strategy to fix the problem. But you seem to have a problem with people mentioning that fact.
A really odd tack to take, complaining about "wahtaboutism" when this sub-thread exists entirely because of your own whataboutist post upthread, seeking to haul in unrelated "whatabouts".
Disingenuous hypocrite much?
Now please tell me where we get planes capable of lifting 5000 tons.
Forget the airplane flights, we could do this much more easily and cheaply with high altitude artillery, similar to what is presently in use by the world's militaries for anti-aircraft roles. We already have auto-cannons capable of firing shells into the stratosphere. It should be possible to setup a network of remote artillery bases with automatic loading and firing controlled by computer and firing more or less continuously. In fact, this would probably be much cheaper than maintaining a fleet of heavy lift airplanes. Each shell would be loaded with a designated quantity of sulfur compounds and set to detonate automatically at the prescribed altitude or after a set amount of time. This technology was available in it's basic form during World War I, over 100 years ago, and has by now reached a very refined and technically mature status.
You are thinking too literally. Yes, ballistic launching. But they wouldn't be explosive shells, they would just be sulfur dioxide tanks that release their payload at altitude then parachute back to Earth to fall into an impact area for refilling and relaunch. Think Falcon rockets, to make things cheap, make them reusable. And we could launch them with vertical launch tubes in the ground using hydrogen and oxygen as the propellant mixture. The muzzle velocity would be relatively slow for artillery, maybe 700 m/sec to reach the ~20 km needed. The Paris Gun way back in 1918 reached an altitude of 42.3 km and it wasn't even pointed vertically (a century ago, but still an impressive feat of artillery engineering).
It may come to doing this (or something very like it) as things get bad enough if we don't accelerate our progress on reduction targets.
But that shouldn't be our major plan.
It is like going in for leg surgery - amputation may be required, but that shouldn't be your initial strategy.
Mars may not be the perfect destination, but at least for now, it is the ultimate libertarian paradise.
The ultimate Libertarian paradise. You don't know how right you are.
Libertarian paradises are always pure fantasy.
You don't know regulation until you know how closely controlled all human behavior has to be inside an small enclosed artificial environment with other people where one mistake, or equipment failure, could kill everyone.
No, they aren't. They value of the richest asteroid ore known is worth about $3/kg. This makes them worth less than some Earth ores (the Cameco uranium mine, and the Klondex gold mine). The cost of retrieving said ore to Earth where it can be used is much higher, much higher than this. The only asteroid retrieval scheme anyone has been willing to quote a price for was about $5,000/kg.
Since that kilogram of asteroid ore is, instead of being worth $3, is really worth -$4,997, it would be more accurate to talk about asteroids containing "negative quadrillions of dollars".
When Europeans started going to the New World to extract wealth, they did it in ordinary commercial vessels, simply going on somewhat longer voyages than average, but much shorter than the voyages being made to Africa and Asia. The cost was not unusual for any sort of commercial shipping operation, and the goods could be obtained at fairly low cost.
The only reason it's not colonized is that it's an international research park by treaty.
Au contraire. The only reason that it is an an international research park by treaty is that there is nothing there that anybody really wants.
I define colony the way everyone else does. A permanent settlement where you live your life there, and have children.
My dictionary says:
1) A country or area under the full or partial political control of another country, typically a distant one, and occupied by settlers from that country. 2) A group of people of one nationality or ethnic group living in a foreign city or country. 3) A community of animals or plants of one kind living close together or forming a physically connected structure.
Nothing about "living your life there" or "having children".
(and no, "settlers" doesn't imply those things either, a settlement is a "group of people living in the same place")
Woah there Nelly!
You have damned strange ideas about what the term "settler" and "settling" means. Mirriam-Webster's defines this as "someone who settles in a new region or colony" and the definition first two definitions of "settle" are "1 : to place so as to stay" and "2a : to establish in residence, b : to furnish with inhabitants ".
The whole idea behind settlers and settling is that they go there and they stay there. People who go there for a while then leave are "visitors" or "explorers" or perhaps "failed settlers" but they aren't "settlers". Yes living their life there is the whole idea, and having children too, if they don't want their colony to disappear when they die.
IMHO, we won't have to terraform Mars that much (if at all) provided gene editing can make our progeny Martians.
In other words, science fiction.
You are not genetically engineering people to not need oxygen, or to eliminate the Armstrong Limit.
If everyone did everything perfectly all the time there would never be any problems.
The solution to everything.
That I never listen to podcasts. Never.
Want to tell me a story? Write it down. Then I might read it.
And I have never watched a pre-roll video. Try to force an animated ad of some kind on me, and I close the window and do something else (sometimes reluctantly, if I really wanted to read the actual content).
The impact was massive, exactly as the head line states.
Since this is a nickel-iron asteroid there will be a mass concentration below the crater, so yes there should be anomalous mass there.
Too bad Slashdot doesn't do images (or maybe not, goatse and all). Looking at the map in the article the glacier perimeter actually follows the crater rim for about 40% of its circumference. The rim must be stabilizing the glacier right now.
I think they are eerily similar in appearance from the outside observer.
Appear similar to someone ignorant about the subject - got it.
LEDs and stars are eerily similar in appearance too, from a distance. Must be the same thing.
H-B11 fusion is an alternative, but requires huge amounts of energy to initiate, though that appears to have been circumvented thanks to insanely powerful (10PW) lasers. See doi:10.1088/1742-6596/717/1/012095 (since I don't wish to link directly to a pdf).
What you mean is that a theoretical technique that might possibly be made to work has been proposed.
As the first sentence in the paper reminds us: "Compared with the deuterium tritium (DT) fusion, the environmentally clean fusion of protons with 11B is extremely difficult". And the introduction also says: "In discussing this option, Crandall mentioned that an enormous further work would be necessary to achieve this goal. The following views may summarize some of the tasks."
So the paper's authors themselves merely claim to summarize "some of the tasks" that need to be carried out as part of " enormous further work" before any claim to feasibility (much less practical implementation) can be made for a problem that is "extremely difficult" even compared to D-T fusion which is decades away.
They're trying several methods. Laser fusion is one, the Chinese reactor is another.
"Laser fusion" is dead. The actual general technology is properly known as inertial confinement fusion (ICF) and lasers are only one possible method of providing the driving energy.
The original ICF idea of direct drive laser fusion is completely dead - it does not work. All ICF schemes now use indirect drive, using an external energy pulse to create thermal X-rays inside a little metal capsule (hohlraum) which then drives the implosion. You don't necessarily need lasers to provide that energy pulse, particle beams promise to be much more efficient and cost effective. Unfortunately even approach this has turned out to be more difficult than expected, the National Ignition Facility at LLNL was supposed to be a factor of 3 above break-even, but came in a factor of 3 below, even when extremely elaborate hohlraums (costs $10,000 each) were used.
Once it became clear that indirect drive was necessary, it made the whole ICF project questionable. The original idea was that you only needed to make cheap little bubbles of frozen fuel. Once it turned out that each explosion required a high-precision manufactured multi-part unit, the cost effectiveness of the idea collapsed. Each explosion can cost no more than about a penny, and you need to set off hundreds of them each second. No one has any idea how this could be done, even if the driver problem is completely solved.
There aren't any ICF projects comparable to the current magnetic confinement fusion work going on any more. No one has any plans for a workable ICF demo plant.
Also you are rating the human metabolic rate about a factor of 3 too high, is is about 1000 W/m^3, so the ratio of heat output per unit volume is 25 times higher for humans. But the density of the solar core is 160 g/cm^3, so the energy output per unit mass in the Sun is 6 times higher than in humans.
It isn't going "round and round" it is going forward, step by step. Each issue that is solved is one less issue. There have been at least 226 tokamaks built to date, and each one advances knowledge about some aspect of design and operation. That is how extremely complex systems are developed. There is a lot of work to be done to build and operate the first true break-even tokamak -- about 20 years and $20 billion worth.