Dysons original paper calculated you would need the mass of Jupiter to make a sphere.
I think Mercury is more than sufficient. We're just capturing the energy output of a star, you don't need a lot of mass for that.
Dyson Spheres are a rather silly thing to search for, as the technology required is too advanced to fathom (perhaps impossible).
Let us recall that the Dyson sphere idea started life as a swarm of satellites around a star, not as a solid shell. I think I can fathom solar panels, satellites, and orbiting the Sun. That's the basics of a Dyson sphere (well, that and a relativistic traffic control problem which can involve at least as many satellites as there are people currently on Earth).
We could even be there in 100 years.
Indeed. Though it would probably involve self-replicating machines tearing apart Mercury.
Eeeeexcept that Musk himself tweeted about it as soon as word had spread on internet discussion forums that SpaceX had a loss-of-vehicle.
Why that's definitive proof of something or another!
So, the civilization has to be pretty much like locusts for it the be easy to discern. There may be some civilization lifetime issues to worry about in that case.
For them or for us?
Let me repeat: Without authority there is no science.
And once again, you continue to use a pet definition of "authority" which does not mean "authority" and a definition of "science" which doesn't mean "science". Any argument which relies on changing the meaning of core conceptions is inherently not scientific or all that relevant in any other useful context.
I think that's what I find really ridiculous about the climate change debate. This insistence on using a long list of fallacies and projecting all sorts of silly psychological issues on people who disagree (for example, this is my "face-saving" refutation by your decree) rather than basic rational rhetoric and argument. Just point to the evidence. Don't waste my time with unscientific arguments.
That is the longer term aim; there is much more than an inklink of how this will be achieved (it's either ignorant or ridiculous of you to claim otherwise) and do not underestimate human ingenuity (or engineering).
No. I strongly disagree. The economics of this have not at all been thought out. Human ingenuity and engineering is not magically a match for human stupidity.
Meanwhile China, OPEC, the US, Russia, won't go along. It's likely that nobody will go along, including the parties advocating these proposals. The combination makes the exercise pointless.
Which is probably what I was getting at when I wrote, "ultimately all authoritative statements in science are evidence based."
Which is a combination of the No True Scotsman fallacy and trying to claim something by shifting the definition (here, from the usual definition of "authoritative" to "evidence-based").
That is why it wasn't a brilliant move to let a corporation build its spy network when all sides to all conflicts have equal access to the top spy satellites unless you are pushing complete global anhilation..
I wouldn't call getting out of the way "brilliant" either. "Sensible" seems more appropriate. And rather than use the term, "complete global annihilation", I'd use the term, "reduction in conflict".
Where all of that heat has been going was where the speculation has been, with the usual supposition being "the ocean" or "the poles".
And "outer space". That is the rub. The attempts to find the "missing heat" assume it's still on Earth and then look for it. Presuming the conclusion is a standard fallacy. But for example, the same reason that the poles could hold missing heat is the same reason that the heat might be in space - namely, that satellites aren't properly measuring heat content and heat radiation to space from the poles.
how should an siRNA particle trigger an allergic response?
By the same mechanisms any other molecule triggers an allergy response.
As we have agreed, I thought, 0 != 3.
You could make the same argument for 0 != 0.0000003. That's not a serious argument. I don't consider 3 significantly different than 0, as I've already stated.
Pure alarmism.
They are proposing carbon emission reductions of up to 80% globally without an inkling of how that's going to be achieved. That massive, uninformed manipulation of societies easily departs from the "pure alarmism" space.
Don't be absurd. While projections (in any field) will inevitably be inaccurate (as all predictions of the future are bound to be), they, or these, are clearly evidence based. We are trapped in history and can only ever base our policy, if we base our policy on science, upon the best available science. There is no ambiguity as to what that is as pertains to this topic.
What makes you think we're basing this on the best available science? I think it's just another lazy assertion.
That is because climate-related discussion is science based and reliance upon due authority is a central tenet of the methodology of science. On matters of science one ought be more concerned about appeals to inappropriate authority.
It's not. It's based on evidence and models that explain that evidence well. There is no due authority. I think this profound misunderstanding of science is a key part of the problem with human thought today. There is this huge emphasis on consensus and authority rather than on whether the models actually work to explain the climate observed.
As regards the science of global warming, the work of scientists such as Lindzen, Landsea and Pielke, gives us reason to trust its robustness.
That's a pretty dishonest way to characterize their work since they instead have provided reasons to distrust its robustness.
It is not a 'drug'.
It is a short 20 - 25 bases long RNA strand. (You know what DNA and RNA is?)
Let's actually look at the definition of drug:
a medicine or other substance which has a physiological effect when ingested or otherwise introduced into the body
Sure, we could come up with a new phrase every time we do anything slightly differently, but there's no point to it. It just makes communication overly complex.
That works exactly the same in every life form based on cells with a nucleus. No idea how the exact english name for it is, as I don't know the proper spelling of the german/latin word and can mot google it. Something like Eukariots.
The human body is not a cell nucleus. For example, if this drug triggers an allergy response, then you have both harm and the destruction of the drug before it can do something useful.
If a thing's worth doing, it is worth doing badly. -- G.K. Chesterton
