True, we can optimize the cycles more. Like double expansion piston engines, or that crazy proposal for a hydrid steam-mercury super high pressure power plant.
Tlaloc_Temporal
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I’ll believe it when I see it. They have so many material science challenges ahead of them and aren’t very forthcoming with progress.
Unfortunately, there’s no way to get energy out of waste heat that won’t be spent pushing that heat a little harder. Already a significant amount of energy is spent cooling data centers, any attempts at energy recapture will just make that cooling harder.
The best we can do is something like district heating, because heat pumps can get over 100% effective efficiency.
Tlaloc_Temporal@lemmy.cato
Canada@lemmy.ca•Ford government hid decision to lower Canadian content requirement for new trains: emails
0·2 months agoWe should be starting domestic manufacturing that just does x amount of rail each year. Fully funded, doesn’t matter where, just pick a place and go.
200+ dwarf planet candidates. Lots of them have very low densities, and most are too far away to know hardly anything about them. Pluto was only confirmed to be in hydrostatic equilibrium with New Horizons, and Quaoar has a Dwarf Planet name, but probably isn’t in hydrostatic equilibrium.
It’s not the specific bodies I’m worried about, it’s a useful idea of a planet. Finding dozens or hundreds more of them should be exciting, not a reason to throw up our hands and disqualify them.
I think “Planet” should be a gravitationally rounded mass that’s not a star anyway. Those can be divided into rocky and gaseous, and further divided by principal composition.
Smaller than that isn’t usually worth having a name, but moons can be just as interesting as free orbiting planets.
The distinction between minor and major planets is decently clear in our star system, but if we define it poorly it won’t help us understand other systems or why the major ones are important. It’s definitely not enough to disqualify minor planets from being full planets though. Go ahead and declare 8 major planets arbitrarily, but don’t try to justify ignoring the other few dozen planetoids poorly.
Of course it would be a .ml community…
Ceres would be a way better start. Lots of water for shielding, consumption, and fuel; easy access to asteroid orbits; and a shallow gravity well to make transport easy.
Similarly, many of the icy moons around the gas giants would be good, also with decent mining, but better science opportunities too!
Our Moon is good too. Close, big enough to not need zero gravity setups. That’s actually about it really, it’s just right here. May as well do Orbit I guess.
Start with Antarctica and the ocean floor. That’s still 80% as difficult, and rescue can take 30 minutes, not 3 days or 10 months!
You need a very big one though, and humans need a more varied diet than soil bugs.
You’d also need to deploy the system, or find a way to maintain it all the way from Earth orbit to Mars’ surface.
1kg of oxygen is a good estimate, humand need 0.5-1kg per day.
Astronaut calorie budges is a bit higher than average, as would be for labouring humans. About 3000kcal, or 12 MJ.
I think more important than the raw energy and oxygen is sourcing the water, cleaning the water, producing the energy to electrolyse and heat, and maintaining the equipment necessary to do so. And that’s assuming all food is shipped in.
Tlaloc_Temporal@lemmy.cato
Science Memes@mander.xyz•I’m somewhat of a bad dude myself 🐟English
16·4 months agoThat’s a Scleral Ring and helps to keep the shape of the eye in fish, many reptiles, and birds. Fish don’t have round eyes (they’re shaped more like M&Ms or chocolate chips), and the ring helps support the shape when swimming. Most rings are just cartilage, but fast swimmers often have bony rings.
Tlaloc_Temporal@lemmy.cato
Science Memes@mander.xyz•How about the digestive system?English
72·4 months agoThat’s why we have the compound word “through-hole”.
90% of important parts on living things are pockets and manipulations of surface area, two things completely ignored by topology. Topology is interesting mathematically, and has meaning for traversal and knot problems, but it’s not really useful to describe reality.
Tlaloc_Temporal@lemmy.cato
Science Memes@mander.xyz•How about the digestive system?English
183·4 months agoAnd yet each indentation could hold something, like cheese or a kitten, so each indentation in functionally different from a smooth surface.
Deforming a shape changes it, thus topology is a special case of specifically ignoring most aspects of a shape.
Tlaloc_Temporal@lemmy.cato
Science Memes@mander.xyz•Ġ̵̻ͅį̴̹̜̼̙͍͋̈̕m̷̦͎͈̎̄̄̿̈ṁ̶̭̫͓̞̻̾̂̚ë̶͚́̍̀͆ ̴̻͗̈́̿̂̚͝f̴̧̳̝͓̫̆̍͌͠u̸̧̖̠̗͔̽̽̾ȇ̶̝̠̎̔l̵̡͙͔̀́̃́̓͘,̵̠̜̽͛ ̴͙̜͇͚̥̜̑͛͐̓͆͒ḡ̸̮͝͠ḯ̸͍̩͛͗̍͝ṁ̶̛͎̖̭̖̓̃͑̃ḿ̵̫̇e̸͈͕̍̍͒ ̸̧̣̣̣̹̺͌̃ẇ̴̤̳͇̪̝̑̈́̏̚i̶͖͒̒r̶̢̪̙͉̭̥̂̐e̵̞̳̻̍͘English
1·4 months agoYes, but at that point it’s not really voltage anymore. It would be more like a rapidly expanding cloud of electrons ionizing anything it came across.
It could be more focused though a magnetar though, and a magnetar might conduct the ionised plasma nearby, or even through the galaxy in interactions with the local supermassive black hole.
Tlaloc_Temporal@lemmy.cato
Science Memes@mander.xyz•electricity is honestly eldritchEnglish
1·4 months agoWell the path of least resistance is pretty full right now, the path of next most resistance seems like less bother.
The Sol-Jupiter system would have a bary center just 7% outside the surface of Sol. The effect of all the Gas Giants together can either center the syster in Sol’s core or move the barycenter 120% outside Sol.
The really weird thing is that the part of stars outside the core is more like an atmosphere. If the star gets hotter, the parts outside the core can expand. This is happening slowly as Sol’s core fills up with Helium and becomes denser, which fuses Hydrogen faster. So despite weighing less, the Sol-Jupiter barycenter will be engulfed within Sol’s envelope. Once Sol stops fusing Hydrogen in it’s core, the core will shrink and heat up, fusing Hydrogen in a shell around the core, which will cause the envelope to grow and engulf Venus and possibly Earth directly, and definitely contain the full system’s barycenter. After that it will release a bunch of mass in a planetary nebula, which will cause it to shrink a lot, and the remaining planets will probably orbit much farther out, which would throw the barycenter waaaayyyyyy outside of the white dwarf left over.
So bad that bridge players see a perfect deal like once a decade. It often makes the news.
Far better names than most others get. What the hell does a C. elegans elegans look like?
Tlaloc_Temporal@lemmy.cato
Science Memes@mander.xyz•‘It speaks to me in brain rot’: Theorising ‘brain rot’ as a genre of participation among teenagersEnglish
2·9 months agoAs far as I can tell, brain rot encourages no thoughts, head empty enjoyment. It expects and promotes the lowest common denominator thoughts, like a thought stopping cliche but for entertainment instead of propaganda.
There’s plenty of mature brain rot and it’s only non-productive in the same way most media is. I can see calling it decompression-driven, but more as a form of escapist relaxation, like coloring books or knitting. It’s main focus is mininal mental effort, hence the name.
TL;DR: Ye, paper is garbo.
It’s older than genAI by at least a decade.