Airbrush

Larger countries have more area for quakes to happen. Countries with a lot of coastline will have more tsunamis.

Spyman: "It is not only the best theory we have, it is totally without competition, there is currently no other model that can explain our observations. "Do you like Owl also reject Relativity and have your own personal diverging variant of that theory too?" I don't reject relativity of any sort. Thanks for posting the observational evidence above. And yet after reading it I don't see how it rules out what I will call the "Revised Balloon Analogy (RBA)". How does the observational evidence show that our region of space is not comparable to a tiny area inside the giant expanding skin of the balloon, and the skin of the balloon is over 50 Billion light years thick?

Interesting ideas CaptainPanic. What I was proposing is that only people living in an area that is very vulnerable to tsunamis and the routes of escape are few and limited. Those wealthy people living along the coast in Malibu, CA are in this situation. How much would it cost them to water proof only the passenger cabin of their cars? I don't believe that would be terribly expensive. Maybe it doesnt take much to stop the flow of water only into the passenger cabin. Then your car would float and provide some protection, without using armor or bullet proof glass. All you need is to have doors and windows that seal and the air intake has an alternate route from a snorkle on the roof? So when anticipate a flood or tsunami, you and your family and pets all jump into your car and you press a button that shuts the usual air vent route and switch it to an alternate route that cannot take in water like a snorkle. Thanks Michel for the estimated time elapsed from quake to tsunami arrival of 20 minutes. I think I recall hearing in a recent TV news report that the first wave arrived an estimated 18 minutes after the quake, but I could be wrong. If these estimates are true, and the shaking lasted several minutes, that left as little as 15 minutes for them to extricate themselves from their damaged dwelling or work place, and sprint for high ground. Not enough time for thousands.

Nice thinking. However, there can be a kind of "barrior" or transition to a different kind of space. Our region of the universe seems very uniform, yet beyond our visual horizon space may transition into a strange realm, like a region of antimatter, or something unimagined. Space is not nothing, and not empty. Virtual particles and antiparticles pop out of nothing and go back into nothing. So empty space is full of potentiality. Even a big bang can pop out of emptiness. I like your balloon analogy which I also considered. The universe is an expanding shell like a balloon, but the thickness of the balloon is hundreds of Billions of light years thick. We are in the middle of that expanding away from some great cosmic center where the big bang originated. Folks around here don't like that idea much.

We don't see a bright night sky because most stars, and all galaxies, are so far away that they are invisible to the naked eye. Even with the most powerful telescopes we don't see a bright sky, because beyond a great enough distance, it is so far back in time that there were no galaxies and no stars yet formed.

Thanks for the title edit. Or how about "Cars as Refuge from Tsunamis"? Just a thought. My next question is how much more would it cost to make a car water tight or air tight or both? This could apply to other disasters, such as nuclear fallout, or biological or chemical weapons. You need filtered air to survive. If cars had adequate air filtration, you could jump in your car to avoid exposure to airborne nuclear fallout or other dangers. Swansont: "The reactor timeline implies it was less than an hour after the quake that the tsunami hit that region — that was the time of generator loss resulting from the tsunami." Interesting, but "less than an hour" can mean anywhere from seconds to 59 minutes. My guess is there was only a few minutes warning. The news said the quake hit at 2:46pm local time. So all we need is someone who can read Japanese and read for us the time stamp on any video of the first tsunami wave. That will tell us exactly how long it took the tsunami to hit.

Galaxies, and clusters of galaxies, and the Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation, are all very uniformly distributed throughout visible space. There are great voids and filamentary structures but these all appear to be very uniformly distributed in every direction.

Sorry I edited out my original questions, but thanks for the info which is very helpful. I wish I could change the title because the direction of this thread has little to do with Japanese nuclear reactor design, and everything to do with how to react to an impending tsunami. I can't find information about how long after the quake the tsunami hit. Since the quake was so near the coastal towns, maybe the tsunami followed the quake by a matter of a few minutes or less. We usually think of tsunamis traveling long distances before they strike land. In this case the tsunami may have appeared almost immediately after the quake, or even before the shaking stopped. This may also have happened after the Indo quake of Dec 2004. Anyone know how long between the Indo quake and the first tsunami damage is caused? For example, the houses in Malibu along Pacific Coast Hwy, if a similar quake and tsunami struck that area, there are few and narrow avenues of escape to high ground, only Pacific Coast Hwy. There would be a total traffic jam within a few minutes of warning. Either you die or you retreat to an underground shelter. There you can wait it out for days until the water returns to sea level. Then all you need to do is dig out thru tons of debris. Maybe you can get away on a dirt bike which enables you to go off road and around or thru traffic jams. But you better have a pistol handy, because it takes only one driver with a gun to take you down and steal your dirt bike.

True, but many cars will not be buried under debris, nor their windows smashed. What would you do? Would you get inside your car, so you have a chance, or give up and surrender to the big crush standing alone and helpless? Safer inside a car, especially if it is watertight, than on a rooftop or anywhere else. After the Indonesian tsunami of 12-26-04, I proposed tsunami survival barges attached to the roofs of houses. It would be totally enclosed, like a big coffin, and give you a chance but no guarantee of survival. There is a lot of jostling among the debris, but after a little while it become a huge conveyor belt and only cars on the perimeter will be seriously smashed. If you happen to be in the "middle of the stampeding herd" you will be floating and relatively safe. Also, if there is no quick escape from a tsunami, it might help to have an underground shelter equiped with extraction tools (saws, axes, shovels, etc) with an exit designed in a way to facilitate exit into a mountain of debris after the water subsides.

If the car was airtight it would also probably be watertight and you would be glad for that because you would have hours of breathable air. If not watertight (or airtight) your car will flood with water withing 30 minutes. You will probably not be buried under debris, because a boyant car will float. Then when it is safe you exit your car and climb to the top of the heap and light a flare when you see rescue coming.

Thanks for the replies! If I was living in a vulnerable area, like Huntington Beach California, and a tsunami 30 feet high was carrying all kinds of deadly debris towards me, I would get inside my car. It would protect me better than anywhere else. After all the violent battering, then you will need to get out of your car and climb to the top of the pile.

It seems to me that a car should be water-tight, so you can survive a tsunami by getting inside your car. But I think cars are death traps in a tsunami. Anyone know how long it would take a car's cabin to fill with water if getting battered around by debris from a tsunami? I propose people living in vulnerable areas should have water-tight cars and it doesn't seem like such a difficult thing to water-proof a car's cabin.

We will see the same red shift for all clusters of galaxies that are at the same distance from us. But the farther away these superclusters are, the more red shifted they are. No problem at all with that. Most folks around here will say the universe has no center, according to the balloon analogy. But the analogy requires a leap of imagination into the realm of spatial dimensions. That is what bothers me about it. I liked to think of the universe expanding from a single point in a roughly spherical shell, and that shell is hundreds of Billions of light years thick.

In astronomy they refer to the "cosmic microwave background radiation" which is very uniform from every direction. It is so red-shifted that it is believed to originate from the moment the universe became transparent, less than 400,000 years after the big bang.

Hahahahah. Nice to know that what you read here is a lot of "empty space." We try to write substance, but alas, it seems like so much nothing. Hahahaha. Time is not space, and space is not time. What we formerly called space is now considered to be "space-time". Ready for some more space? More nothing? Heeeeeree it comes: I think that before the Big Bang there was space, not space-time. After the Big Bang we have space-time. Big Bangs happen so infrequently that for all practical purposes it is correct to say that before the Big Bang there was no time, or there was such an unimaginably long period of time, measured in Googols of years, that the word "time" becomes meaningless. This is my wild speculation. Sorry I could not resist.

Has the evidence for such life inside Mars rocks been confirmed? If not, maybe this will be as inconclusive as the Mars rocks.

Has the evidence for life inside Mars rocks finally been confirmed? If not, maybe this will also take a long time to produce similar non-conclusive results.

"A paper published on Friday in the Journal of Cosmology claims that NASA discovered microscopic evidence of fossilized structures that may be remains of extraterrestrial bacteria or what is being termed “alien bacteria. "The report was written by Dr. Richard B. Hoover, an astrobiologist for NASA. The report provides details of fossilized remains found in meteorites that appear to be remains of ancient alien bacteria. The findings would lead credibility to claims that life did not originate on Earth, but has existed in some form in the universe for millions of years." http://www.ecanadanow.com/space/2011/03/07/paper-alleges-nasa-scientist-found-alien-fossil-evidence/

Then why not suppose that before the Big Bang was empty space, but that space had an "improbable" potentiality, as someone said above. Big Bangs don't seem to happen very often. The last one that occured locally was about 13.7 Billion years ago. What is to prevent another taking place at any time, anywhere? Nothing, except for probability. It is an improbable event. Like an infinite tub of soap bubble, some are expanding, others contracting. Our bubble happens to be expanding. "...many are wondering if galaxies recycle after all galactic material is sucked in to the SMBH. Do they "eat" and then somehow re-birth the consumed galaxy?" No matter how massive the black hole is at the center of a galaxy, the time comes when it becomes isolated and, for the most part, stops feeding. When it stops feeding the quasar turns off and it goes dormant. Angular momentum will prevent the entire galaxy from being devoured. Maybe from different dimensions a big crunch results in a big bang in other dimensions. When the amount of matter being "crunched" exceeds a certain limit, it cannot merely crunch into a supermassive black hole. It goes beyond that and implodes as an explosion in different spatial dimensions.

What exactly do you mean by "something from nothing"? What exactly is nothing? Empty space? I don't believe "nothing" ever existed. There was always something, even if that something is hard to recognize. The difference between something and nothing is just a phase change, or a quantum fluctuation. Why do universes need to recycle thru big bangs and crunches? Our own universe appears to be accelerating its' expansion. Why not suppose that Big Bangs are just one of those things that happens, now and then, here and there? There is no need for a crunch before a big bang. The only thing that prevents our universe from being a super-supermassive black hole is that the initial state of the universe was expansion at an inflated rate, faster than light. However, a big crunch should result in a super-supermassive black hole, not a rebound.

OK, I see what you mean. Better to hollow out asteroids and spin them so they create artificial gravity on the inside. When humans reach that stage of development, it will be easier to just build huge multigenerational star ships. What does Titan have that asteroids and starships don't?

Nice explanation I ME. I had also wondered about that. From your excellent link: "The short answer [why the universe did not become a black hole at the start] is that the Big Bang gets away with it because it is expanding rapidly near the beginning and the rate of expansion is slowing down. Space can be flat even when spacetime is not." http://www.phys.ncku.edu.tw/mirrors/physicsfaq/Relativity/BlackHoles/universe.html In other words, the universe was never static at the beginning. It was always expanding faster than light. Now that is hard to figure. The big bang never existed UNTIL it was expanding faster than light.

Your best bet for any terriforming in our solar system is Mars. Leave Titan alone. Not worth the effort. After terriforming Mars becomes feasible, that will be a long hard project. After that we would be better off building a star ship that can keep people comfortable and safe for thousands of years.

An easy way to comprehend the size of a black hole is imagine the Earth crushed down into a black hole. The event horizon would make the black hole appear to be a flat black ball less than one inch in diameter. Black holes this size and smaller could possibly exist if they were created at the time of the big bang. The most massive black hole known OJ287 at 18 Billion solar masses (which we should see an outburst in 2015) has a Schw radius of about 4 light days.

From the Feb. 2 New York Times: In a long-awaited announcement, scientists operating NASA’s Kepler planet-hunting satellite reported on Wednesday that they had identified 1,235 possible planets orbiting other stars, potentially tripling the number of known planets. Of the new candidates, 68 are one and a quarter times the size of the Earth or smaller — smaller, that is, than any previously discovered planets outside the solar system, which are known as exoplanets. Fifty-four of the possible exoplanets are in the so-called habitable zones of stars dimmer and cooler than the Sun, where temperatures should be moderate enough for liquid water. http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/03/science/03planet.html?_r=1 ------------------------------------ And from a Seattle Newspaper: "Before Wednesday, the count of confirmed planets outside the solar system stood at 519. That means Kepler could triple the number. And those findings are from Kepler's scanning of just one four-hundredth of the night sky, so the actual number of planets out there is presumably hundreds of times greater, Borucki said. "Kepler also found that there are many more relatively small planets than there are giant planets". "Sixty-eight of the planet candidates Kepler found are considered Earth-sized, including the first ones ever discovered to be smaller than Earth. An additional 288 planets were less than twice the size of Earth, which is still in that optimum zone for life." http://www.seattlepi.com/national/1501ap_us_sci_alien_planets.html