lemur

Do you think I am talking about gravitational lensing occurring somewhere outside the Milky Way galaxy? I know there are gravitational lensing effects noted that take place in circumscribed areas far from Earth, but I am talking about the possibility of the Milky Way itself creating a gravity-web that has an effect on the appearance of light that reaches it from the outside. How do you think such an effect could be controlled for if everything observed outside the galaxy was taken at face value? Which math? Are you going to "cobble" some up to somehow prove your point? Gravitation can cause redshift along with motion/velocity and universal expansion. Gravity doesn't alter the speed of light, supposedly, to cause the redshit. Rather it compresses the spacetime the waves are traveling through, resulting in frequency compression - wait, that would be blueshift, wouldn't it? Oh well, the point was that gravity can alter the frequency of EM radiation waves. No, I'm just hypothesizing that light might change trajectory in an organized way when it reaches the galactic perimeter. This could, in turn, alter the apparent distance and spatial relations of the objects if the effect was similar to that of light penetrating the surface of water, where you're observing from under water. Did God make light change speed and direction when it goes from one density medium to another? If I accepted what someone told me based on the fact that they had studied, would I be doing science or authoritarian-trust? You may be right, but I need to see the reason to accept it. Excuse me for being critical. All I did was think about the charge-relationship between protons and electrons and hypothesize that if the two were disassociated in a plasma state, the opposing charges would still tend to cause the two types of particles to basically circulate around each other, which could cause some shielding effects, albeit less than when the atoms are completely integrated with coherent electron orbits/clouds. I don't mind being wrong, but you didn't provide real reason, just authority-based claim. I asked what happens to the electrons in the plasma and you haven't answered that yet, as far as I know. Maybe you haven't been out of school long enough to get over the ego trip of who gets to lecture who on what. I am happy for you to lecture me on how astrophysics works, but do not expect me to accept anything and everything you say on the basis of your credentials, whatever those may be. When you provide clear specific reasons why I am wrong, I recognize that. I may not be as learned as you but I'm far from stupid. All I do is provide my reasons for thinking the way I do and look for better reasons to replace them and evolve a higher level of understanding. This does not occur from someone telling me that they have a degree that I don't. No, all you did was tell me I was wrong about the planets eventually falling into the sun. So I revised my hypothesis to them drifting into space. Now you tell me they're going to shift orbit outward but not drift away. So will they stabilize into some permanent recursive orbits then, without falling or drifting? Is there any way to measure mass of a distant object except using Newton's inverse square law? If not, don't you see that the measurement technique itself assumes that the mass of objects is proportional to their distance and velocity from another body? Therefore, if a denser object exerted more gravitation than a less-dense object of the same mass, you would still measure its mass according to its gravitation. You have no other way to measure mass except as a function of gravitation, right? Therefore, you cannot but assume the gravitational characteristics indicate the mass and not the density, correct?

That's just part of the conspiracy. The other part is to keep us healthy AND paying large amounts of money in various forms to fund a great deal of high salaries and other income/revenues. They want to give us good health so we will give them as much money as possible for it and live to work so that they will have unlimited goods and services to buy with the money. Of course, part of the conspiracy is to get us to be thankful for our good health as being their providence so that we assent to paying what our health is worth into their pockets. After all, how can you put a price on health? "Health is priceless, so give us all your money for it and go work to earn it back from us - thank you."

So does the federal government have the power to limit out-sourcing and in-sourcing among states? Couldn't it stimulate the local economies and create jobs within states to limit what they can import? Could corporations be encouraged to support local suppliers by having uniform tariffs on interstate trade?

So are you trying to say that plants act as a moisture anchor and transmit humidity over the ground, and that they will dry up because higher CO2 levels cause them to evaporate more water on average? If they're sweating more, why wouldn't that humidity just get taken up by nearby soil and other plants? Plus, if higher CO2 levels increase overall plant-growth, I would expect there to be more moisture being embedded in the plants. I am kind of divided here about what to think of your approach to this issue. On the one hand, I do think that cars pollute in numerous ways and are bad for plants and certainly many animals as well. Personally, I would prefer to see people drive less and walk/bicycle more. Even roads full of electric cars will have a negative effect on nature and wildlife. What it really comes down to is that there is a culture of destroying and repressing nature, which occurs not just in urban planning of roads and transit but also in the way business and homeowners maintain properties. Add to this the fact that many people simply like to backlash against green-politics to assert their own power and you have a recipe for intense nature-hate fascism. Despite my irritation with nature-repression culture generally, however, I also get irritated by the elitism of environment-worshippers. This is not because of the fact they value and love nature, because I do that too. It's the fact that they tend to fetishize their immediate surroundings, the way an ethnocentric jingoist fetishizes their ethnic culture. So I can't tell if the reason you are lamenting about plants drying out is because you live in or just fetishize some lush moist foresty area, which is more than likely also an area with a high level of economic and cultural capital. I mention the capital because it also bugs me to listen to people fantasize about how wonderful such areas are when they are not the people that put in all the labor of cultivating and maintaining the landscaping and architecture that gives them that warm-fuzzy feeling while they go out for coffee and have deep conversations about life and knowledge. Don't get me wrong, I enjoy that lifestyle as well. It's just that there is a lot of economic resources going into supporting those elite areas that people enjoy so much, and the question is whether the same economy that sustains them is not contributing to the degradation of so many other habitats elsewhere. Yes, I'm all for the greening of everything from major cities to interstate highways, but I'm not sure that fetishizing rain-forests, Seattle, or any place else in particular will achieve that. I think the economic practices have to be addressed directly how and where they are taking place. And I don't mean attacking them - I mean approaching them constructively to develop and evolve them into greener replacements. And realize that it's not cars you have to replace, it's cultural-geographic habits and cultures of economic-behavior and business. Do you have any idea how rigidly embedded cultural assumption are down to the most sub-conscious cognitive levels? I know you're probably going to say that you just wanted to talk about rainfall and plant-growth, but you can't practically separate those from the human cultural practices that interact with the ecology.

I think our respective positions represent an essential philosophical difference in the values of socially structuring people's lives. Structural education, like structural economics, and other forms of organizing people into relatively artificial social situations bothers me some. There's something eerie about a school or other situation where people are organized according to cohorts segregated on multiple levels according to age, ability-level, interest, etc. I don't think this is really separate from the radical classification of people into different economic sectors such that it becomes increasingly unimaginable for a person classified into one cohort or institutional situation to imagine working or interacting with people in another. Do you want a society solidly divided into white collar, blue collar, and service personnel and no fluidity or exchange of people or functions between the separate sectors of human life? I had the idea that segregation got really unpopular during the civil rights period, anti-apartheid politics, and the struggle to remove the berlin wall and the iron curtain, but maybe that was just for certain instances of segregation and people are still interested in maintaining and expanding others. Obviously there are going to be a slew of reasons to sort and organize people in various ways, since this is basically what humans do with just about everything for one reason or another. It's just that there has also been this other philosophy developed where people see the goal of society to increase human freedom instead of increasing the power to sort and control them within institutionalized matrices. I don't know if you think of yourself as being squarely on the side of sorting, structure, and control but I tend to find that most people who are do not really see any value in people being able to interact with anyone freely without institutional guidance toward some and away from others. edit: I just posted this but I thought I should mention that there is one reason, imo, that relative segregation makes sense and that has to do with language and other interactions where multiple individuals practicing common culture is needed for interaction. Still, the question is whether people should segregate themselves 24/7/365 into common language situation or companies/divisions that do the same kind of work or other culture. You would think people would be able to congregate for various common culturalities and divide their time between different ones. Humans tend to get stressed and seek security from that stress through avoidance of all sorts of situations, so we get used to surrounding ourselves with a single culture/language/lifestyle if we can get away with it, but I don't think it's ultimately good for anyone to take it so far. Still, it is important for people to come together on a regular temporary basis to practice various common culturalities.

You don't think young adults can benefit from interactions with more experienced adults? I tend to think more diversity is always better, although that's really too general to possibly be universally valid. Big universities that concentrate young adults and supply them with lots of institutionalized interactions may protect them and give them more of an opportunity to compare experiences with others in a similar situation, but it also prevents them from broadening their horizons somewhat too, don't you think?

But why couldn't such a student move away from home to someplace where they really wanted to live/work and then pursue education online? Online schooling could open up a lot of possibilities for combining life-experiences that could not be combined if physical presence was required for all aspects of a person's life. For example, suppose someone wanted to do humanitarian work somewhere in a developing economy but pursue academic study in a field not offered in that area. Likewise, someone might want to live someplace to gain practical experience with a new language while still being able to pursue academic studies in a more familiar language. Another benefit is that with online classes, the instructor is also able to migrate around at will, which could mean that your instructor could be touring various facilities and including info about them in class-discussions. Imagine you were taking a class in water-treatment and your instructor would tell about highlights from various water-treatment facilities she was touring. Of course, the risk is that both students and instructors will take advantage of online classes to shirk responsibilities and devote less attention to learning-interactions, but if they didn't it could also enhance these interactions in many ways, I think.

Are you saying that gravity could curve spacetime in such a way that gravity could bend the path of gravity itself instead of just light? If so, that's something I've never heard anyone suggest and it sounds sort of interesting. After all, I think generally gravity is thought of as occurring in concentric 'layers' around masses to produce gravity-wells. I tend to look at gravity-wells as intersecting where gravity-wells intersect, such as the Earth's gravity-well being located within the gravity-well of the sun, and the moon's gravity-well being located in that of the Earth (and the sun too). I have asked whether gravitational fields interact in some way and people have told me they do not; that an object going from Earth-orbit to lunar-orbit simply shifts direction with a small amount of propulsion at the lagrangian point and goes from orbiting one to orbiting the other. But if gravity in fact 'radiates' from objects, for instance the gravity from the sun is supposed to travel at the speed of light to reach Earth, the same as sunlight does, then why shouldn't it follow the curvature of spacetime just as light supposedly does? In other words, why can't gravity bend gravity 'rays,' the same as light? If it did, I don't know how this could possibly be observed or tested, because it would mean that spacetime is curved within its curvature, so to speak. The only way I can think to formulate a concrete question about this would be the following, maybe (could be nonsense but I'll try): Let's look at the gravity-well of the sun as having an upward "slope" going from the sun to the heliopause. Now, consider the Jupiter's gravity-well as indented into this slope. Would Jupiter's gravity-well then be perpendicular to the slope of the sun's gravity-well or would the two gravity-wells be parallel, so to speak? Now I'm trying to think of how this distinction could be relevant but I can't really. The closest I can get is that the high-end of a slanted gravity-well could have a higher escape velocity than the low-end. Maybe this might also mean that an elliptical orbit could appear circular because it is the result of gravity-well slant instead of satellite-trajectory. This is all very speculative, though, and I'm not even sure you meant to imply what I inferred from your post.

Last I read, the current administration's approach to space is to privatize the parts of the industry that would do well as private industry and allow NASA to concentrate on more challenging issues. Is that bad for space developments? As for the moon, I sort of wonder why those rover robots were put on Mars but the only thing they've done for the moon lately is to shoot it. Shouldn't there be some rover robots on the moon examining the traces of water and other substances mentioned in the OP? Or would such rovers be ineffective at that task?

Please explain to me the logic of how rainfall levels decrease due to warming. When I first heard that CO2 levels were going to be high, I expected an increase in tree-growth. Not only the extra CO2 would provide more carbon for growth but increasing average temperatures would mean earlier springs and later freezes in fall, which translates to a longer growing-season. Of course this assumes that deforestation doesn't eliminate too many trees. If in fact more land was devoted to (re)forestation, I would think that increased CO2 levels and longer grow-seasons would actually help to mitigate the warming because the greater shade would generate more cooler air from the forests. I don't know how significantly an effect this would be. I think that you're right about desertification causing problems for (re)forestation. I just wonder why rainfall is supposed to decrease.

Idk but 1kg in the size of a needlepoint or actually much smaller (right?) would have an extreme amount of kg/cm^2, so even if it would move very slowly I would expect it to have a powerful ability to penetrate anything and everything. I guess if it was small enough, it could just go through your body without you feeling much or noticing much of the damage. It would be like getting pricked with an extremely small gage needle, I would think. You might just notice the slightest pinch and a small blood spot. Of course, what happens when it goes through your bones?

That's a really funny paradox. I actually pictured his nose starting to grow because it knew he wasn't telling a lie and then suddenly stopping after it started and the lie became true. Maybe this is the statement that makes Pinnochio's nose grow the absolute minimum length possible for any nose-growing statement.

Supposedly it takes gravity just as long to get from the sun to the Earth as it does light. So where do we get the idea that light and gravity are not instantaneous? I mean, if the sun would somehow vanish without a trace, it would affect Earth gravitationally at the same moment we would see it happen, so in effect the speed of light and gravity are just a principle whereby events happening in two distant places cannot be simultaneous. It's not really that light/gravity reaching the Earth from the sun left the sun 8 minutes earlier. It's that the sun's present is Earth's past and Earth's present is the sun's past. So, is it not possible to simply think of the sun and Earth, or any two distant objects really, as being directly in contact as a function of the amount of gravity they exert on each other? In other words, could gravitation simply be the same thing as direct contact between objects? We tend to think of space as an empty container for matter, I think, because of the distinction between radiation/light and matter. If we would think of light emissions as the "photosphere" of electrons or other light-emitting particles (if other particles emit light as well that is), then could light and gravity simply be seen as very large elementary particles with very small cores? In that sense, it wouldn't be light and gravity taking 8 minutes to get from the sun to Earth. Instead, the sun and Earth would simply be in contact via their gravitational and photon spheres, and the lag would just be due to the fact that smaller particles are more dense and therefore more agile. If two cruise ships were pushing against each other's bows, for example, a passenger could run from the stern of one to that of the other in 8 minutes even though the two sterns came in contact at the same moment as the two bows, if you take the two ships as contiguous units. I.e. the two ships would be simultaneous but the position of the person running across them could still take time. So in the same way as the two cruise ships, the Earth's gravitational and photon spheres could be in direct contact with Earth's, only particles of matter are like passengers on the ships that take a long time to get from one side of the ship to the other; and tend toward the centers and perimeters of the ships, respectively. Traversable space, then, could be a function of matter but not of gravity and light. Why isn't light simultaneous then? Because it is measured in terms of speed and space that are derived from interactions among particles of matter. Sorry if this post is too speculative - it just seemed like something to bring up in light of the issue of gravity as something (particles) that must be in transit to connect distant atoms.

When people complain about Walmart, I argue that it's the closest thing in capitalism to a communist economy. In communism, people are supposed to produce as much as possible and basically give it away to whoever needs it. The closest you can get to that in capitalism is to lower prices as close to costs as possible, while producing things as efficiently as possible. Obviously if Walmart gave away goods for less than they cost, it would go out of business. So it has to work within a capitalist market economy where inputs and labor require price-negotiations, but it basically tries to supply all possible needs for the lowest possible price in the most efficient way. This post is not an advertising promotion for Walmart, btw.

What if the 1kg object was only slightly larger than its schwarzschild radius? Would it still generate Hawking radiation or would it remain a stable 1kg?

What I believe happens when politicians and others in media start promoting science as an economic benefit is that a version of science is adopted that allows competitive status-achievement types to prove their merit and gain a good-paying position somewhere high on a corporate food-chain. What this means in practice is that severely anti-innovative thinkers come to utilize science as a means of job-securitization. This in turn creates a demand for highly institutionalized theories that are defined in a way that makes them challenging enough to weed out all but a hard-working elite. Those that make the cut may not be creative or innovative, but they will have proven themselves in an institutionalized system that they expect will be used to maintain their position in a rigorously controlled hierarchy of fiscal-distribution. I'm afraid that this kind of science does not actually improve the base economy with innovation because it actually institutionalizes science in a way that stifles creativity and innovation, in favor of predictable career-outcomes that promote competition for job-security. The way that science improves the base economy, where resources are actually utilized to create economic value, is by analyzing existing economic practices and tweaking them or formulating alternatives that increase productivity along with efficiency. The problem with doing this is that when it gets done, lots of people complain about the fiscal crises that result from markets flooding with efficiently-produced goods and high-yield services. Then what you get is politicians and others wanting to create more jobs, even if doing so means promoting efficiency and resource-waste. Of course, they never openly state they're willing to increase inefficiency and waste to create jobs, but they simply emphasize the importance of job-creation over conservation of resources and labor-saving innovations.

Discrete because that is in their physical nature or discreet because it is more convenient for counting and subsequent mathematical operations?

I don't know, either way. I was just wondering if you might have a general idea about what kind of speed would need to be achieved to lob a vehicle into orbit, or at least high into the air. I was hoping for a discussion of the forces and energy involved with that. Maybe the best vehicle design for lobbing vehicles as high as possible before initiating propulsion would be flying saucers. This design has become cliche' due to bad sci-fi but a rotating saucer does have a gyroscopic effect to keep it flat and it is steamlined; but of course most importantly it can be lobbed unlike a radially asymmetrical cylinder-type vehicle. Isn't discus the olympic projectile that has the greatest ratio of distance to weight?

It would not be pretty to see species stressed by warmth struggling with climate change, but surely there are many co-present species struggling with cold that would flourish from any additional warmth. So I think that by the time the climate change was severe enough to be seriously affecting certain trees, other trees would be flourishing to take their place.

If that were the case, I would expect to see some charge-type phenomena, like lightning, occurring with due to gravity. I assume that by having charges, particles of matter would have to be distinguished into positive and negative gravitation. If all particles had both charges, they would attract each other and cancel each other out the way proton and electron charge do in a molecule, no? Also, it seems as though all particles can exist independently of other particles in a vacuum. Does this mean gravitons could exist independently of protons, electrons, neutrons, photons, and whatever all the sub-atomic constituents of these may be? Also, it seems like other particles have multiple behaviors, i.e. a proton has charge but also nuclear force and mass/inertia/gravitation. Photons have electrical and magnetic fields (and possibly gravitation?). Does that mean gravitons could also have other qualities than attracting each other?

Generally, I don't get how it's possible to have an attractive particle. When a particle hits another particle, it pushes it. How can a particle hit another particle and pull it?

Any idea what the "lob" velocity would have to be to achieve orbit then? I suppose you could lob a vehicle to a certain height where it could subsequently use propulsion to continue further. Maybe it would be possible to have a catch-net suspended from something in low geo-synchronous orbit. Is any of this reasonably plausible at all?

How can trees grow any faster than they already do? They can only receive so much solar energy for their size. Granted some trees grow fast than others, but I think such trees are usually softer and more prone to breaking.

This topic really deserves its own thread. It's a favorite of mine when it comes to space-technology discussions. I once thought that the tall volcano on Mars next to a very deep sea could have been used as a long launch-track by ancient Martians. If you would lob things into space, it would make sense to do so above a large volcano to take advantage of the hot, light, upward-moving air currents rising off the volcano, no?

I like how you use vanish/appear and hidden/revealed to distinguish materiality and experientiality. I also think it's funny that you compare quantum objects with superstition. More seriously, though, it alludes to an issue I've been think about lately which is what exactly "quantum" refers to. People sometimes use it to mean anything at the level of elementary particles, but that doesn't really make sense imo because "quantum" refers to quantification, which may refer to the fact that quantum theory deals in multiplicities of particles rather than particles individually. Originally, I think "quanta" referred to the discreet "packets" of energy that Max Planck found to occur in fixed amounts according to light frequency by studying black-body radiation. I would be curious to hear what people with more expertise in this matter have to say.