chaosmarine92

joined 8 months ago
[–] [email protected] 22 points 1 month ago (4 children)

Nonsensical or thoroughly debunked technobabble. The most annoying for me is faster than light communication via quantum entangled particles. Yes entangled particles will change each other's state faster than light but this effect CANNOT be used to send information of any kind. At all. Ever. This has been known since engagement was first discovered but Hollywood is always like "I'm just going to ignore that second part." I don't even have anything against ftl comms or any other physics breaking things, just use an explanation that isn't literally impossible and well known why it's impossible for God's sake.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago

There are a couple approaches that protection from radiation can take. You could pile up a few feet of dirt on top of your habitat. You could look for lava tubes to live in, which would be much bigger than earth due to the lower gravity. You could design your habitat to have an inner and outer shell that is filled with water, turning your water storage into radiation shielding. You could create an artificial magnetosphere by putting a satellite at the Lagrange point between Mars and the sun (estimates say 1GW of power going to a simple magnetic dipole could do this.) You could find a general cure for cancer and not worry about the radiation.

Radiation is scary but it's not the instant death that popular media makes it out to be. Even if you did nothing to mitigate it and just lived your life on the surface of Mars it will only give you an increased risk of cancer over years of exposure. If you shipped in a bunch of 20-30 year olds and left them on the surface then they would probably be more likely than not to get cancer by the time they hit 80, but they wouldn't just keel over and die after a couple years there.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago

Protection from radiation would only require a couple feet of dirt, not a mile of it.

[–] [email protected] 97 points 3 months ago (10 children)

Shooting two guns at the same time does in fact look cool. That's not a myth. Hitting two targets with two guns at the same time is really hard though.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 3 months ago

Nowhere did I say or imply that capturing CO2 is a net positive of energy. It is in fact a huge energy sink. If you aren't using renewables to power CO2 capture then you're just making the problem worse.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 3 months ago (2 children)

We have to do both. If today our emissions went to zero we would still see more warming because of all that CO2 we've already released. First priority is to get to net zero so we can stop making the problem worse, then we have to remove all the CO2 we released. We have the technology now to do step one it's just a matter of scaling it up. While we work on step one we need to do the research on the best way to do step two so when we get to that point we have something ready to go. Pulling CO2 out of the air is going to be inefficient no matter what just from the physics of the problem but it still needs to be done and the energy to do so has to come from renewables.

[–] [email protected] 23 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (10 children)

Doing some back of the envelope calculations we have put about 1.6 trillion tons of CO2 into the atmosphere since the industrial revolution. Latest estimates put the number of trees on earth at around 3 trillion. Looking at how much CO2 a tree takes up puts the average around 600lbs over the first twenty years. So combing all this if we want to plant enough trees to take up all the excess CO2 we would need about 5.3 trillion more trees, or almost double the total number of trees on the planet.

This is simply not achievable in a fast enough time span to make a difference. Nevermind that I was being super optimistic with all my calculations and the real number needed is likely much higher still.

It is simply a necessity to develop better methods to pull CO2 directly from the air and to do it on the same scale that we have been releasing CO2.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago

In addition to what has been said already, in many places the cost to upgrade the electrical service to the building to handle the amount of power that could be generated can be as much or more than all the other costs combined. So now the building operators are looking at millions in cost with a potentially 30 year payback period. It just doesn't make sense at that point.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 4 months ago (2 children)

Are the predicted prices ever crazy far off from what they actually end up being like what happened in Texas last winter? Where am outage causes price to go from like 20c/khw to 2000c/khw over a one hour period?

[–] [email protected] 10 points 4 months ago (4 children)

How do you keep up with the current price? Does your thermostat have a setting where if the price is above X then turn off? Do you just come home to a freezing house and say "oh the electric is too expensive, guess I'll grab some wood"?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 months ago

Yes I'm sure. That rear light is always on while driving and gets much much brighter while braking.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 4 months ago

Notice that the sound doesn't start until he goes around the corner, then it stops, then starts again, then he hits. That's not brake skid, that's I'm going to fast around a corner skid.

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