lemur

29 years must be a typing mistake. I wouldn't "lump them together" in a general sense. Nuclear doesn't deplete any oxygen or generate hydrocarbon-type emissions. I just note that it's ultimately non-renewable because with any fuel, you have to consider an eventual transition to energy-levels that are available purely from solar and other renewable sources. Nuclear power could last for millenia but assuming human life continues to that point, then you become faced with the issue of how to make cultural-economic transitions to sustainable energy-levels per capita without the kinds of social-political conflicts that have been going on for years over fossil-fuel and especially oil.

No, you basically clarified it; except the example of a binary neutron system is more specialized than the terms I was thinking in. I was just thinking of any source of gravitation and 'gravitons' generally, if such a particle is responsible for carrying gravity. I.e. if photons move through curved geodesics, why not gravitons? But if gravitons do, then it raises the problem of what causes the curvature of the geodesics that gravitons move though?

All the posts in this thread have interesting perspectives. Mine was just based on a simple observation that I don't think anyone in the high-energy economies is really planning to cut down on energy use due to carbon tax. I think there's an unspoken assumption that people will find a loophole to continue to drive and air condition their home and office and they'll just increase their revenues/income to afford the higher taxes. I was trying to point out the irony that when a tax is designed to curtail some type of consumption, it messes the plan up if people start trying to make more money to pay for the tax so they can continue to use as much as they were before. It's like with currently rising gas prices. That is basically exactly what would happen if CO2 or O2-waste was taxed, the price of hydrocarbons would increase. Yet many people just want to work more hours or do whatever it takes to raise their income to a level where they can afford the same amount of gas they were buying before the price went up. People don't seem to realize that price-increases in a free market is the invisible hand's way of encouraging rationing through rational choice to reduce consumption and seek substitutes. That's why I say that if people just continue to want more money to pay for more expensive gas, and the price of gas keeps going up to restrict consumption, there could be hyperinflation. Swansont is right to point out that hyperinflation doesn't happen very often, but it's just the question of what will cause the global economy to really start moving away from high-energy usage per capita?

How is nuclear renewable? It may have a much larger reserve of fuel available than fossil fuel, but isn't it still ultimately limited?

This doesn't address what I was talking about. My question was not in regards to how spacetime is traditionally understood in GR. My question was whether it seems logical that photons should move along geodesic paths determined by gravity but gravitons, if such a particle would be recognized, would presumably be determined by nothing but the matter emitting them. I.e. spacetime would be treated as curved for photons and matter but would it be treated as flat for gravitons?

My response comparing heat caused by friction with waves caused in fluid was reasonable and you respond by asserting that physicists don't care because they're physicists?

I don't see the functionality of differentiating between friction and other kinds of motion-resistant force. Brake pads heat up because the KE of the vehicle's momentum is getting transferred into them, creating waves of (heat) energy in the pad. If the same vehicle's brakes fail and it plunges into water, the momentum that would have heated up the brake pads and the tires with friction would be lost as waves in the water. Yes, for those waves to be formed, the vehicle can't pass through them frictionlessly, but for any fluid displacement to occur, there has to be resistance, and that resistance will translate into waves rolling away from the pushing object. Those waves may be waves in a fluid medium, but they are still waves of energy just like the waves of energy that manifest as heat in a brake pad or a stopping tire, aren't they?

Why does relativity treat gravity levels as absolute while allowing light to shift due to all sorts of causes and conditions; e.g. redshift, blueshift, and following the curved paths of (fixed) spacetime? If gravity and light would both be particle/waves traveling at C, then why couldn't gravity vary dynamically in all the same ways light does? Certainly it would be confusing if gravitation was influenced by gravitation and spacetime curvature was determined by gravitons that move through curved spacetime because of the chicken-egg type viscous cycle of determination. But on the other hand, why wouldn't it be logical that gravitons behave much like photons, considering they travel at the same speed, etc.?

Like whether gravitation itself could redshift/blueshift The question is why relativity treats gravity levels as absolute while allowing light to shift due to all sorts of causes and conditions. If gravity and light would both be particle/waves travelling at C, then why couldn't gravity vary dynamically in all the same ways light does? But I think that this question is liable to distract from the main crux of this thread, so I think I'll repost it since you responded.

Farmers would just pass their costs on to the food industry. Consumers would pay higher prices and ask for subsidies for more jobs and higher wages from government, who would have the money to provide it from CO2 taxes. Hence the viscous cycle that would result in hyperinflation.

Marat, for someone whose posts seem to be well-informed by Marxism, your economic analyses miss the material base a lot, imo (not meant as a personal attack - since you have interesting economic insights, just not at a mechanistic level). I don't think the public would be able to afford less widgets because I think they would just go on buying widgets as subsidized by the CO2 tax. Likewise, I don't think industry would reduce production. Instead they would just go on producing and paying the CO2 tax as a cost of doing business. All in all, I think the whole global economy would just steam along into hyperinflation generated by the recirculation of CO2 taxes. If standard of living would actually decrease, as you say, that would mean the CO2 tax would have an effect, which I think is optimistic at best.

I don't understand. Isn't the issue which dimensionalities of the universe can be co-present and which can't? Or do I misunderstand the whole issue of multiverse? And is the idea of a foam universe the same thing as multiverse? I thought the foam concept was that there could be an indefinite number of expanding universes and that the expansion rate was dependent on the behavior of other, connected bubbles. Well, at least that's how I understand foam and how I think it would apply to a universe-metaphor of foam.

when is object-motion-resistance different than friction?

Total time dilation as absolute gravitation is reached seems, imo, to correspond to a singularity from which absolute spacetime expansion can be emitted. This is purely physics-based intuition. Why shouldn't a state that compresses all time into a single moment also be visible as a point of emission for all spacetime of a given universe? Everything in one moment = everything in all moments from another vantage point, no?

Maybe this should be in speculations. The premise is that if a tax were levied requiring people to pay for CO2 emissions, would the proceeds from the tax end up paying for more CO2 emitting industries, etc. causing a viscous cycle that would lead to hyperinflation? Presumably, if the economy would shift to CO2-free activities, there would be no taxation/fines and no fiscal stimulus caused by redistribution of CO2 tax proceeds. But I would guess that industries would just "pay to pollute" and would receive those payments back in increased revenues from people who wanted the products that they generate with that energy. Is this overly cynical?

I know all this. The issue is why the OP deemed it relevant to state that distance grows faster than the speed of light.

I don't see what dissipation has to do with it. If an object is pushing through a fluid, the resistance of the fluid to the object's force is friction regardless of what happens to the energy that gets transferred to the fluid later, no?

What do you mean by kinetic energy loss? Energy isn't created or destroyed - it just changes form. Every time a spring changes direction, it has to decelerate and re-accelerate, doesn't it? An object in orbit may be a perpetual motion machine in that it is an object in motion tending to stay in motion, but how can an oscillating spring remain perpetually in motion when its motion has to keep stopping and starting in a forceful way? Doesn't that require work? Not even force of resistance incurred by motion?

Because it's just a story and siding with the snake makes you a satanist. There is no difference between siding with a repressive image of God as with opposing a (false image) of a repressive God. Both will lead you into complicity in your own self-repression by the belief that repression is a fact that you should fight against. Succumbing to the temptation to fight and tempting/provoking others to fight is the stuff of satanism and generally evil, or just call it mean if you don't like dramatic language. If you want to interpret these stories and critique their validity, that I understand. I don't get why you would want to pick a fight with God and people who take sides with goodness by taking sides with the snake and trying to drag people into deceit, conflict, etc. If you want to praise the snake for being an angelic instrument in the enlightenment of A&E, why don't you just say that instead of making it into a fight with Christians who also acknowledge the misfortune of losing the garden of Eden?

The OP referred to the idea of distance growing faster than the speed of light as being some overall quality of the universe, but that doesn't make sense in that at one scale the universe is expanding faster than C and at other scales it's expanding sub-C. So all I could discern from the idea of everything expanding at sub-C speeds is that everything in the universe would be visible to any observer anywhere. If distance was growing at C or higher, there would be galaxies invisible to other galaxies.

Forget about collisions for a moment and just think about waves. How can a wave form except by resistance in the transfer of force through a substance? If you push on a substance and it creates a bulge, whatever is on the other side of the bulge is resisting the force-transfer. I suppose you could say that the ability to form the bulge at all and the fact that it can move through the substance as a wave indicates friction among the particles. The only way I can see a fluid being frictionless is if the particles don't displace each other in any way, e.g. if they just pass each other without force-transfer. But even if that occurred, the particles displaced by the object would still have to accelerate so there would be a very small amount of (resistance) force that would be exerted on the object pushing them (equal and opposite reaction). If that's not friction, what is it?

I don't think humans are unique in this. Sexual activities make you more vulnerable to attack than when all your energy is free to spend protecting and defending. Still, I don't think this is the main reason for hiding nudity and sex. I think it has more to do with control and power over sex itself, who gets access to whom/what when and how.

You seem obsessed with taking sides with the serpent against God. That's irrelevant to the point of the story, which is the irony that you have to know consequences through experience to make wise choices. You could look at it this way; if you would make a choice that does cause you to die, only those who survived you could gain wisdom from your experiment with that choice. In that sense it is logical that the curse for taking the tree fruit was to have to eat from the plants of the field, i.e. because if you survived watching others die from eating tree fruit, you would avoid it. Maybe the story really refers to the way superstition works in general. I.e. you see someone walk under a ladder and have bad-luck or whatever and then you start avoiding it and telling others that it is bad luck to walk under a ladder. I think you're too caught up in the status/ego of being good or bad, perfect or imperfect. The issue isn't judging people's worth or the value of morality. Morality isn't a beauty contest. It's just beneficial to gain the wisdom to make good choices, but it's a mixed blessing because to know the consequences of bad choices, you have to know them which means someone known to you must have suffered the consequences of making them. Maybe, but you can also ask what the world would look like if every child would get themselves killed with bad choices.

I can understand the concept that galaxies would be expanding away from each other at greater than the speed of light, and would therefore be invisible to each other. What I don't get is how distance could ever be growing everywhere in the universe at below the speed of light? Wouldn't that just mean that everything that's visible is all there is and there's nothing beyond the hubble horizon? Technically, it can never be known whether there is or ever has been anything beyond that horizon anyway, right? I suppose if distant galaxies vanish in redshift, you could know that they didn't actually annihilate, but when would inflation ever have been below C for everything? I.e. when would distance have been expanding below the speed of light?

I don't understand your reasoning process. Without an example of how an object can pass through a fluid without collisions among the particles of the fluid occurring, then I don't see how there can be no inertial resistance to displacement and therefore friction. I think if there was a concrete scenario that defied this logic, I could understand it but I just can't think of one. I think friction results from dissipation of a pressure concentration (wave) through the fluid, as Swansont implied talking about dissipative force. Well, maybe that's not exactly right - more like friction occurs in the building up of the pressure-concentration before it dissipates as a wave. If the displaced medium was perfectly inelastic, I would think it would displace without waves, e.g. like pushing on a solid object where force-transfer between all the particles of the object somehow occurs without any movement of the particles relative to each other. But because the force of motion isn't immediately resisted uniformly by all particles, pressure has to build up among the ones most immediately affected by a push. I guess then as the motion dissipates throughout the substance, the amount of force received and resisted by the inertia of subsequent particles decreases, like a ripple in smooth water fading as it dissipates. Without some inertia resisting the force of the wave/ripple, though, there would be no ripple, correct, because the raised water of the ripple has to be held up from the front by some force? This sort of goes back to the aether issue, though that wasn't my intention, because I don't see how a frictionless fluid could be a medium for waves since there would be no inertia to hold the wave energy from immediately dissipating.