Turns out that a superconductor won't lose that field. The items moving around the field have work done on them. But that is directly via forces on those objects. It won't suck energy out of the coil. In other words its a really big almost perfect permanent magnet. Of course this is once its all started. During start up there will be extra energy required for such dissipation effects, and well iron in the core will change things quite a bit.

I did the calculation to show that it was a silly idea (need cables made out of magic sort of thing). But it turns out the numbers are not nearly as bad as i expected. Not easy either and probably not as practical as just making a dome. But meh.

True, but the forces and energy are the same. ie a million superconducting wires will need a 350A current. It should be noted for 77GN your looking at something with a 5-10m diameter. So this is not small. But a bit more plausible that i originally thought.

It is not quite as easy as it sounds. If we assume we want a field strength close to what earths is, ie about 65 micro T, from the radius of mars of 3390km, we would need a current of 350MA. That is quite a bit. But even worse is the force this wire is under. The tension is 77.276 GN. The total energy in the magnetic field is 6.3MW/h.

Well it seems sort of plausible.

Sorry, but your faith the "quick" decision on a wet computer is misplaced and based mostly on romanticism. We are not far away from self driving vehicles being better in every possible way. When there response times are measured in microseconds, humans can't compete.

5 citations required. Note that they have not been published and have all have large issues with experimental procedures.

In both C and C++ just about everything in the spec has the words "undefined behaviour".

well the lots of small peices of glass do you give lots and lots and lots of small cuts. I had well over 100 cuts to my face and arms. But yea it healed. i didn't die.

You couldn't be more wrong. See the very strong effect of cholesterol in a large study from ages ago..... Proper statistical techniques and understanding what your data really is, is important. Oh and many fields use 4 or even 6 sigma for "confidence".

This could be said almost world wide to most farmers with different direct and effective subsidies. It is not going to happen. it is just politically untenable.

There is also the fact that water is used very wastefully in general. Fairly small changes in farming practices etc can save large amounts of water, especially when irrigating what is effectively a desert.

How much energy? about a little more than oil. No desalination is far more energy intensive. That is why there are things like aqueducts and long pipe lines already.

The problem as i understand it, is a lack of fresh water in the first place. This implies desalination *and* pipe lines. Also expensive water.

It really isn't that a big undertaking and is done very frequently. +10000 tons of steal is worth real money.

Well it is cheap. You just beach the ship and crazy underpaid nutjobs risk life and limb to chop the things up. Ok maybe they are not so nuts, after all its a job.

I review in a fairly wide range of Journals (ones i have published in). From biology to computer science to math and statistics. Often the stats is sloppy and misinterpreted. So reviewers, begin the same group of people, have the same flawed ideas about that sort of thing.

People put far to much faith in "science" and mostly scientists. We are just people, like everyone else. We have the same failings and just because we never left University, it does not make us special.

The reason you don't understand is that your too lazy to read anything about outside a /. summary.