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davieG

Technology, Science and the Environment.

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10 hours ago, AS78UK said:

Terraforming commences.   

 

Just confused, creating oxygen is great, but isn't carbon monoxide a poisonous gas.  

They are venting it to the atmosphere, so it’s just a waste product and won’t be breathed. They are considering terraforming, just a potential oxygen supply.

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We've gotten fed up with venting carbon into the atmosphere here on Earth so we've found another planet to start on. 

 

I know Mars doesn't have much of an atmosphere and CO is a very weak greenhouse gas, but still...

Edited by The Bear
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6 hours ago, The Bear said:

We've gotten fed up with venting carbon into the atmosphere here on Earth so we've found another planet to start on. 

 

I know Mars doesn't have much of an atmosphere and CO is a very weak greenhouse gas, but still...

I think that if there was actually an ecosystem to affect on Mars this would be a bigger problem, but seeing as there (most likely) isn't, I don't see the problem in using other planets in this way.

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11 hours ago, The Bear said:

We've gotten fed up with venting carbon into the atmosphere here on Earth so we've found another planet to start on. 

 

I know Mars doesn't have much of an atmosphere and CO is a very weak greenhouse gas, but still...

I'm an amateur when it comes to the finer points of science, but I do find it interesting. 

 

In my mind, on Earth, venting carbon into the atmosphere that has been buried underground for millions of years in the form of fossil fuels is bad because we are introducing "new" carbon into the atmosphere, this increasing the amount of carbon up there.

 

On Mars, aren't we taking CO2 that's already in the atmosphere, taking one O atom and releasing the carbon back into the atmosphere, where it came from in the first place?  No net increase in atmospheric carbon?

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18 minutes ago, nnfox said:

I'm an amateur when it comes to the finer points of science, but I do find it interesting. 

 

In my mind, on Earth, venting carbon into the atmosphere that has been buried underground for millions of years in the form of fossil fuels is bad because we are introducing "new" carbon into the atmosphere, this increasing the amount of carbon up there.

 

On Mars, aren't we taking CO2 that's already in the atmosphere, taking one O atom and releasing the carbon back into the atmosphere, where it came from in the first place?  No net increase in atmospheric carbon?

Not exactly carbon, but carbon monoxide, which isn't naturally present in Mars' atmosphere in any quantity.

 

In any case, I don't really see there being much in the way of unintended bad consequences from doing so on the minute scale the MOXIE does.

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3 hours ago, leicsmac said:

Not exactly carbon, but carbon monoxide, which isn't naturally present in Mars' atmosphere in any quantity.

 

In any case, I don't really see there being much in the way of unintended bad consequences from doing so on the minute scale the MOXIE does.

Right, so it isn't so much about the presence of carbon, it's more about the molecular structure? CO isn't as bad a greenhouse gas as CO2 which isn't as bad as methane (CH4?).  Same amount of carbon, different molecular structures.

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10 minutes ago, The Bear said:

With the death of Michael Collins I've been looking at some of these Earth pictures here:

 

http://www.tobyord.com/earth

 

This one in particular. 

 

 

tapatalk_-327803730.jpeg

 

 

Every human being alive is in that photo, apart from Collins. 

We are losing so many of that elite old guard, now. It's long past time we trod in their footsteps again.

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What do people think of driverless cars?

I'd personally miss the 'hands-on' approach to controlling the car, than just relying on the motor to guide through all the necessary gears etc.

Edited by Wymsey
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9 minutes ago, Wymsey said:

What do people think of driverless cars?

I'd personally miss the 'hands-on' approach to controlling the car, than just relying on the motor to guide through all the necessary gears etc.

There was a decent discussion on this one earlier in the thread.

 

My own take is: I'm sure you're not alone in preferring to remain "in control" of the car and I'm sure that option will always be available to drivers.

 

However, just like the economy of electric or other designs vs petrol engine cars, the day is coming when AI will become statistically safer at avoiding fatal or injurious collisions than a human driver would be. It may be in 15 years, or 40 years, but it isn't far away. And when that day comes, the insurance companies will get involved and driving "in control" of a car will come with a price.

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Eventually it'll be the norm. I'm guessing not for another 50-100 years yet, but we will one day just say our destination and sit back as the car takes you there and uses a network of other car's cameras to know where the parking spaces are and set you down  as close as possible. 

 

Or even fully autonomous Ubers will do it and no-one will own a car. Like Johnny Cabs in Total Recall :D

Edited by The Bear
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The detection of dark matter could be a step closer this autumn, when the James Webb infra-red 6.5m Space Telescope is launched from French Guiana. When the telescope is parked (in one of the Lagrange points) and unfolded, its infra-red detectors will look for giant exoplanets. The theory is that these giants' strong gravitational pull attract dark matter which, being weakly interactive, travels to the planets' cores where it is annihilated, generating heat in the process. It's this excess heat that the JWST should detect. If the theory is right, exoplanets near the Milky Way's centre will exhibit greater exothermic activity, due to higher concentrations of dark matter in those regions of space.

https://phys.org/news/2021-04-exoplanets-dark-detectors.html

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3 hours ago, Wymsey said:

What do people think of driverless cars?

I'd personally miss the 'hands-on' approach to controlling the car, than just relying on the motor to guide through all the necessary gears etc.

Can't wait for the day when two of em bump into each other, sort that out!

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1 hour ago, yorkie1999 said:

Can't wait for the day when two of em bump into each other, sort that out!

It'll be like those automated vacuum cleaners. They'll hit each other the turn around and go back the other way.

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6 hours ago, leicsmac said:

https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-56949426

 

Should have been sorted before, really.

It's fair enough, isn't it, I'd only realised recently how big a contribution to particulate pollution it made.

 

The thing that really needs to be sorted out is the number of people that sit in their cars, parked, with the engine running. Whilst I imagine there's an element of me noticing more because it gets on my tits, it's definitely becoming more commonplace.

 

It's like car owners WANT vehicles to be banned from urban areas. Inexplicable behaviour

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43 minutes ago, Bellend Sebastian said:

It's fair enough, isn't it, I'd only realised recently how big a contribution to particulate pollution it made.

 

The thing that really needs to be sorted out is the number of people that sit in their cars, parked, with the engine running. Whilst I imagine there's an element of me noticing more because it gets on my tits, it's definitely becoming more commonplace.

 

It's like car owners WANT vehicles to be banned from urban areas. Inexplicable behaviour

It is daft, isn't it?

 

Unfortunately I think cars are so ubiquitous that legislating for shit like that is very difficult in terms of enforcement. Sooner we fix it by making cars in general as close to emission-free as we're going to get them, the better.

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2 hours ago, Bellend Sebastian said:

It's fair enough, isn't it, I'd only realised recently how big a contribution to particulate pollution it made.

 

The thing that really needs to be sorted out is the number of people that sit in their cars, parked, with the engine running. Whilst I imagine there's an element of me noticing more because it gets on my tits, it's definitely becoming more commonplace.

 

It's like car owners WANT vehicles to be banned from urban areas. Inexplicable behaviour

Drivers sometimes keep their engines running to keep things like the heating, the air con, the headlights or the stereo working, without caning the battery. Ironically, its caning the battery that can cause the stop-start system to cease working correctly.

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