pavelcherepan

I'm not exactly sure whether Iran does need nuclear power all that much having second-largest oil and gas reserves in the world, that's not to say that it will definitely be a very nice addition and will allow to develop science, education and production in new directions. And I wonder what will Israel's action be. So far what I've seen they are very unhappy about the results of negotiation: Yeah... not happy at all.

The causality is that an intelligent being due to its intelligence and being able to analyse situation better can overcome instincts. Instincts as I see them don't offer any incentive to an organism but on the other hand emotion brings a carrot-and-stick situation where you're rewarded with endorphins or some other feel-good hormone for doing what's best for the organism itself and get punished for refusing to do so. Although it's a good question whether it's only humans that have emotions or that animals have those too and to what extent.

Enough for what?

France started nuclear project around 1945 and started producing plutonium in 1949: So you see, France had been producing plutonium for a decade prior to developing the weapon. Also, Firstly, that happened in 1956 and secondly, it doesn't say "start nuclear weapons program", but "accelerate" existing one. No idea where they'd go, because while US stored nuclear weapons in what appears to be 23 countries and territories, it never transferred the possession of weapons to another state: US Once deployed 12000 atom arms in in 2 dozen nations

So what? It doesn't mean that Australia has a working enrichment facility. So you still need to build a plant, get enough material for a bomb and then design and build a bomb itself. Again, it's not a question of one year or two years.

Yeah, but its slow, less energy efficient and no one uses it anymore. Nope. Nuclear weapons were located on US military bases and owned by the US. Not sure about Italy, btw. Germany - yes, Turkey - yes, but can't remember about Italy. It took France all the way from 1945 to 1960 for nuclear weapon and until 1968 for thermonuclear device. France and weapons of mass destruction Since you're referring to iNow, please re-read post #5.

All of those you mentioned have mathematical basis and provide testable predictions that have been observed, while your idea doesn't.

Iran has ~3600 working enrichment centrifuges. Calculations on this site estimate that to get ~45 kg of weapon-grade uranium (enough for 2-3 weapons) it would take them about 2 years and enough uranium for 1 bomb in some 9-10 months. Countries you mentioned have 0 centrifuges (except for Germany) and selling of weapons-grade uranium to non-nuclear powers is verbotten by the nuclear non-proliferation treaty. So it's 9 months to enrich uranium plus whatever it takes to get comparable number of centrifuges online (couple years at best would be my guess) plus time required to design enrichment centers and to design and build the bomb itself. Even if we exclude international and political pressure and public opinion from the picture you're still looking at several years. If it all was so easy, we'd already be re-living Fallout for real this time. These 'blueprints' are not actual blueprints but just basic design schematics. Point me to one real blueprint, if you can? As you can see in the quote above you can't even find the design for centrifuge let alone the bomb itself. EDIT: Added quote from Nuclear Non-Proliferation treaty

No. I was pointing out that there's no infrastructure for that in Australia. There's plenty of uranium but no enrichment centers and building one is not a matter of a couple months, right? Australia, Germany, Italy, etc. have a know-how to build a modern implosive-type nuclear or thermonuclear weapon? And here I thought that the design of the implosion mechanism and staging of thermonuclear devices was still the among the best-kept secrets of nuclear powers. Developing one from scratch will take time. One year is a joke.

It's been assumed that Theia's orbit has been perturbed by interaction with Venus and Jupiter (which had much more eccentric orbit back then).

Based on what I read it most certainly was.

Yes, it is in fact orbiting the Sun, not the Earth, I just used Earth as a reference to calculate relative velocity. The Earth just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time

You can find geological assessment of the area in the link starting from page 4. I'll quote a part of it: So here you have it. Cliffs are some 100m high and sedimentation took some 40 million years, so on the very rough and average you get about 400k years per meter of sediment. But then again, that is assuming the constant rate of sedimentation which is most likely not true.

Personally to me emotion is Instinct 2.0, an upgraded version of instinct for intelligent beings. Many will probably disagree.

The term "velocity at infinity" is used in hyperbolic trajectory calculations and simply refers to the fact that the object would coast to infinity: [latex]v^2 = v_{esc}^2 + v_\infty^2[/latex] Where [latex]v_{esc}[/latex] is the local escape velocity, [latex]v_\infty[/latex] is the hyperbolic excess velocity or excess velocity at infinity and [latex]v[/latex] is the orbital velocity. At Lagrangian point L4 or L5, where Theia had supposedly formed the escape velocity relative to the Earth would be: [latex]v_{esc} = \sqrt \frac {2GM}{r} = 225 \, m/s[/latex] So using the number in simulation (4 km/s velocity at infinity), when Theia started moving towards the Earth from either of those points its orbital velocity relative to the Earth would be: [latex]v = \sqrt {0.225^2 + 4^2} = 4.006 \, km/s[/latex], and just before the impact with the Earth: [latex]v = \sqrt{11.2^2 + 4^2} = 11.89 \, km/s[/latex] P.S. Latex trial was a success

Highly doubtful about Australia. While they do have the largest uranium deposits in the world they currently don't have any operational nuclear reactors and even when they did, there were no enrichment facilities in 'Straya, but all the fuel was bought from overseas. Also for all of those "less then a year" is highly underestimated value. Without technological help from nuclear powers development of a working weapon and creating all the required infrastructure could take half a decade or more. Well how could Iran trust anyone? It's a Shia Islam country surrounded from every side by countries with predominantly Sunni leadership and population, a predominantly Persian country surrounded by Arabs, a country that's been invaded by Western powers not even once in the last couple centuries. So in my understanding, these guys are in a really precarious position and they might as well try to protect themselves. Whatever leadership they have, even if Iran does get nuclear weapons, they would never use it offensively. I can imagine they understand quite well that if they do, US can quickly turn the whole country into a radioactive desert.

The problem is that currently we only know of only a single type of life - carbon-based organics and we have no idea of other pathways life can take. If we let our imagination run wild pretty much any planet could be thought of potentially supporting life but there's much higher chance of success if we search for Earth-like planets and later on if we do discover some other life type we can then widen our search. Carbon chauvinism

But much of that stuff also came from war, from developing long-range delivery systems for nuclear weapons. When Americans found out that there was a metal ball beeping in space did the rejoice in celebration of this tremendous achievement or did they think that now commies will pew-pew them with nuclear bombs from space?

It happened here too. Read up on Great Oxygenation event (also sometimes referred to as Oxygen Holocaust). A lot of primitive anaerobic organisms died as a result of cyanobacteria poisoning atmosphere with oxygen. AFAIK, the current search conditions for planets that could support life only includes ability to support liquid water on the surface, not being a gas giant and not being tidally locked to the central star so possibilities are endless. Circumstellar habitable zone

I think that refers to the velocity of the impactor relative to the Earth at a distance where effects of Earth's gravity are negligible. The actual velocity of the impact would be higher.

From SR you get that an infinite amount of energy is required to accelerate a massive body to the speed of light.

If by 'light barrier' you mean the barrier of speed of light then the answer is yes. If all electromagnetism still stands (and hence the Special Relativity is valid) massive particles would still be limited by the speed of light and massless particles (of which in absence of photon only gluons will be left) will be required to always travel at the speed of light.

Here's a quote from Wikipedia article on Van Allen belts (I quoted a part on Inner belt because that's where most of protons are): So many if not most of them will not get to the poles. And then again there is this notion if oxidation of protons. You can't oxidize a proton because: Proton has no electrons so it can't be oxidized and can't form chemical bonds. It must first acquire an electron and become a neutral hydrogen atom before it can do so. I don't have a calculation but it must be much less than that due to the issues above. Not exactly true. It hasn't been proven with any sort of certainty that banded structure of BIF's is a result of seasonal variations.

Yeah, and that is also one of the reasons why Giant Impact hypothesis is preferred nowadays over many others - it does better job in explaining angular momentum of Earth-Moon system.

But as it said there it really depends on the direction and location of the impact. I would say that 229 hour day scenario was for the impact in the direction exactly against the direction of rotation of the Earth.