RyanJ

I find the space elevator idea really fascinating. It could be do-able sometime in the future too.

Hi guys!

I came upon an interesting idea, unfortunately I don't know how to calculate it.

I was wondering how far out would the GPS satellites be for a car traveling say 100 miles if GR was not factored into their programming? How much out would the distances be?

The water would act as a solvent - allowing the enzymes to function and of course to dissolve the compounds that it has broken down.

Safety systems are generally scaled to handle a certain level of threat, starting with the most likely and rarely going to the expense of rare threats. Are they protected against "solar storms" or "most solar storms" realistically?

There is limited information on their exact protection measures. I believe the systems they use are block isolators which allow them to basically shut down sections of the power lines and so on to prevent power surges being spread over large areas and thus containing the damage.

How well this would work for a severe vs. a usual solar storm I cannot tell you.

In the worst case GPS would be gone (unless the military have some shielded satellites that they aren't making public, even then those would be only for their use).

Most mobile phone signals and most aircraft calls are sent via satellites at some point so those would be damaged badly.

In the event of total system failure like that the communication companies probably have backups in place, such as land lines, that could take the signals in such a situation. If this is the case or not though I am unsure. Can anyone clarify this point?

Well, certainly the potential exists for great damage. I was under the impression however that this possibility has been anticipated and the power and communication systems have been constructed with the appropriate safety components. If this is true, the damage would be minimal, however I could be mistaken on this point.

No. You are correct. They have added a lot of safety systems to the power and communication systems over the years that should greatly reduce the risk of anything catastrophic. The satellite systems are still quite a worry though.

Society would pretty much grind to a complete halt I think because we would get blackouts everywhere. And I've been told that it will take months or even years to replace the transformers... so that's a pretty long blackout. Please note: I'm no expert, and I just wrote down info from "hearsay"... so please doublecheck it if it's important to you.

Only provided the power systems aren't put into safe mode first. Otherwise there would be minimal damage only.

Do satellites (GPS and communication satellites) have any protection against a big solar storm? Or will they just get fried and become a lump of metal and silicon in orbit? If such satellites go down, the world might change for decades. We wouldn't know what's happening everywhere anymore.

They do have protection. The storms only affect things that are currently active so putting the satellites into a low power state (safe mode) would prevent damage to the systems.

Precautions have been taken to ensure that such things are quite preventable.

As with most things in science it is not a matter of if it will happen but when it will happen.

If we have enough time before the event satellites and power grids can be put into safe mode to minimize any damage caused. If we didn't have enough time then the grids could be taken offline by the storms and many of the satellites fried by the radiation.

I understand that part, but here is something I am saying that I think is getting missed also. Most all of the electrical components in any giving computer operate instructions in the form of some standardized logic operating on some standardized electrical devices. This holds true for processors. If you could make say some 15 core processor that has all kinds of capability it could run in various ways depending on the instructions. For instance maybe a maximum graphics potential for a giving program would require six of the cores.

No, I understand what you are saying but I am trying to explain that it comes down to more than just the "code" that runs the hardware. The hardware it's self is usually configured specifically for a task. Just adding more standard cores will not make up for hardware optimizations that can't be programmed in.

As I said you could emulate virtually anything that way sure but you would never get as good results as hardware specific optimizations combined with firmware optimizations.

That isn't true I'm afraid. If it were that simple it would have been done a long time ago no?

Things like graphics cards don't reply on the underlying "software" (the firmware) but also on advances in the hardware. Compressing everything into one multi-cored CPU where each core could be programmed individually wouldn't allow for one to expand upon hardware and, say, upgrade to a faster graphics card because removing the core would not be possible. See what I mean? You need to have flexibility and that can't be given by programming.

And that would require you to upload new hardware instructions each time you wish to add a new component? Sorry but programming hardware isn't the best solution.

Graphics cards for example are optimized for their task and for their specific hardware. While other hardware may be able to emulate the features they won't be as good as the originals. No code can, for example, turn an Nvidia GeForce 8800 GT into a 275 GTX. The hardware has to be changed.

The motherboard allows for a lot of flexibility, and doesn't have much of an energy cost. To save energy, use slower clock cycles.

Good point. If everything were built directly into the CPU then extensions (such as extra PCI cards say) wouldn't be possible. Thanks for pointing that out.

Not in this case. It was the OP who misconstrued the article to being about silk. From the cited article, "The ultra-strong glue that spiders use to trap their prey has given up some of its genetic secrets, raising the hope that similar substances could one day be synthesised to produce surgical adhesives." The article does mention the spider web, but only in the context of spiders secrete this glue onto the web.

I did try to correct it but the posts seem to time out so I could no longer edit it.

If you fired the bullet at a large enough speed it would orbit. The problem assumes you can treat the region as being flat.

That's what I meant since the original question made no reference to a curved surface at all.

If you're looking for the calculations you could try something like this. Good luck

I would like to argue it from the point of all the logic behind any computer system and why the processor exists to execute these instructions. Even a graphics card has a gpu, and most all of it is simply digital right with a clock? So why can't it all be just brought down into cores that have different structures for say doing floating point numbers and what not? If each core could do the same functions they could relate to each other in optimal ways when doing instructions I would think.

Because the connections would still need to be as intricate as they are now. A GPU could be integrated into a CPU but why bother? It's no more optimal and would only serve to make the design more complex and harder to dissipate the heat.

I think all the different specialized components ultimately has to use the processor to some regard and all of them have to run from some instruction set. Plus many of these digital devices and what not can be reprogrammed, as in the hardware does not have to be the end all of what it can do.

 

I think it would be interesting to see as I don't know if anyone has tried such.

Of course you are correct. Most things have a processor at their core but combining them together would cause more problems than it would solve. See my first post.

Actually, the dropped object should strike first because it has less distance to fall due to the curature of the earth.

It doesn't quite work like that. Gravity is uniform and the object falls at an equal rate regardless.

The Mythbusters demonstration proved the point very well.

There are several issues, the first would be the size. This would make the processor larger and thus slower as it would take the electrical signals longer to cross the processor and it's components.

The second would be cooling. CPU's already generate huge amounts of heat and need to be kept cool to work optimally. The more you try to cram into them, the more heat generates.

The third is that it's pointless. It would not reduce the complexity of the system and would still require just as many connections - why waste time doing something that will not make a great deal of difference in the end?

there is a theory that we are likely connected to loads of othere universes and even multiverses but our universe only contains life because that our universe was just cool enough to support life and in millions even billions and trillions of years time our universe will be to cold...[sNIP]

You refer to the multiverse theory, it is fair to warn you that it hasn't been proven at the time of writing. There are some ideas about how it could be shown to be correct but none have yet been tested as I recall.

You make one fatal assumption in your post however - you assume that we can define exactly what life is and what limits it can endure. Neither are true. In face every time we try to set a limit on what we believe life can endure, we usually find an extremophile that can live there.

As to the original question of this thread - it doesn't necessarily have to end somewhere... not even if the universe were finite in volume!

if you add sulfuric acid to drain cleaner in little amounts it will be safe as a experiment

Adding dangerous compounds to a solution that contains unknown compounds could lead to dangerous reactions. People who play with cleaners without understanding the chemistry of their components usually end up being hurt.

The compounds used in most cleaning agents are usually dangerous enough on their own, mixing them without the proper understanding is not recommended as it can lead to explosions, production of toxic gasses etc. DO NOT attempt it unless you know what chemicals it contains and understand how they will react.

Absolutely useless for biology. Contains pretty much nothing, not even the most rudimentary information, and frequently misdirects. Vastly overshadowed by wikipedia.

The biology section is still largely a work in progress due to the vast volume of information required. But it is being worked on - give it some time and see what they come up with

NASA's Ares I-X test rocket lifted off at 11:30 a.m. EDT Wednesday from NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida for a two-minute powered flight. The test flight lasted about six minutes from its launch from the newly-modified Launch Complex 39B until splash down of the rocket's booster stage nearly 150 miles down range...

http://www.physorg.com/news175953892.html

Please add Wolfram Alpha (http://www.wolframalpha.com) to the main post too as it can do all sorts of useful chemistry calculations (I'll post a thread for that later).

There are plenty of tests that can be done before mass spectrometry to identify potentially dangerous compounds before they are analyzed. Otherwise you would be correct, step 1 in particular could be hazardous with certain materials.

I've never heard of that happening. Basically the process for entering an unknown substance into a mass spectrometer is as follows:

1. Load a sample into the MS instrument, and vaporize it.
   
2. Ionized the unknown substance (which results in the formation of positively charged ions)
   
3. Accelerated the ions using a magnetic field.
   
4. Computation of the mass-to-charge ratio of the particles based on the details of motion of the ions as they pass through electromagnetic fields.
   
5. Detection of the ions, which in step 4 were sorted according to m/z.