ZetaX

Theoretically, yes. Practically. no. You would need to accelerate it to reletivistic speeds for this to truly matter. At some point the blast will also become more and more cone-shaped.

Terawatts is a very small power output when compared to such a thing.

You could also use solar winds. For example, add some huge surfaces that can open to outside space to let particles (and hence impulse that would otherwise push against the sphere) out on the side farthest from the star.

No, it requires exactly zero energy to let something hover. We already know many things that hover one way or another (permanent magnets and diamagnetism/superconductors, balloons, ships, ...), none of them putting any energy into it. One can surely build something that wastes lots of energy on it (think helicopters or rockets), which is due to other reasons such as maneuverability or speed, but not a requirement.

No. Here is problem sheet for you: http://spacemath.gsfc.nasa.gov/blackh/4Page33.pdf .

I am not sure. Radiation is proportional to 1/r², but the orbital speed increases as well (at ~1/r, but that's a rough approximation); thus they stay that close only for a comparably small amount of time. Hence the amount of radiation might be comparable to that of the other parts of the trajectory (still not good if it heightens cancer chance by another 10% per person). But it could be that more radiation in less time increases the risk significantly, e.g. due to the body having no chance to regenerate. Then they are screwed without a shield of some kind.

[quote name='Findthepin1']Sedna?[/QUOTE] There is no unexplained irregularity in Sedna's orbit. It follows its path as predicted. That it has a rather non-standard elongation has nothing to do with unaccounted mass.

While theoretically correct, we are pretty sure that the amount not accounted for is very small. We do not see any relevant amounts of mass, and we are not observing any unexplained irregularities in the orbits of planets. It probably has nonetheless been measured anyway.

[quote name='peadar1987']So where do you think this energy is coming from? Radiogenic heat? About 22TW. Human energy consumption? About 15TW. Insolation? [B]174,000 TW[/B]. [/QUOTE] Or to make his numbers even more ridiculous: use the energy actually produced by the humans themselves. Lets use the numbers from [url]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_power[/url]. By that even if all humans were exercising 24/7 at peak potential, we would only have aroung 1.2TW of usable power produced. In practise, this ignores losses due to the conversion of chemical energy inside humans, but it also ignores that humans obviously do not exercise 24/7; those two should about cancel each other. Some other sources talk about 120W total energy consumption of healthy humans. So yeah, the above should be about right.

[quote name='*Aqua*']My dictionary doesn't know "absed". What does it mean?[/QUOTE] *based (as someone already said)

[quote name='*Aqua*']You'll need an RNG which works with so-called 'big integers'. Afaik there's none and big integers are [I]slow[/I]. Also the number of combinations are so huge that you'll see patterns in the generated data caused by the design of the RNG algorithm (that's one of the reasons why they are called [I]pseudo[/I] random).[/QUOTE] That's all wrong. The principles RNGs are based on generalize to arbitrarily high number. See for example the Mersenne twister, but almost any other should do. You might have to find some library or code it yourself (depending on what language you use), though. For some older ones (quadratic congruential generators and such) you might get patterns, but modern ones are made to avoid those as good as possible. Even if there are patterns, they would only be visible after huge amount of uses, where "huge" is a number much bigger than the number if requests I expect that page to get (or, if done right, higher than the amount of atoms in this planet). Big integers are a non-issue as well. Naive implmentations (of something like 100 000+ digit numbers) are slow, but we have fast fourier transform-based multiplication and such. But I don't think you would even need that. Take a 1024 bit number, which is very small in comparision to what would already be possible, and you should never encounter a problem. That will be mroe than enough data per picture to work with. In total, this is just an elaborate version of my first post on this.

I can only second what Camacha said. He is 100% correct that locking threads because of a few participants is not working too well. It gives the trouble-makers (e.g., but not only, trolls) even more power: not only disrupting threads, but even getting them locked.

[quote name='peadar1987']It's always night but... It's also ALWAYS DAY! Mind. Blown.[/QUOTE] Actually it is only always day. You would need a rather weird definition of "night" to be able to claim otherwise. Yes, it is dark, but I wouldn't take anyone seriously who closes the curtains at noon and then proclaims "night". Seeing stars also can't be it, otherwise every cloudy day is "night". And so on.

[quote name='ChrisSpace']How much energy would I need to completely remove the earth's axial tilt? In other words, how much energy would I need to make the earth's rotation lined up with its orbit around the sun?[/QUOTE] This cannot be answered without more information on how it is done I think. You want to change angular momentum, which is conserved. Hence you need to put it somewhere. It should be like with specific impulse: you can either spend more energy or more reaction mass. You could calculate the exact angular momentum, but that will not give you the energy. For example, you could try to change the axis by shooting packs of rock into space. Theoretically, even a single rock the size of your fist would suffice, but you require absurd amounts of energy then. Or you could somehow abuse the moon or the sun (those, followed by the planets, are also what mainly influences the tilt in real life) for it, which gives you much more reaction mass to work with, leading to significantly lower energy usage. if you can somehow tie the entire Milky Way to this, then the energy probably becomes laughable (but to actually get there you would probably require absurd energies again). By doing a very very precise prediction you could maybe abuse the chaoticity of the system to just throw a rock into space now and then wait for a billion years for it to do all the work itself.

[quote name='Mitchz95']This is something I've often wondered about. We have millions of pieces of debris floating around in LEO; what's going to be the cumulative effect of those things re-entering over the next few hundred years?[/QUOTE] Nothing. Maybe one of the few larger ones strikes a house. That's about it.

[quote name='WedgeAntilles'][B] LOL![/B] Literally. I genuinely busted a rib reading that. You just screwed up big time. "WedgeAntilles" was not stupid enough to dabble into your area of expertise. [SIZE=3][B]Wikipedia was.[/B][/SIZE] If you're going to tell me you know better than Wikipedia? Forget it. That's the ultimate peer-reviewed journal, and they trump you, every time. I read the history myself. Andrew Wiles pwn3d Fermat's Last Theorem. In secret. [B]ONE MAN.[/B] [/QUOTE] It seems you cannot even read. Because Wikipedia very clearly gives a very long history of the proof.

[quote name='Stargate525']The proteins we need are made by the animals, not the plants said animals eat. It's not like the grass we feed cattle has all the protein already. ;)[/QUOTE] It is still less nutritional value for the cattle. If that wouldn't matter, we could just feed air balloons to the cows, after all ;-) But yeah, I do not have numbers. Might be that this is hust 1%. Maybe it is 50%. Maybe this is completely irrelevant. But: think about the vegans. Or more economically oriented: on the impact/efficieny of cattle. [quote name='WedgeAntilles']Bingo. There's been a gigantic amount of research aimed at figuring out, by way of example, Fermat's Last Theorem. How many people did it take to finally prove Fermat's Last Theorem? [B]One.[/B] Bravo to Andrew Wiles.[/QUOTE] Now you were stupid enough to dabble into my area of expertise. You have not even any idea on how that one worked. Taniyama-Shimura conjecture, modularity, Taylor, not even speaking about the tons and tons of other people in the basics. It's like claiming that the guy who laid the last stone built the entire pyramid. In this case he more or less built the entire king's chamber, so surely is worthy of being praised, but saying that everything is his work is so very wrong. He built on so many conjecture, theorems, principles laid by others that this thread's margin is too small to list them. Come back to me if you know what a modular function is. Which is still very basic in regard to this.

[quote name='Stargate525']But we don't get protein primarily from plants anyway[/QUOTE] From what else? If you are thinking animals, then it simply goes back to the plants again. So the animals now also need more plants. Those 10% less nutrition but 15% more yield are also bad: you are not eating the raw plant on the fields. Transport and refinement both get more complicated expensive (per protein) than before.

Can we, i.e. everyone interested in an actual debate, please agree to completely ignore WedgeAntilles? It is obvious that he has an agenda and no intention to ever change his point of view. Nor has he contributed to the discussion more than his own unfounded claims, never giving evidence. Instead he does as peadar1987 already described in detail. That he calls himself "pro with statistics", "veteran of many, many global warming threads" and "master debater" is telling. He is either a troll or ignorant at a ridiculous level; both being a reason to ignore him.

[quote name='Stargate525']You mean the one that made mammals like us the dominant top-tier form of life on the planet? That one? Isn't that sort of like saying 'if you're not careful, Santa Claus will come?'[/QUOTE] No, it's like saying 'if you're not careful, Santa Claus will come and make sure that reindeer are the new dominant species, while eradicating your own'. Or more likely some reptilians, due to the heat.

In principle you only need one thing: an invertible hash function. Then you use that function and interpret the output as a bitmap. One such function is to just take the index of the string in a lexicon, ordered lexicographically. Or easier to implement: interpret it as a Base36, Base64 or whatever_such_thing number and use that. Cryptography will give you many more that are not easily reverted. But in reality this will lead to all pictures being very very boring (emptyness and/or noise). Such as the pages from your link: purely random gibberish.

[quote name='GDJ']-Sticking with coal? Sure, no radiation[/QUOTE] You would be surprised how much radioactivity a coal plant actually releases.

[quote name='peadar1987']It's very frustrating debating with WedgeAntilles. He is a big fan of the Gish Gallop, throwing out loads of poorly-backed up claims with little to no evidence behind them, when they are disproved, he quickly moves on, until he can find a point where someone has tripped over their words slightly, or has become so confused the sheer volume of soundbites he puts out that they misinterpret something he has said. Then he latches onto this like a dog with a bone, claiming outright victory, even though it is irrelevant to the debate, and even more irrelevant to the science. He is very good at this, peppering his posts with enough half-truths and verifiable facts to give a superficial impression of credibility, but that does not mean he is right. Classic example just there. Yes, CO2 increases result in diminishing returns. But guess what? A smaller effect [I]is still an effect[/I].[/QUOTE] Thank you. This is exactly what I think, too. His newest strategy seems to be to absurdely missuse claims of fallacies, e.g. that something that is an insult at best is an ad hominem, and then that attributing such a claim of ad hominem to him is a straw man. So he is not just a dog latching onto the slightest things, he even just bites for the sake of it.

I will now just ignore that self-declared "pro with statistics" that obviously is not interested in any discussion except trolling (and no, I am not talkin about Stargate25, before again someone jumps to conclusions without checking who called himself that; hint: his name starts with "W"). [quote name='Stargate525']I said I didn't know the term (but I was thinking logarithmic). However, there HAS to be an upper bound, and if you're telling me that an increase from 6% to 7% of CO2 in the atmosphere will cause the same amount of heating that the increase from 0-1 or 99-100 will, I will laugh in your face. It's not linear. It CANT be linear. It makes no sense with everything I know about heat and energy (if you're welcome to cite sources proving it is, feel free).[/QUOTE] Do not attribute things to me I did not say: none of these were claimed by me. The guess sqrt I gave does obviously not satisfy linearity and indeed grows slower the larger it already is. I very definitely nowhere claimed it to be linear, so asking me for evidence for this is completely missing the point. I am not asking you for evidence of exponentially increasing temperature with CO_2 levels (I think we can agree that this claim is absurd), so please do the same towards me. [quote name='Stargate525']Either it's logarithmic (powerful initial impact with tapering effect), exponential (greater impact the more we add), or S curve (low effect on either end, with a powerful effect in the middle). Which is it, where on the curve are we, and is it beneficial to REMAIN on that portion of the curve?[/QUOTE] The words you use are wrong. Logarithmic would mean an extremely slow increase, much slower than most things you will ever encounter in real life. Similiarly, exponential is much faster than anything realistic. I already gave you a better example: sqrt. The general words are "concave" and convex". But the S one might be an option. A standard curve of that shape is the logistical one, and the general shape is called sigmoid.

No, it is not logarithmic (that simply makes no sense). A very naive one might give you sqrt(amount), but even that is probably off by a lot. And another reason why this is still a lot, even if we assume that sqrt: such things are relative to absolute 0. Thus even an increase by only 10% is an icnrease by about 30°. [quote name='WedgeAntilles']I consider it an ad hominem. Period. If you consider it an insult.....well, an insult is still sufficient grounds for me to dismiss all your arguments categorically. Followed by some kind of snarky comment about how you shouldn't be in here, or some such.[/QUOTE] So you continue to construct an ad hominem/insult out of nowhere, just to self-rightously dismiss all my points without an argument? That's just low.