mistermack

It wouldn't be that simple, even on the Moon. It doesn't take too much energy to take off from the Moon, but a space station would have to be in Moon orbit, so you would have to accelerate to get on, and then decelerate on the return trip. Mars would be a major undertaking, landing and taking off, involving a great amount of energy. Not something you could afford to do on a daily basis. But Mars does have a couple of small moons that would be very interesting from a materials point of view.

I can't work out the maths. There are more billions of chickens and pigs and cattle than people. Were they all bad people or do some animals have souls and others don't? I suppose the Hindu gods move in mysterious ways too.

If my mother is now a sow, acting as a piglet producer in a bacon factory, I might be a cannibal of my own siblings. It's enough to make you go veggie.

If I have no memory or physical features of the creature that I am supposed to have been reborn from, then that person or creature was simply something else. In a way, I, at the age of five, was someone else entirely. The link to me, apart from the genes, is very tenuous. Was Adolf Hitler the same person as the one he became, as a newborn bably? We are a slightly different person every day. To claim that you had a previous life, you have to define what you are, and that is very changeable. The notion of reincarnation can't hold up, without some kind of immortal soul, and as far as I'm concerned, if I have a soul, lurking around and saying nothing, it's not what I consider to be me. If it exists, it's some kind of alien, and definitely not me.

But if that were the case, we would detect that effect now. Just because we have 3 dimensions, that doesn't make us blind to 2D effects, if they exist. We might not be able to concieve of 4D phenomena, but that doesn't mean that a 4D creature would be unable to detect and measure 3D things. Just as volume can't exist in 2D, I don't think gravity can exist either.

So the Gestapo officer asks you "We're looking for Anne Franke. Do you know where she is?" Do you reply, "sorry, no, I don't" or "yes, she's in that house there, up in the loft" !! Wasn't there a comedy film where someone lost the ability to tell a lie?

I know this is going to sound a bit thick, but what the hell. How can you have gravitational potential energy greater than zero, with only two spatial dimensions? If you take any 3d object, and reduce one of it's dimensions to zero, then you get zero mass. So how can you have gravity, without mass?

Islam is by far the fastest growing religion, both in the UK and the world. A lot of the growth in the UK is down to Mulims having a much higher birth rate than the UK average, but it's also because their indoctrination of children is much more intense than, say, the Church of England. And another factor is that Muslims tend to all live in the same area, so their kids are generally mixing with other Muslims at home and at school. Immigration is also still playing a part. I don't have any figures, but I'm pretty certain that Muslims make up the majority of immigrants to this country, both legal and illegal. That's just the impression you get from tv interviews, but I'd be amazed if it was otherwise. Judaism is still growing, I think, mainly on the orthodox side, as they tend to have big families, and more intensive indoctrination of children. I think that religions that are most intense are generally going to get more converts than the laid back ones too. The Church of England is pretty relaxed and non-fundamentalist these days, and is leaking members like a sieve. People who convert to a religion tend to go to the more intense ones. And they have the lowest number of drop-outs.

Historically, that's all true, I'm just commenting on what's driving it in a modern fairly free society, like the one I live in. The religions with strong growth are those that heavily indoctrinate their kids, and/or send them to faith schools.

I'm not a vegan, but I like the fact that they are there. In the same way that I'm not an astronaut, but I like that people have been to the Moon. The existence of vegans will develop the non-meat food industry, and eventually, it will reach a point where it's edible and maybe even pleasant. I'm happy to give it a go, so long as it's nice, and is just as complete a diet. The quality of vegan food that I've tried up to now has been a bit varied. Some is sadly tasteless and unsatisfying, but some of it has been surprisingly good. The more people go for it, the better it will get. But I'm too lazy to do the research myself, so I'm happy to wait till other people have done all the work.

I think you have a fundamental misundestanding of what makes a religion "win". The appeal of the message is only a small part of it. The main factor in the growth of a religion is the level of indoctrination of children. That, and the level of isolation of the children from those of other faiths.

Exactly. Your opinion is your own. One person out of seven billion. That's all it's worth. The only way you can make it worth any more, is through persuasion. I think you're doing a great job.

Update to previous post : They have updated the wikipedia page for the JET taurus, and the value of Q for that run was 0.33, which is rather unspectacular, considering that it was 0.67 when they set their previous record. It's not surprising, if it had been more, they would have published it straight away. They were obviously aiming at something else with the latest run. Mainly bumping up the record for fusion energy, which they achieved, but it's still disappointing to the likes of me. It would be surprising to make spectacular gains with the same machine. The main thing they should be aiming at, is to learn what is best to put in the next design, and what to avoid. The JET tokamak has made a major contribution to progress, not just by setting records, but by the invention and development of the plama diverter which was a big step in the stability of plasmas. The major conditions for fusion are a combination of density, temperature, and plasma time. They all involve energy input, so more time costs more energy, as does higher temperatures, and pressures. If you raise one of the parameters, you can afford a lower value for the others. It's the value of the combined parameters that gives the level of fusion. Seperately, plasmas have been run with much higher temperatures than necessary. And density and time of plasmas have been run higher than needed. It's keeping a stable plasma, while all three are raised that is the objective. Pressure is the combination of temperature and density. The rate of fusion increases with the square of pressure, not linearly. Big designs like ITER were thought to be the only way to raise the plasma pressure without instability, but the latest advances hold the promise of other ways of raising pressure. The spherical tokamak design, and the high-temperature superconductors being developed, promise to make big forward steps in raising stable plasma pressures. On the plasma pressure subject, the record is held now at the Alcator C-Mod tokamak at MIT, it set a record of 1.77 atmospheres in 2005, then last year they got 2.05, which doesn't sound a lot, but it's the square that counts, so it's comparing 3.13 to 4.2. https://news.mit.edu/2016/alcator-c-mod-tokamak-nuclear-fusion-world-record-1014 The ITER is expected to reach 2.6 atmospheres in 2032, the square of which is about 6.8, and consequently to achieve a Q of 10. With that sort of performance, it would be well into the region of generating net electrical power, once the systems were proved and improved. That would be for the next version, the DEMO class. With such a large Q, the heat output is more than enough to be able to reduce the input electrical power, IF the heat can be kept long enough in the fuel, rather than rapidly escaping to the walls. So once you are into that kind of value of Q, you are really fine-tuning and perfecting, rather than chasing unknown performance levels. The real breakthrough comes when the fusion heat can be made to stay around long enough, that you can start reducing the input power, and still maintain the burning plasma. Like lighting a log fire with a blow torch. Once you get to a point where you can take the blow-torch away, you have a self-sustaining fire, and just need to keep adding fuel. Being able to reduce the input power automatically raises the Q value still further, so there is a sort of critical point, where the Q value naturally takes off, and the output rises, and the inputs fall. Hopefully, the ITER will take fusion all the way into that zone.

This is getting silly. The real cause of death is being born. Nothing to do with covid. Everybody knows that. Anyway, the figures are probably a good approximation. There must be people who died without getting tested, who were given the final push by covid. They would balance out any that died of something else, who got included in the figures. It's not a perfect world, the figures are the best we have.

I think we are saying the same thing, don't we?😊

In 2009, a retired policeman called Geraint Woolford was admitted to Abergale Hospital in north Wales and ended up next to another retired policeman called Geraint Woolford. The men weren’t related, had never met and were the only two people in the UK called Geraint Woolford. Must be fine tuned.

It doesn't have to be. There are 700 quintillion planets in the Universe, (whatever that means), so our planet could be like a grain of sand in this Universe. Another way of looking at the fine tuning argument, is to look at the odds against your own existence. A healthy man constantly produces 1500 brand new sperm in his testicles PER SECOND !!!!! and when he ejaculates, he lets fly with 250,000,000 of the little buggers. Only one of the 250 million would produce you. Any of the others would have produced someone quite different. And that's just PART of the odds against your existence. So the slightest difference in the conditions of your conception could have meant that someone quite different to you would have been born. Then there's the odds against your parents ever meeting, or their parents meeting, or their parents meeting, or deciding that they liked each other, or feeling like sex on that specific occasion. The odds against me getting born must be more than 700 quintillion to one against, yet here I am. Therefore, all of the conditions must have been fine-tuned to produce me !!

Even the phrase "fine tuned" is rubbish, because it contains in it an unwarranted assumption. It implies that there is a tuner, which is circular reasoning right from the start. Finely balanced might be fairer, but even that implies a situation that could have been other than it is, which is not established at all. Imagine a grain of sand in the Sahara Desert. On it, there is a population of intelligent bacteria. They can only live under the conditions that exist at this moment in time. Any puff of wind could move the grain to a spot where they couldn't exist. Using the same logic, the Sahara must have been finely tuned, to enable them to exist. It's rubbish for them, and it's rubbish for us. I don't like the word constants. It really means relationships. If the various RELATIONSHIPS between forms of matter and energy in space and time had been any different, we would not exist. But that wouldn't matter in the slightest. The universe would be a bit different, that's all. There's no eveidence that life as we know it is in any way important.

They need Tony Blair as Peace Envoy.

I did, but you didn't follow it. Firstly, your own logic is sadly lacking. I'm not aware of any children working in the UK national health service. If you know different, I await your link. Secondly, even if there are long term effects from the vaccinations, you would have to set them against the KNOWN long term effects of long covid, to establish whether it's safer to be vaccinated or not. There is a wealth of evidence for the adverse effects of long covid. Maybe you think people are making it up? And then of course, there's death from covid, which can also have long-term effects. Where is your evidence that these unknown long-term effects of vaccination can possibly match and exceed the real and proven harm that covid can dish out?

Governments are proceeding cautiously, because there is more than one approach that's being pursued. There is the danger that if you put your money in too early, you will be committed, when somebody else makes a major progress leap that leaves you with a redundant project on your hands that's never going to beat it's rival. On top of that is the uncertainty of the fuel prices, which can dive as well as rise. Then there's the renewable industries, that can also make major breakthroughs that affect the viability of nuclear of any sort. And tightly bound to that is the energy storage field. If somebody makes a major breakthrough there, it will massively affect the attraction of nuclear of all types, as it would take away the trump card of technologies that can generate electricity when the sun doesn't shine, and the wind doesn't blow. That's the real reason that progress is slow. It's down to money, and financial uncertainty. Nobody wants to go in too deep, and end up holding a damp squib. If they take it slowly, they can keep an eye on the competition. Hence the vaccine comparison. If it became really urgent, they could easily gear it up. Not necessarily the ITER project, but the ones that follow on, in the thirties. What I found a bit disappointing about the JET announcement was the lack of techincal detail. They said that they'd doubled the record for the output, but that's really just a reflection of how they kept the plasma steady for five seconds. I'd be more interested in the ratio of power in to power out, and whether there was any improvement in that. This test involved a tritium/deuterium ideal mix, so the value of Q that they achieved would have been of interest, but I haven't seen any reference to it.

I'm truly filled with wonder at the sheer scale of it. A few arabs sat round a fire, and someone said "I wonder where it all came from" and they started making up stories. And one of those very stories is still being taught to millions of innocent children as fact, five thousand years later. I wonder what we could inflict on the kids of 7022, if we started now?

They used to say that about vaccines.

I would stop all money spent on climate research, and spend it on fusion. It must be a win/win. If climate change is a real threat, then your money spent on fusion might make a difference. Instead of modelling the problem, your money might actually solve the problem. If climate change didn't turn out to be as bad as you thought, your money isn't wasted, it's still well-spent on cheap and limitless energy. After all, what more, of any practical use, is there to be learned about GW? C02 is bad. Methane is bad. We know that now.

No, you're the cop-out kid. All of this " I don't know till it happens " and "it's wrong but I might do it" is just because you're incapable of giving a straight answer. What if it really happened? Would you be arguing "I was right to do wrong" ?