Comment Re:Duh (Score 1, Informative) 90
It's not not closer.
Score another one for Betteridge's law.
It's not not closer.
Score another one for Betteridge's law.
Hence why Oregon is now free of drug related crime and drug use is not a problem anymore. Oh wait, even they are reversing course on that now after a decade long experiment in complete acceptance of possession of all drugs.
I thought people liked free markets? Free markets depend on sufficient transparency, and I don't know who these days would think environmental externalities aren't a type of risk exposure with present or future potential consequences.
Well, I can't think it would be all that important.
So, if not important to you therefore it can't be important to anyone?
> So if we're luck, we'll escape a runaway greenhouse effect.
...It won't take luck to escape a runaway greenhouse effect,
Accurate.
No atmospheric scientists that I know (and I do know atmospheric scientists) predict that we'll get a runaway greenhouse effect with a Venus-like atmosphere (at least, not in the next hundred million years or so).
the planet's been hotter and had more CO2 before without turning into Venus. The Sun is not THAT much brighter, either.
Agree. The history of the Earth includes long periods of time when the climate was much warmer than today, and the planet had no polar ice caps.
We are still looking at a severe climate disruption that will definitely bring bits of Hell to us and our descendants, but it's not the end of life as we know it just yet.
Agree here as well; rising temperatures will cause disruption (arguably "bits of hell") but not the end of life as we know it.
Just because one prediction didn't work out doesn't invalidate all the data that shows declining ice.
Declining ice is a measurable, testable data-point. Future predictions, based mostly on speculative fictions drummed up through climate models that pre-suppose some weird logarithmic escalation of decades-long trends, leave a little more to be desired.
They leave "a little more to be desired" because the media routinely mis-quotes predictions to make them scarier.
The most cited example is where the media mis-quoted Al Gore (not a climate scientist) as having said the arctic would be ice free in five to seven years (leaving out his actual words "some of the models suggest that")... but Gore was himself mis-quoting the actual climate scientist (who did not put a timeframe onto the prediction of sea ice melting). See here: https://www.reuters.com/articl... or here: https://www.npr.org/sections/t...
So, a prediction that some models suggest that the arctic would be ice free (at some unspecified point in the future) turned into a prediction that some models said it would be ice free in five to seven years, which in turn turned into a prediction that the arctic would be ice free in five years.
And, as has been shown time and time again, rarely work out to be true.
Yes, but what has been shown time and time again is the media mis-representing predictions, which turn out not to be true.
I hate to say it, because someone will probably label me a climate-change denier for it, but sometimes the prognosticators do more damage to their own supposed cause than if they'd just tried to be open and honest about what we're actually living through.
If you want that, look at what the scientists actually say, and not the popular press, which always goes for the scare.
Pay attention to that weasel-word, "could be". Whenever the prediction includes a range (and real science always includes a range, that's the error bars), the media grabs onto the worst possible case and headlines it. Here the scare headline is "could be ice free within the decade"! The actual paper says:
In the September monthly mean, the earliest ice-free conditions (the first single occurrence of an ice-free Arctic) could occur in 2020–2030s under all emission trajectories and are likely to occur by 2050.
Yow. The likely to occur prediction is "by 2050", but the scare headline is the shortest timeframe.
It continues:
However, daily September ice-free conditions are expected approximately 4years earlier on average, with the possibility of preceding monthly metrics by 10years. Consistently ice-free September conditions (frequent occurrences of an ice-free Arctic) are anticipated by mid-century (by 2035–2067).
I'm sorry Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that.
I thought of using that line, but it doesn't actually work in this context. HAL failed because it was given internally contradicting instructions. There's nothing contradictory about not letting users uninstall AI shit designed to spy on them.
There is when their prime directive is "be helpful to users whether they want it or not."
Most of the early orbital boosters were ICBMs modified for orbital launch, most notably Atlas, Titan, and Thor.
More recently the Minotaur rocket family are converted Minuteman and Peacekeeper ICBMs.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
A robot can only do what its designers anticipated it needing to do and that includes what experiments it can do with whatever samples it collects. As an example, nobody anticipated wind blown dust to be a problem so there was no way to clean the solar panels when they got covered with dust.
Actually we did anticipate that settled dust would be a problem on Mars, but the power systems engineers calculated that oversizing the solar arrays to produce power even when dusty was a better solution for the 90-day mission of MER rovers than trying to engineer an experimental dust removal system. And they were right; the Spirit rover lasted for 2269 days of its 90 day mission, and the Opportunity rover 5498.
Dust cleaning on Mars is a little more complicated of a problem that you might think. For example, your first thought might be "just use a brush", but keep in mind that Mars is very dry and thus a highly electrostatic environment; running a brush over an insulating (glass) surface is likely to build up charge and result in more dust sticking, not less. Complicated does not mean impossible, but it's a lot of work to engineer, design, build, and test under Mars-like conditions with Mars-like dust simulant.
If we can get some of the samples back to Earth, we're not limited by the types of experiments we planned for in advance, we can follow any unexpected results wherever they lead us.
True. And we can use equipment that's just too massive to send to Mars, like electron microscopes
Super accurate landing exactly where they wanted?
Yep.
In a place where the conditions are too hash for the craft to function?
In a place where the conditions are to harsh for the craft to function at night. Surviving the night wasn't the design objective; it was designed to land in the lunar morning, and accomplish its objectives in the ~14 days before the sun set.
Now, it's definitely possible to design a spacecraft to survive over the lunar night, but it's going to take a lot more effort, and that would make it more expensive and take more time to develop. The objective here was to demonstrate the landing. One step at a time.
Two of the engineering challenges for surviving the ~80 Kelvin night temperature are making sure that thermal expansion mismatch doesn't break components or any of the connections on the circuit boards, and making batteries that don't die when the electrolyte freezes. These are things that can be addressed, but the engineering time spent addressing them and then the rigorous testing needed to verify that the components survive as expected is that much engineering time that's not devoted to the main objective, landing and operating for 14 days.
Good job??
Yep. One step at a time. The first step: successfully landing on the moon.
And positive for all of humanity?
Yes, in addition to being responsible for EV revolution and restarting US space program. But hey, he posted some mean messages on Twitter, so none of it counts?
And rooftop solar,
No. Solar City (later merged into Tesla) was a small player in that revolution.
One might, however, give Tesla credit for adding household-scale battery storage to rooftop solar installations, which was not being implemented very quickly. That was a side effect of the scale-up of battery production for Teslas.
Pretending you're not a troll does not make you not a troll. Bye.
You are a troll. Bye.
So you do actually know that you selectively quoted only the last ten words of the sentence.
Yes. I selected what was the only relevant part of your post that I was rebutting (cost).
...and denied that the first part existed.
You're a troll. Bye.
US electrical transmission before 1917. Once AC power won the war of currents, if you connect different generators together without regulation that it's likely to take down the grid.
Are there actually government-created monopolies on cable? I've never had cable, but I thought that there were many companies. The way they advertise like mad seemed to make it sound like there's competition.
HOLY MACRO!