Moontanman

That's what I would've expected. This burner is labelled as designed for LPG though, and from all the cylinders I inspected at the hardware store all were are at 3.3MPa, seemed like it's a standard. I'll go check out another store on Monday, they better have something suitable...

 

Btw, this is the burner I have; http://cgi.ebay.com.au/LH0050-LPG-Bunsen-Burner-Slide-Collar-LPG-NEW_W0QQitemZ330422422011QQcmdZViewItemQQptZAU_Business_Industrial_Medical_Scientific_Equipment2?hash=item4ceeb609fb#ht_500wt_1182

Seriously, it needs a regulator, it is not designed to use full pressure from the cylinder, any gas grill regulator should work. Find an old gas grill and take the regulator from it, i see them in the trash all the time.

Yeah, don't press the ATR button

I would have liked for him to answer his views on the age of the Earth and if he believes it is only a few thousand years old. While him answering a few questions was nice, if he really wanted to be fair he should come here for open debate, he wouldn't because he knows both his assertions and his methods of asserting them would fail the test of reality.

He can easily assert his reality in a simple answering so many questions exercise as he has done here but his disingenuous nature was clear and his reasons for not being willing to openly debate his assertions is clear from his own answers to these questions.

I think snakes are miracles, I mean really, how do they move? It looks like a miracle to me!

"unreasoning ideologies that dehumanize anyone who disagrees", sounds like religion..

Sadly religion is often used for that but if you think back so has economic systems, race, and even where you are from.

So while religion is used for that it does not have a strangle hold on mans inhumanity to man for sure.

Hey, John Brown was a relative of mine! Hero in some circles, yes I think we can celebrate those soldiers, the fought for what they believed in it's easy to stand back so far in the future and say how wrong they were but they had no way of really understanding what the future held.

Huh, never knew that. How do dams produce greenhouse gases?

 

Also, while I understand how big dam projects like the three gorges one in China (extinction of Chinese paddlefish?) will majorly screw up the surrounding ecosystems, smaller dams (I live downstream from one) don't seem to have that much of an impact.

Any damn has an impact, I have a friend who lives in the mountains, he put a dam across a small creek that only flow a few months out of the year. He wanted a small pond but above the dam quickly filled up with sediment but it prevented small fishes called chubs from coming up stream to spawn, the ecology above the dam has changed drastically. with out the annul up stream spawning the population of various organisms changed.

Worms and crustaceans now dominate water that used to be filled with small fishes but most importantly the water is now filled with the larvae of biting insects and crayfish that crawl out on land at night and eat the new shoots of plants, even in his garden.

The new large population of crayfish has attracted raccoons and possums that also eat his chickens and destroy his property in other ways. He is going to have to to hire a dozer to come in and dig out his small dam to bring things back into balance.

This is an extreme example that amazed even me but all changes have consequences, some are more obvious than others. But even small streams can be important for large organisms to spawn and if they are denied this they die out in that particular watershed.

many runs of salmon have been destroyed by small dams even fish like sturgeon can be effected by a small dam.

Dams cause methane release by allowing vegetation to rot in anoxic conditions. The links i provided explain this in detail.

BTW, yes, the three gorges dam has pretty much clinched the extinction of the Chinese paddlefish by preventing them from have access to the entire river, stopping them from spawning in the head waters or traveling to the feeding grounds of the lower river. The Chinese paddle fish is an extremely good food fish and was historically presented to the emperor as tribute. But thanks to the three gorges dam it is gone forever, the largest freshwater fish on the planet, 23 feet of piscavore, gone, forever. Several other fish an alligator and a dolphin are also endangered by this one damn.

This sort of thing has or is happening all over the world, here in North America we have destroyed many runs of fish and endangered many others by even small dams, out own sturgeon and paddle fish are also endangered by these dams.

The environs around dams is also negatively impacted by dams, the links I provided explain it much better than I can.

I can assume from your first paragraph, Mr. Skeptic, that glacial cores are hardly possible, nigh impossible.

 

As would be a hollow core for any object large enough to be a sphere under it's own gravity.

 

I am confused how Mars would lose the atmosphere. I know that if it doesnt have enough gravity to kep something down, that something will fly away, but why would it take millions of years?

 

The atmosphere would not suddenly fly off into space, Gasses move at certain speeds at certain temps. If gravity is low enough the speeds can exceed the escape velocity but not all at once. Also solar winds slowly strip away atmospheric gasses, the lower the gravity the faster they strip away.

 

If you could instantly give the moon an Earth like atmosphere it would take a long time to escape. Given enough time even the atmosphere of the Earth strips away, much slower than Mars because the Earth has a protective magnetic field but strip away it will many billions of years from now.

 

Is the whole oxygen-filled dome idea possible? Maybe if we used the carbon source from the warmed up CO2 to grow plants for creating oxygen for the domes? Would that be possible, or would we need to many plants?

 

Yes it is possible, I'm not sure how long it will take to fill a dome up with oxygen from plants but there are chemical processes that can be used as well in a small space like a dome.

First, wrong movie, you are thinking of Total Recall. Second i don't think they asserted the entire planet was hollow but I would question just how big the hollow would be, probably no where big enough to cause the instability of the entire planet but since as far as I know there is no such reaction or substance as portrayed in the movie it is just science fiction after all.

But to be precise , no a Mars sized planet with an ice core is unlikely if not impossible but a Mars sized and massed planet with a rocky crust and an ice core is impossible.

No a hollow planet of Mars size and mass would not be stable.

If you actually had a galcial core that went through sublimation and turned into gas , would it actually create an atmosphere for the now hollow planet? (I really think its unlikely, but maybe plausible?)

Lots of depends upons here but I'll say no, the planet would not be stable and any atmosphere created would be made up of what ever the ice was made of.

Hm, yeah, coal burning plants are really that much better

 

As far as I know the amount of greenhouse gases produced from hydro dams is negligible, and after the initial filling of the resevoir there really isn't much to complain about from the environmental point of view.

Well ercdndrs you would be mistaken, dam methane emissions is the largest source of human generated methane gas and a huge amount of CO2. Dams disrupt the ecosystem and negatively impact a great many fish species, some of them commercially valuable but all valuable in their contribution to the diversity of the ecosystem.

http://www.internationalrivers.org/en/node/383

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_impacts_of_dams

Many very large fish are impacted to the point of extinction, the Chinese paddlefish are now gone, the largest freshwater fish the world, many sturgeon species are going extinct due largely to dams, herring, shad, trout, salmon, the list of negatively impacted species is very long.

http://www.internationalrivers.org/en/node/1545

http://www.mtholyoke.edu/~lpohara/Pol%20116/enviro.html

Earthquakes can be triggered by dams.

http://www.internationalrivers.org/en/node/3845

:doh:

I agree, still a person and still the same person and i would do it.

Ok yodaP do something GOD like, rearrange all the planets so we have more than one habital planet in the solar system, cool down Venus and make it Earth like, do something dude!

Hydroelectric, such as dams, already use gravity as an energy source; water falling to lower potential. Along that theme, if we could trap rain water at elevation (mountains), we could use this solar induced gravitational energy as a renewable energy supply.

 

.

Hydroelectric has lots of environmental problems, from release of greenhouse gasses to environmental disruption. Most environmentalists are looking to decrease our use of hydroelectric from damns.

I have heard this commented on before, that we do not have much uranium left in the world. This topic may already have a thread. I tried searching for it to no avail, so I apologize in advance if it does. Anyway could someone elaborate on this?

As long as your uranium doesn't have to come from the ground as ore there is plenty left. Future civilizations will mine our old nuclear waste depositories for new fuel. I think we should make this as easy as possible and store the stuff in places where it can be removed easily.

In Dave's universe, supercomputers are quite common. He put it together himself, in his parents' basement.

So in Dave's universe gods are quite common? So is being able to create something God like behavior? Who created the computer technology in the first place? Who created Dave's universe?

I think the idea of a benevolent God or at least mono theistic type god is quite modern. At one time God was plural, Gods, and many of them were quite evil or mischievous and even destroyers instead of creators.

First for Dave to be a God he would have to be supernatural but to us mere computer programs he would indeed be supernatural so yes Dave is a God. he has total control over everything can resurrect the dead (old programs) change reality to suit his whims and would appear to be both capable of time travel changing both the future and past and super luminal

Then again, what are the people who make his computer?

Merged post follows:

This is probably the first question that runs through my mind when talking about God(ignosticism ftw). What is a god? Is a sufficiently powerful man a god(like Pharaohs)? If the alien-god hypothesis is true, are the extraterrestrials really gods?

 

What are the qualifying characteristics of a god?

 

 

 

 

 

I hereby present my candidacy for godhood.

Do something supernatural and you have my vote.

Yeah, toasty, you are correct one bomb will kill us all, no way to shield any one or anything, huge sheets of lead and concrete (or maybe 36 inches of soil)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallout_shelter

Shielding

A basic fallout shelter consists of shields that reduce gamma ray exposure by a factor of 1000. The required shielding can be accomplished with 10 times the amount of any quantity of material capable of cutting gamma ray effects in half. Shields that reduce gamma ray intensity by 50% (1/2) include 1 cm (0.4 inch) of lead, 6 cm (2.4 inches) of concrete, 9 cm (3.6 inches) of packed dirt or 150 m (500 ft) of air. When multiple thicknesses are built, the shielding multiplies. Thus, a practical fallout shield is ten halving-thicknesses of packed dirt, reducing gamma rays by 1024 times (210).

 

Usually, an expedient purpose-built fallout shelter is a trench, with a strong roof buried by ~1 m (3 ft) of dirt. The two ends of the trench have ramps or entrances at right angles to the trench, so that gamma rays cannot enter (they can travel only in straight lines). To make the overburden waterproof (in case of rain), a plastic sheet should be buried a few inches below the surface and held down with rocks or bricks.

Or maybe we are already dead, we detonated many nukes in the atmosphere before the nuclear test ban treaty.

Toasty, yes nukes are bad, no they should not be used but there is a difference between knowing the danger and running around stepping and fetching like your ass is on fire and your head is catching.

Nukes are defined as weapons of mass destruction, they are all dangerous and under the correct conditions and numbers they could all pretty much end civilization as we know it. If you want to learn about the effects of nuclear weapons i suggest you do some research instead of listening to all the anti nuke crazies out there.

Would a nuclear strike be bad for everyone? Yes, no doubt but even a limited war between small powers would not kill us all, it would be bad, no doubt the effects would hurt us all. But it would not be world ending, I spent all of my growing up years in horrible dread of nuclear war, it took me many years to find out the old wives tales of nukes and radiation have real world connections but that most of them are gross exaggerations of what would really happen.

I think it's great the the US has decided not use nukes to automatically attack if we are attacked by WMD's. But your constant fear mongering of how world ending the use of any nuclear weapons would be is simply not true.

Merged post follows:

Toasty, i owe you an apology, this thread has gone so far off topic I'm not sure what it was we were supposed to be discussing. This thread is a huge pile of ifs, maybes, coulda, woulda and shoulda's. I find myself defending the indefensible, excusing the inexcusable. Which is more powerful among the WMD's is like deciding if being eaten alive by a shark or a killer whale is worse. personally i don't want to die either way.

After exorcising my own demons i have to say that using a nuke, even in defense should not be an option. Nukes are terror weapons, the idea of nuclear power drives demons in people we never even know we have. But Nukes are not supernatural, the do have limits but the limits are quite large.

Given the technology IMHO nerve gas is probably the biggest threat to the human race, Nukes would have to be second but for low tech scenarios bio-weapons have to be the stuff of nightmares than can come true.

If I was in power and knew of a hardened bio-weapon facility that was being used offensively a ground penetrating type of bunker buster bomb might be justifiable if time was a factor but in all but the most extreme scenarios conventional weapons would be the only way to go.

Nukes can be useful as MAD weapons but to actually use one is almost completely unthinkable. They are threats, as was already said in this thread like hand-grenades in an enclosed space. But bio-weapons are equally ridiculous as weapons as are chemical weapons, only the insane would use such weapons or the desperate and often the two are difficult to see a difference in.

lets hope that the trends of the last couple of decades continue and that our children or their children do not have to have this discussion due to the idea of unreasonable people with ideologies than can turn the other side into a threat that has to be eliminated no matter what the risk.

Lets hope that the numbers of all weapons of mass destruction continue to go down and eventually get to zero. IMHO the real weapon of mass destruction is unreasoning ideologies that that dehumanize anyone who disagrees and allows the slaughter of other humans simply because God or they are of a different social system or economic system says they can be killed.

The true weapons of mass destruction are these dehumanizing ideologies and the people who follow them.

100 20 kiloton bombs is equal to 2 megatons. There is some of the math for you.

 

 

One 2 megaton device will not produce the same results as 100 20 kiloton weapons spread out over a large area, do that math. We have detonated a 15 megaton device in the atmosphere already that is the equivalent of 750 20 kiloton bombs, the world didn't end.

 

 

Could you please tell me what defenses we have against radiation other than giant slabs of lead. Our capabilities of protecting ourselves against airborne pathogens are cheaper and more effective than our capabilities of protecting against radiation and nuclear blasts. Last I checked Hepa Filters and alcohol do pretty well with germs and they are much cheaper than the bunker you are describing above.

 

we don't need large slabs of lead, not do we need to stay inside for years.

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_fallout

 

Fallout radiation decays exponentially relatively quickly with time. Most areas become fairly safe for travel and decontamination after three to five weeks.

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallout_shelter

 

A basic fallout shelter consists of shields that reduce gamma ray exposure by a factor of 1000. The required shielding can be accomplished with 10 times the amount of any quantity of material capable of cutting gamma ray effects in half. Shields that reduce gamma ray intensity by 50% (1/2) include 1 cm (0.4 inch) of lead, 6 cm (2.4 inches) of concrete, 9 cm (3.6 inches) of packed dirt or 150 m (500 ft) of air. When multiple thicknesses are built, the shielding multiplies. Thus, a practical fallout shield is ten halving-thicknesses of packed dirt, reducing gamma rays by 1024 times (210).

 

Usually, an expedient purpose-built fallout shelter is a trench, with a strong roof buried by ~1 m (3 ft) of dirt. The two ends of the trench have ramps or entrances at right angles to the trench, so that gamma rays cannot enter (they can travel only in straight lines). To make the overburden waterproof (in case of rain), a plastic sheet should be buried a few inches below the surface and held down with rocks or bricks.

 

Fallout can be defended against, it does not kill everyone and it does not mean the end of everyone. a nuclear strike against one target or even several would not mean the end of the world. Fallout is limited, it decays, it does not cover everything everywhere with deadly level of radiation. You assertion about one 2 megaton explosion being equal to 100 20 megaton explosions is very misleading and is nothing but fear mongering!

I tried, once, to stay on one of those liquid diets with just the right amount of calories, vitamins and fiber to keep me healthy, it came in lots of really great flavors and tasted really good, I gagged at the sight of it with in two weeks.

I don't think any reasonable persons definition of several would suffice to kill everyone on the planet.

That several nuclear weapons could kill everyone on earth (everyone being humans)

Define several, 4, 8, 25, 100?

No, that's not what you were discussing. As a reminder, here's what you were discussing:

Your point would be?

As was established earlier, the current stockpile of nuclear weapons does have sufficient potential to kill all humans on earth. This is because humans and all other animals evolved in a environment where they were constantly attacked by disease, however we did not evolve in a fallout-ridden high radiation environment like one that would exist after a massive nuclear catastrophe.

 

The detonation of the current nuclear stockpile of ~10,000 nukes, geographically distributed around the world, would create a fallout cloud capable of killing every human on earth.

And why pray tell would anyone want to do that? I thought we were discussing a retaliatory strike against one nation for using non nuclear WMD's against that country, exactly what scenario would result in the detonation of every nuclear weapon on the earth geographically distributed all over the Earth?

On the other hand a bio weapon could indeed spread over amuch larger area than one nuke (or even several) ever could and cause far more deaths than one nuke (or even several) ever could.

That doesn't change the fact that nuclear weapons produce fallout and fallout is deadly.

 

I will agree with that

 

So can fallout

 

Yes but the fallout from a single or even several nuclear detonations is limited, Radiation does not become ever more dangerous, it becomes less dangerous over time.

 

 

 

Diseases can be contained. Fallout cannot.

 

 

No, diseases cannot be contained, once released they can spread and grow, fallout is limited and becomes less dangerous over time, not more dangerous.

 

That's generally not how biology works. You'd be hard pressed to find any sort of biological agent, even in lab conditions, that can kill 100% of a large population of organisms. Now, consider a modern population of humans with state-of-the-art immunology and organizations dedicated to fighting outbreaks of disease.

 

I will grant you this, even rabies is not absolutely 100% deadly.

 

Horrible diseases exist. Ebola exists. If someone weaponized ebola it would be bad. However, weaponizing a disease to the point it can exterminate all humans on earth? I don't buy it whatsoever.

 

Agreed and neither can one or even several nuclear weapons eliminate everyone on the earth. Both are very bad, both are very scary, it is conceivable that the release of one bio-weapon over one populated are could spread and kill a huge percentage of the human race. The release of one nuclear weapon would be limited in both the number of deaths and the spread of radiation. It could not eliminate even every one in a large city much less the entire human race.

 

Okay' date=' well it seems you refuse to accept the facts that I cited above. The Tsar bomba was actually 50 megatons, not sixty, and it was originally designed to yield 100 megatons, the test bomb was downgraded.

 

The Tsar Bomba was also not a very old inefficient weapon. It is the most powerful piece of weaponry ever designed and it operates the same exact way that modern nuclear bombs do.

 

Also again you seem to not understand, the point of a nuclear bomb is to create radiation, that is how the blast is created. As I stated above 45% of the blast is caused by thermal radiation. And again, the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were about 20 kilotons. Modern Nuclear weapons are in the range of several hundred kilotons to megatons. Check out the following chart,

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_weapon_yield[/quote']

 

What facts did you cite toasty? the fact of 20 to 100 megaton bombs being a what nuclear weapons are all about ? Why do you ignore my fact that few if any current bombs in use are more than .5 megatons, huge multimegaton bombs are out dated and no longer in use.

 

Tsar bomba was an old out dated very ineffecient bomb, no one makes boms like it anymore, it was huge in size, not just explosive potiential, (sorry i missed it by 10 megatons), the bomber that dropped it was also huge and had to be because the bomb weighied several tons.

 

Modern nuclear weapons are not multimgaton weapons, they are small, easily deployable, very accurate and very deadly. just because huge multimegaton weapons are possible is not a reason to assume that is what is in use. Several small nukes are far more distructive than one or two huge ones.

 

I'll say it again, the has never been a 100 megaton bomb deployed by anyone, the russians tried and it was too big to be usable, almost too big to be carried by a bomber. There is no reason to use huge multimegaton weapons, the smaller ones are quite deadly enough.

 

If you had read your own chart you would have found that the US does not feild a nuclear bomb bigger than 1.2 megatons. Missle war heads are smaller by more than half

 

Largest US weapon ever fielded, retired in 1957.

EC17/Mk-17, the EC24/Mk-24, and the B41 (Mk-41) various Most powerful US weapons ever: 25 megatonnes of TNT (100 PJ); the Mk-17 was also the largest by size and mass: about 20 short tons (18,000 kg); the Mk-41 had a mass of 4800 kg; gravity bombs carried by B-36 bomber (retired by 1957).

 

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W87 (300 kilotons)

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W88 (475 kilotons)

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B83_nuclear_bomb (1.2 megatons

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B53_nuclear_bomb (9 megatons, largest bomb currently available but not in active service)

 

so where are all the factual 20 to 100 megatonnweapons just waitign to be dropped all over the eaerth? Do the russians have them, they seem to be as serious as the US about small reliealbe weapons instead fo huge city bustetrs of the cold war, do the french have them? who has them as you claim to be facts?

 

Nulcear weapons are desinged to use blast and heat to destroy targets, fallout and or radioactuive poisoning of the planet is not the idea behind modern nuclear weapons.

 

I don't know why this discussion has gone into how powerful nukes really are but a limited strijke against one city is not going to end the world or kill 95% of the planets population. Bio weapons can indeed kill a major number of people not targeted by them. Bio-weapons get out of control they spread, reproduce, nuclear weapons do not reproduce and spread like biological organisms do.

I applaud Obama for saying nukes will not be used against non nuclear states. I also think bio weapons are more dangerous than nukes.