Leaderboard

I can't say I had ever come across them, until a few years ago on the internet. Anyway, it's nice to know one can always annoy them by asking if it is true that the Flat Earth Society has members all around the globe. This seems to be a meme they can't kill off.

A good start in that education, and obviously sound reasoning, would be to take the medical advice.

Zeno's paradox goes away when time is considered.

Taking the vaccine is always safer than contracting the virus. Also, if you've already had covid, you'd still want the vaccine and that would make you even more protected. Why is this even a question? Get vaccinated. Run, don't walk to do so.

I just recently saw a video where someone examined an "experiment" done by FE proponents, Dealing with looking across a large body of water at a building. They worked out how much of the building "should" be hidden by the curve, and then pointed out that more of the building was seen than predicted by there being curvature. The examiner pointed out two things: 1. They failed to take into account refraction( as mentioned in earlier posts). 2. The ground floor of the building was not itself at water level, but several yards above it. Once these were taken into account, the amount of building they saw matched the predicted curvature. But the other more interesting thing he pointed out was that, In their own video, some of the building was hidden below the horizon. With a flat Earth, all the building should have been visible. They never even address this and sweep it under the rug. This is typical of the type of intellectual dishonesty they indulge in. Some of the other stuff I've seen makes me me wonder if they just competing to be the poster child for the Dunning-Kruger effect.

I've been looking for a reason to put people at the bottom of the ocean and there aren't a lot of practical reasons. ROVs can do most or all of the work. But I think I finally found one reason that makes sense. Hydrogen is the best rocket fuel but not not long journeys because the tiny atom leaks from the tanks. However metallic Hydrogen will not have this problem. Metallic Hydrogen also seems to have a boost in efficiency by 4x but I don't understand how. However the diamond anvils needed to press Hydrogen into metal are at their limit, right at the limit apparently. So what if we put the diamond anvils at the bottom of the ocean? That will add some 1000atm which may be small in the terms of total pressure needed but may be enough to make the diamond anvil capable of tolerating the job? If so, then such a highly accurate job with sensitive equipment most certainly would need human presence to maintain and operate at such depths? Especially given the high lag times to go to the surface and dive that deep if equipment needs replacement. Inspired by this article. https://www.insidescience.org/news/these-instruments-can-create-pressure-thousands-times-higher-bottom-ocean

It's possible I'm missing something obvious here, but Archimedes Principle is about buoyancy yet you seem to be explaining Zeno's Paradox

No. And yes. They are very contingent concepts. As... perhaps most other concepts? "Exist" is not a good verb for describing reality, in the last analysis: Does the upper part of an electron exist? Does that look in my sweetheart's eyes exist? Does a name that hasn't been pronounced exist? Virtual particles are effectual, I would say. They don't exist, but they appear in calculations. If you measure their presence, then they "exist", but they no longer are virtual. That's the kind of circle we're in. And I don't know whether that's a satisfactory explanation, but that like the best I can do.

Agree with @studiot that a piece of information seems to be missing from the problem, in the way you describe it. You don't say over what period of time the deceleration occurs. Without that, you can't know if the deceleration was gradual, due to a small force applied for a long period of time, or sudden, due to a large force applied over a short period.

Yes Yes How ? I think you need to know the time it takes for this to happen or the distance over which it travels during this time.

The first time I heard someone arguing for a FE, it was a religious argument that went beyond eccentric. From everything I've seen lately, the religious perspective has been spread by the popularity of YouTube. Like creationists before them, the FE proponents add in a slurry of misunderstood science and flat out lies to fool those who know no better.

I wasn't sure venomologist was even a valid word. (Apparently it is.*) I think toxicologist is more reader-friendly. You can have his backstory one in which, having trained a a toxicologist, he narrows his field to focus on the production of anti-venoms. *I was curious as to how common the word was and found a mere 111 hits for venomologist on google.scholar. One of more of them might be of use to you.

But I expect that is not as big a graveyard as for those who thought something could be done but it turned out it couldn't. Seriously, these kinds of arguments around having the right attitude don't answer the fundamental problems. Take it for granted that there will be visionaries and risk takers and that they will be admired for it. And some will get it right and change the course of human history and all but the spectacular failures will be forgotten. But I'd like to hear something more substantive about how the risks and problems are to be dealt with than cliches and slogans. It will 100 years of the world changing out of recognition. A century of coming up against hard resource limits and dealing with climate change impacts. Advances in technology and industry, yes, especially near term, but I think there are limits to those too. R&D and continuing advances depend on healthy, wealthy economies and no matter the appearance of continuing advancement as an inevitability I don't believe that it is. Communications looks like the exception that has developed a commercial foundation and can generate sufficient income to pay it's own way. But the entire industry outside of communications and observation is propped up one way or another by taxpayers and even those mostly are too, so it becomes a question of the goals of those space agencies and their governments and what they ought to be supporting. Mars is not a commercial opportunity but servicing government contracts to go to Mars can be, if governments can be induced to support it; the private money invested in developing SpaceX capabilities included capabilities that overlap with Mars ambitions, but always depended on getting rockets that can service governments to be a viable business. I think that expectation of taxpayer funding helping, if not outright paying them to go to Mars was always there. Even more so than most government contract servicing businesses, that may have significant commercial business outside contracting, these "private" space ventures depend on taxpayers. What looks clear to me is there is zero chance of private enterprise going to the moon or Mars without it being mostly if not fully government supported. And I do not think there will be any tangible benefits to Earth or even to advancing Grand Space Dreams in these Mars ambitions. An order of magnitude reduction in launch costs is an astonishing achievement and will benefit Near Earth (Earth oriented) space activities (which we can hope will not be weaponising near Earth space) but it is not nearly enough to make the moon or Mars viable for colonisation. Another one or two orders of magnitude might get us commercially viable asteroid mining, but still leave Mars colonies as unviable. Which colonies I believe will require a substantial Mars economy and population - with no way to pay their way during establishment and facting extinction level dangers on a constant basis. Optimising current rocket technologies to achieve another 10 fold cost reduction looks a lot harder than the first time around and there aren't any promising exotic new technologies that look capable of bringing space shipping costs down anywhere near shipping costs within the main economy. Earth based open ended R&D - that works just as well without a specific space colonisation focus is where that will come from, if that is actually possible. Ultimately understanding the depths of the challenges and limits of materials and technology can tell us if we are wasting efforts on unreachable goals - we will know that throwing yet more effort into it in "obstacles are opportunities" style won't work.

Because I'm writing a story, and I had the lead character develop anti-venoms, and I wanted to get the actual title correct. I listed him as a toxicologist

That's right. They looked vaguely familiar to me for some reason, that could be it.

I'm no expert, but they certainly look top line professional artistry to me.

Very nice work.

reminds me of all the cover illustrations of the paperback sci-fi novels I used to read. That might be a market for your art.