Airbrush

There was a recent episode of "How the Universe Works" about this giant merger.  Did anyone see that?  In the episode they only dance around the incredible amount of energy that is required to accelerate a mass of 3 billion solar to a speed of 1300 miles per second.

"The two galaxies' central black holes circled closer and closer to each other during the collision. As this happened, the black holes emitted gravitational waves.  This gravitational-wave emission occurred preferentially in one direction. When the two central black holes finally merged, this emission stopped, and the newly created leviathan rocketed off in the opposite direction."

Gravitational Waves Send Supermassive Black Hole Flying - Scientific American

Here are some facts and questions that I compiled about this merger in case anyone can answer these questions:

3c186 is about 3 BILLION solar masses.  It resulted from the merger of 2 supermassive black holes, one more massive than the other, thus the asymmetry causing 3c186 to be traveling 4.7 million miles per hour (1300 miles per second).

It is about 8 billion LY away and the merger took place about 2 billion years ago.

The merger generated the energy of 100 million supernovae.  How big a bang is that?  It converted 0.1% of its' mass into energy, or (0.1% x 3 BILLION solar = 3 MILLION solar masses converted into pure energy, all at one.  How long would that energy release take?  Both SBHs have giant event horizons, billions of miles in radius.  Would the energy released from the merger take minutes, hours, days, weeks?

Would there be a fireball?  Maybe not, because when they merged, GIANT gravity waves would have carried most of the energy away and any fireball would have been sucked up by 3c186.  Anyone want to try to explain how they merged?

How many megatons of TNT would the merger generate?  My feeble calculations produced the number "undecillion" or about 10^36 megatons, what it takes to accelerate 3 Billion solar masses to 1300 miles per second.

Correct me if I am wrong, but I recall an episode about a merger of 2 stellar mass black holes, each was less than 100 solar masses.  The result was 9 solar masses converted into energy.  Compare that to 3 million solar masses converted into energy!!

Hubble detects supermassive black hole kicked out of galactic core | ESA/Hubble (esahubble.org)

Can anyone translate the following article into English?

Gravitational Waves in 3C186 – Supermassive Black Hole Ejection « General Relativity (gravityphysics.com)

Skip foward to 6:10 to where a unique version of "Dry & Heavy" begins.  Rocking Time is ok but not Burning Spear at his best.

https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=burning+spear+dry+and+heavy+live

CO2 Direct Air Capture (DAC)

"Plans for a total of eleven DAC facilities are now in advanced development. If all of these planned projects were to go ahead, DAC deployment would reach around 5.5 Mt CO₂ by 2030; this is more than 700 times today’s capture rate, but less than 10% of the level of deployment needed to get on track with the Net Zero Scenario."

Direct Air Capture – Analysis - IEA

That means that after humans switch over to totally carbon-free energy, in about 50 years, by using Direct Air Capture, which requires lots of energy, but it can be increased in scale over time, we can restore a healthy atmosphere.  We could return CO2 in the atmosphere to low, pre-industrial levels.  This would cool the oceans, restore glaciers, moderate weather, re-freeze melting permafrost, and freeze over more of the Arctic Ocean.  It won't hurt to also plant groves of trees and dedicate a dependable water supply to each tree, so that no tree's water supply gets interrupted.

On 1/16/2023 at 2:12 PM, Ken Fabian said:

 

My view is that - given existing climate politics - anything gives the illusion that we can keep burning fossil fuels at high rates and avoid the climate consequences is unhelpful -  even where those attempts are sincere. Whether intended as an adjunct to commitments to building an abundance of clean energy and reducing emissions it will be used by opponents - and the apathetic - to reduce those ambitions.

Excellent info, thanks for that.  What do you think of billions of ping pong balls to cover the arctic ocean to reflect sunlight? 

I thought of volcanoes in Antarctica or Alaska, or wherever the wind direction is away from populated areas.  But it would be terribly dirty no matter where the volcano is located.  Also, they would need to excavate the volcano with nukes.

Or foresting deserts?  If you could desalinate sea water, sun-powered water distillation, while you plant the desert with trees, one tree at a time, one water-hose per tree to not waste water.  The forest starts small and expands outward.

Or is there a device that can be built to large-scale to extract CO2 from the air, that works faster than a tree can?

Think of anything that can bridge the 50-year gap between today and an idyllic future that is totally carbonless and clean, abundant energy for cheap.

Maybe this is better in Climate Science?  But engineering is what people DO to address human problems. 

About all humans can do to control anything about a volcano is to divert lava flows.  But what if we could get a volcano to erupt on demand?  Or kept erupting to deliver enough dust to the atmosphere to cool the earth enough to stall global warming?  The big island of Hawaii has a volcano called Mona Loa erupting.  Could it be used to deliver dust to the atmosphere, if the winds are blowing east the dust would get into the atmosphere before falling on the western US.  Is there anything we could throw into the volcano that would help?

"Climate scientists bring up volcanic eruptions to better understand and explain short periods of cooling in our planet’s past. Every few decades or so, there is a volcanic eruption (e.g., Mount Pinatubo, El Chichón) that throws out a tremendous amount of dust and gases. These will effectively shield us enough from the Sun to lead to a short-lived global cooling period. The particles and gases typically dissipate after about 1 to 2 years, but the effect is nearly global."

What do volcanoes have to do with climate change? – Climate Change: Vital Signs of the Planet (nasa.gov) 

In high school I did poorly in physics and chemistry.   In college at CSULA I had wonderful professors for beginning Physics and Oceanography so I did very well in Physics and Oceanography.  Good teachers are more valuable than we can imagine!

Neil deGrasse Tyson for president!  However, Neil said he would not want to be president.  He would rather educate people to vote based on facts rather than emotions.

"The concept of a galactic habitable zone analyzes various factors, such as metallicity (the presence of elements heavier than hydrogen and helium) and the rate and density of major catastrophes such as supernovae, and uses these to calculate which regions of a galaxy are more likely to form terrestrial planets, initially develop simple life, and provide a suitable environment for this life to evolve and advance."

Galactic habitable zone - Wikipedia

The Goldilocks Zone is where there are enough supernovae to create heavy elements that life needs, BUT not too many supernovae because they also destroy life on planets.  Generally, there are more supernovae, and therefore deadly radiation, near the center of the Milky Way, and in the densely-packed spiral arms.  In sparsely populated regions there are not enough supernovae.

13 hours ago, gib65 said:

How does the light from distant stars get to our eyes?

When I try to answer this question, I think of light traveling through the vacuum of empty space as photons.  But if light is both a particle AND a wave, when light travels through space, it is a wave of WHAT?  There is no medium, no ether, to transmit a wave.

Would EVERY fusion reactor require a large number of gigantic, powerful, expensive lasers?  Or is there another way to kick start fusion?

Is it a true story?  The story is almost too good to be true.  Only a year ago did I hear the story of North Sentinel Island.  But do you think a boatload of surfers in 1999 would risk surfing the southern tip of an island they were warned to avoid because of hostile natives (but it had good waves)?  They knew it was illegal, so they snuck in at night and they had a shot gun with them.  I suppose they would dare do it.

Recently I read this story that sounds hard to believe but may be true.

According to John Callahan and verified by the photographer on board in 1999 a boatload of surfers anchored off the notorious North Sentinel Island and had an encounter with the generally hostile natives. The following song was playing on the boat's sound system when the natives approached in their canoe, holding spears, bows and arrows. They paddled around their boat listening to the music for a while and then left them alone. Good thing the music was mellow, contemplative instrumental. Seems to me if it was heavy metal the surfers may have been murdered.

Here was the music that was playing that may have saved their lives:

"Suddenly, the warriors stopped paddling. Gliding towards the boat they looked transfixed. With no engine noise from their canoe, the captain said they could hear the music from the sound system on the boat."

"They could throw spears or shoot poisoned arrows at any time, and we were scared shitless. But they did nothing, appearing to be listening to the music. After three slow circles around our boat, they paddled away, reached the sand, carried their canoe up past the tree line and disappeared into the forest"

Escape from North Sentinel Island | Swellnet Dispatch | Swellnet

They were able to get 50% more energy out of the fusion experiment at LLNL.  However, to do that required MANY GIANT LASERS.  How else can you get a fusion reaction going without so many giant powerful lasers to get it started?  It seems so impractical to have fusion energy for the masses.

Any fans of Anton Petrov?  In his Youtube he says he found a study critical of the Kardashev Scale.  I cannot find the paper.  Anyone heard of this?  This is about a qualitative approach to understanding levels of ETIs rather than the quantitative Kardashev Scale. Below is what I paraphrased from Anton's excellent video.

"According to this study, advanced civilizations could be anywhere in the universe, our galaxy, even close to us.  They would be indistinguishable from their natural environment, so we would not detect them.  Super-intelligent alien life would look to us like ordinary matter.  We would not know what to look for.  We cannot imagine what we can discover about them.  They could easily manipulate the environment around themselves using extremely efficient methods without need for megastructures.  SETI would definitely fail in their search for such an ETI."

"This explains the Fermi Paradox, we don’t see anyone out there by design.  Complexity does not make you easier to detect.  They don’t need megastructures.  Rather they blend into the background."

Wonder why politician them won't go way...

Anyone else notice the connection?  For the Trumper crazies, it's a tough job to NOT hit Pelosi with a hammer. Someone tried to follow McCarthy's advice, but instead hit Pelosi's husband with a hammer.

"The crazed man who allegedly attacked the husband of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi with a hammer was charged with attempted murder by the San Francisco District Attorney on Monday. David DePape, 42, was also charged with assault with a deadly weapon, elder abuse, false imprisonment of an elder, residential burglary and threats to a public official and their family, according to District Attorney Brooke Jenkins."
Attempted murder charge filed against David DePape (nypost.com)

House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy joked at a Saturday night event that it “will be hard not to hit” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi with the speaker’s gavel if Republicans take control of the chamber in the 2022 midterms and he becomes speaker.

“I want you to watch Nancy Pelosi hand me that gavel. It will be hard not to hit her with it,” McCarthy said in audio posted to Twitter by a Main Street Nashville reporter.

Kevin McCarthy says 'it will be hard not to hit' Pelosi with gavel if he becomes House speaker | CNN Politics