FleshJeb

If the asteroid made a faux pas, I hope it's at least a little chon-drite. (Under no circumstances should I be allowed to make puns.)

I just googled "DART Mission" The results were amusing.

I've never bought that explanation. Surely you can hold your breath in vacuum just/nearly as well as you can on Earth. A couple of minutes with prep time is no issue. And your tissue should be easily strong enough to handle a one atm differential. So it must be another mechanism. Could it be rapid, whole-body vasodilation causing loss of blood pressure and consciousness? I don't know how strong the physiology is behind vasoconstriction, but we know it regularly handles swings on the order of 100mmHg (1 atm = 760mmHg). It stands to reason that one could get absolutely ripped on stimulants or other vasoconstricting drugs, and extend vacuum consciousness for a lot longer. Al Pacino in spaaaaaaccceee.

That's interSTOOLer, sir.

I've never read Shattered Sword, but Jon Parshall is a frequent guest on this podcast. it's a fun ride: https://www.youtube.com/@UnauthorizedHistoryPacificWar/videos

Oh yeah, I'm saving the idea for a future build. That said, a coal-powered airliner that looks like a goose may indicate that I'm not deeply attached to realism:

Just not finished, but that's a neat idea if I can get it to float. I've changed the bow shape radically since then anyway. I'm roughly basing it on this: https://www.maritime.dot.gov/multimedia/ocean-going-tug

Some @Cupcake... grade funk: and some hard rock: Music was good before Ronald Reagan destroyed America.

Was playing with various bow shapes, copied and pasted a chunk, and realized I accidentally made a Pixar character:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AeroVironment_Helios_Prototype https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_Impulse https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-altitude_platform_station#Solar_powered

Xyla Foxlin builds and flies a carbon fiber model rocket. Best line, "Hot glue rhymes with Mach 2."

If it makes you feel any better, large hospitals/trauma centers are explicitly designed to survive natural disasters and keep functioning. One of the running jokes in my industry when we get a little sloppier than we want is, "Hey, we're not building a hospital here!" ("Sloppy" being defined as 1/4-inch tolerance instead of 1/8th)

I've always thought this was one of the definitive texts on living a cyborg life (or spending a lot of time clinically dissociated): https://gutenberg.ca/ebooks/smithcordwainer-scannersliveinvain/smithcordwainer-scannersliveinvain-00-h.html

This is a fascinating question. I'm just going to brain dump here. No energy for structure, apologies: Pooled budgets, pooled knowledge. Systems/Standards interoperability. To a certain extent we're already sharing a lot of knowledge and standards with "competing" organizations. We're also already benefiting sociologically and politically from collaborating with other nations. I think you get into the "design-by-committee" problem when organizations get too large. The group that provides the largest percentage of the budget has a bigger vote. How do priorities get set in monolithic organizations? What missions get prioritized, what instrument packages go on those missions? I think there's a bigger benefit in having different sets of priorities and instrument designs. Uniformity means that maybe every planetary mission is carrying the same design of spectrograph for efficiency's sake. That instrument may have unknown flaws, or less-appropriate specifications than a custom-built one. Even within existing large programs, they're already subdivided. JPL is a subset of NASA, Soviet Design Bureaus had a lot of independence. I'd suggest that one of the drivers for this is preventing the stagnation of uniformity. Does a worldwide space program end up with the equivalent of the UN Security Council, where SOME participants get to veto everyone else? Is that veto power a pro or a con? (I'm inclined to think the latter.) I think it would be a good idea to look at the structure and history of NATO to see what the kind of organization you're proposing would look like. Brain dying, thanks for the question. REALLY thought-provoking.

It's funny how expecting hostility from rabid fanbois stifles critique. Almost like the hype is purposefully engineered that way... Organizations that do this lose contact with reality and are setting themselves up for failure. NASA lost contact with reality (although with different symptoms) and they lost two shuttles because of it. I enjoy picking on SpaceX, but in general, organizational culture as a failure mode fascinates me. One, because I've experienced it. Two, because it's independent of engineering talent. I used to work with a former Soviet engineer, and she's amazingly talented, but one of the reasons she emigrated is that she was tired of the culture of obfuscating mistakes.

Someone less rude/more credible than me needs to say this in the SpaceX thread. ALSO: Good luck to RosCosmos on the next one. Successful scientific missions are good for everybody.

Sorry, I respect your intellect and maturity too much to believe that you think that question doesn't have obvious answers. If you think it's a serious question, why don't you go ahead and tell me what YOU think?

Your tube is quite a bit larger than mine. (Now I wish I hadn't deleted all my work photos)

Can you pull off the objective lens and use the body of the scope (and the range of the focusing mechanism) as your fixed distance? I'm just spitballing here--Remember that you're talking to a guy who uses a 3-pound sledgehammer to drive tacks to millimeter tolerance.

Would it be easier to check it on a table pointed at some graph paper (I assume the focal length is short enough to allow this)? My stuff is only tangentially optical, but I always found it easier to calibrate back in the shop, rather than under field conditions.

Not with a slope that steep we won't. Also, this has already been accounted for in the models: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milankovitch_cycles Have we actually seen a model that does that in this thread? I'm tired, don't make me look for one. It does, because they haven't consistently traced it back much farther than 6000 years. Newer evidence is easier to find and more likely to be undisturbed. They just started doing this in the 2010s, and they've been mostly concerned with corroborating it with written records. You know, to test the model to see if it's worth exploring further. Any evidence is 100m underwater and more likely to have been disturbed, because the sea level was lower. The ocean sand has to crest over a beach to a coastal lake for the storm to be detectable. They'd have to find the remnant of a coastal lake in the ocean. Additionally the temperature was cooler so the hurricanes would be actually be less frequent and less powerful. Per one of the articles I read, they said that Paleotempestology methods can't even find evidence of the devastating Hurricane Sandy because it was too small. I assume that means it's not loading. Try this? https://web.archive.org/web/20221005040516/https://www.americanscientist.org/article/uncovering-prehistoric-hurricane-activity

I don’t think climate change in the past and now are comparable in terms of having similar effects. Hurricanes: You're making the mistake of believing an unsourced assertion. Fun find of the day: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paleotempestology While it doesn't cover exactly the time period, we have evidence of VERY large hurricanes in prehistory. I read the general methodology from more than one source; it seems pretty sound. Also, some good diagrams here: https://www.americanscientist.org/article/uncovering-prehistoric-hurricane-activity I also looked up how hurricanes form: https://www.weather.gov/source/zhu/ZHU_Training_Page/tropical_stuff/hurricane_anatomy/hurricane_anatomy.html Lets presume that sea temperatures in an area follow some kind of bell curve, and that global warming pushes that bell curve to the right. So temperature gets above 26deg more often and it also can get higher. This is congruent with climate scientists often saying, "More frequent and more powerful storms." Sea level: Sea level rise is a potential LOCAL catastrophe (and that's how it's presented by climate scientists.) If by local we mean near the shoreline...where most people live. More frequent flooding, higher storm surges, etc. It's going to be absolute hell on infrastructure. This is kind of an over-generalization, but most infrastructure in the U.S. is built with a 2-foot safety zone ("freeboard") above the 100-year flood. A few centimeters eats up a healthy percentage of that safety zone, especially if you're also dealing with the more frequent and more powerful storms. I drafted this when I was arguing with Joe a couple years ago. This is what it takes to add a couple of extra feet to an existing levee if you're trying to armor up against climate change. (EDIT2: This is an example of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_resilience ): Obviously, there will be a variety of parameters, but it's more effort than one might initially think. Other: FYI, I read both your links and they were fascinating. Aside from having to look up a few terms, they were quite understandable, and the methods appeared solid. As usual, people do very thoughtful and comprehensive work. The whole, "Scientists are dumb" narrative needs to go die in a ditch unless explicit, detailed critique is provided. EDIT: I think @kerbiloid has an agenda

The purpose of the paper is to assess Exxon's modeling with newer data. (This particular chart is from 1982). It shows strong correlation, which corroborates the validity of the modeling. The delta-temperature is zero-based. There's no benefit to charting the CO2 PPM to zero, because that's not a condition that's existed, and it would be discontinuous anyway, as soon as CO2 concentration ceased being the primary controlling variable in the physical system. The usual datum is 1850 for industrialization, and hundreds if not thousands of temperature stations existed worldwide by 1900. I've actually visited a science station that was built in 1897 and had a LONG conversation with the docent. They did some hardcore observations there. 1 deg C in that amount of time, over the entire Earth is a MASSIVE amount of energy--It's relevant. Particularly since we know that the ocean induces a LOT of thermal lag. So, a 1 deg change represents much more energy storage than a 1 deg surface temp change indicates. Independent models being corroborated. Possibly from the same or similar sources, so I'll give you that one. Originally published internally at Exxon for making business decisions about the effects of drilling a new field. Only obtained by the public in 2015. They weren't trying to impress anyone, and the conclusions drawn were contrary to the business interests. A manipulative chart would have wanted to downplay the effects. Extractive industries have higher profit margins, and it was already their expertise. Solar, wind, nuclear, hydro, and geothermal were already in use, but that required investment, and the risk of moving outside of their existing expertise. Short-term profits and risk aversion prevented them from moving sooner. Today, oil company investment in green R&D is about 1% of their budget. (i.e. meaningless). The source for that is a recent TED talk by Al Gore, which you may not respect as a source, but I'm comfortable with him getting basic company-provided numbers correct. See the above. My unsupported conspiracy theory involves oil as https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydraulic_empire Renewables are much easier to decentralize and don't provide the same opportunities for control. This is fair and possible, but not necessarily true. The argument is, "Can you get data that's more precise than the precision of the instruments, and is it fair to report it as such?" The answer is definitely yes. Many depleted traces, cross-correlated with each other. This is much more difficult to do, but we proved plate tectonics in a very similar way. Lots of geological and paleomagnetic observations, and I'm sure many of them were contradictory and confounding. And yet somehow we're not arguing about the validity of this: Long-term and short-term data. Those damn geologists and their AGENDA! They were all paid off by Big Dinosaur! It's a Silurian plot! Ours match pretty well now, and I live in a very weird area with crazy geography and lots of microclimates. That said, "Climate is not weather" We're looking at the global average over a long period of time, not the daily bumps and jumps that are highly influenced by local variations in terrain and vegetation.

Dodging moderators should be an Olympic sport. It's fun for all sides. My primary goal is really to combat science denialism and bad argumentation, and I try to stick within those bounds, even if I'm excessively snarky about it. The fact that it's politically-charged just makes me sad. For those who are new to this years-long argument on the forums, I actually LIKE the two people I'm fighting with. I like them BETTER when their arguments are better constructed, but overall they're great, and contribute a lot to the overall health of the community. Kerbiloid and I throw each other upvotes pretty frequently, even when it gets heated.