mistermack

The JET programme is not just British. JET stands for Joint European Torus. It's been a real success in taking the technology forward, but it's going to be redundant as the much bigger ITER starts firing up, and there's not much new that you can learn now from JET. It had a massive revamp about ten years ago, and that extended its life by a lot, and it's had more upgrades since. So ITER is why JET has to go, but the UK is putting money into STEP which is the development of smaller near-spherical Tokamaks to come after ITER. I think it's the major advances in super-conductivity which is directing the way future developments are heading. It's making different concepts feasible, that were previously out of reach.

Seventy years ago, there were butterflies everywhere. The downside was that their caterpillars would destroy my dad's garden. He would fight a running battle with them, dusting everything with Derris Dust, which was cheap and effective. (DDT) I don't think it did us any harm, eating food that came from plants that were white with DDT. All seven of us kids are still here. But I miss the butterflies, and the skylarks overhead.

Sleep apnea is a bit confusing, even if you've had experience of it. Obstructive sleep apnea is when the soft palate obstructs the airway during sleep, so they say. But my dad had it quite bad, and he would fall asleep during the day, after a meal. He would be breathing perfectly normally, quite loud, and then suddenly stop. There was no attempt to breathe that was obstructed, he would just stop breathing. I poked him awake many a time, fearing that he had kicked the bucket, and he would just give me a surprised look, and resume breathing. It didn't come across as obstructed breathing. He just stopped, and then nothing, and eventually he would start again, as if nothing had happened. No clearing of the throat or anything of that sort, it was just stop, . . . . . . . . and then start again. It seemed clear to me that the normal signal to breathe ( too much CO2 in the blood ) was stopping working, on an intermittent basis. Maybe, when you have an obstructive palate, the CO2 reflex gets over-used, and stops working at times.

Making fire is a fascinating topic, and it's not easy, even if you are shown how. It's much easier to prolong a fire, and to carry smouldering embers with you from place to place. That probably happened thousands or hundreds of thousands of years before anyone found out how to ignite a fire from cold.

The common cold would be a lot more deadly, if a blocked nose was a risk of death. My sister's had several operations for polyps in her nostrils. They keep growing back. It's not often she can breathe through her nose. Not a very intelligent design. I wonder if there's any racial difference in performance? Visually, the nose is a very obvious racial difference.

Well I'M worried about it, and that's why I'm trying to drink only beer. Someone's got to take responsibility.

That's assuming that the 1,000 Earths had no history. The OP says 1,000 Earths with cave men. So they would probably be already making fire.

Everyone has different DNA. Even brothers and sisters. Only identical twins have the same DNA as another human. Races have some tiny differences in DNA, of course they do. That's why an Asian looks different to an African. But the differences are very small, in DNA terms. For example, humans and chimpanzees have between 95 and 99% common dna, depending on how you measure it. So the difference between different human races are absolutely tiny, compared to that. One interesting thing is that most people have a tiny bit of DNA inherited from Neanderthal people. But people from Sub-Saharan Africa don't. So homo sapiens people interbred with Neanderthals, when they came into contact, as they spread out of Africa, but Africans who stayed put never encountered them.

Well, yes, of course it would. Fire happens naturally as a result of lightning, and in some instances of volcanic eruptions. Humans would naturally go looking for food after a wild fire, and like the results. We started using fire by finding ways to prolong naturally occurring fires, as camp fires and cooking fires, and it's very likely that most or all of the Earths would begin using fire by doing the same thing. Likely, but not certain, there might be the odd Earth where they didn't go down that path. There was until recently an isolated Island in the Indian Ocean, where people had no contact with the outside world, and it was observed by fishermen that there were long periods when no smoke could be seen, until the next thunder storms and lightning strikes. So they apparently have never found an artificial way of starting a fire. So even here on Earth, there is a lot of variation in progress levels.

The door of my microwave oven seems to do a pretty good job.

Humour is alive and kicking. ☺️

Peoples opinions don't come out of a vacuum. We are carefully fed our opinions, by a combination of government and mass media. Older people have been sucking it up for longer, so they are generally more on message.

Our home secretary is trying to silence support for Hamas, by decreeing that the police should take action, for any noticeable support for Hamas in " Jewish areas". Maybe she should define what a "Jewish area" is, and what special laws operate there. And of course, she then has to name the "Moslem areas" and tell us what can and can't be said, in case a moslem might take offence. The borders of these "areas" need to be accurately defined for legal purposes. I think we are going to have a lot more "moslem areas" than "Jewish areas" and probably not much in the way of "Christian areas" these days.

This is something that's nicely illustrated using Google Earth. It surprised me when I first did it. It really shows how smooth the surface of the Earth is, when you look from a distance. If you look carefully, you can see the yellow line that indicates the height of Mount Everest, coming out of New York. I used the measuring tool and scrolled about 29,000 feet.

My assumption of the term reflex is an action that doesn't need a conscious impulse. The simple version is the knee reflex, when you strike the tendon below the knee, and it causes your leg to kick. A "short circuit" operates without any brain input, causing the kick. Catching something you dropped is more of a grey area. You need the signals from your hand and eye to tell you that you've dropped it, and how and where to catch it, so it's quite a complicated action, compared to a simple reflex. I would say it's more a learned sequence of actions, embedded in your brain, that can be put into action without too much thought, but you still need your eyes and experience of falling objects to guide the catch. So I think that some of the action is just the firing of "saved software" which is a bit reflex-like, and some of it is guided by the brain in real time.

Any escalation in violence serves the long-term zionist program. Israel can continue to portray itself as a victim, and it's own violence as self-defence. I don't think there's any doubt that the government would have know this was coming, and privately welcomed it as just what the doctor ordered. They know how to stoke this stuff up, although you will never hear what they have been doing in the background, to light the fire.

In the last couple of weeks, I've seen reports on the news of spiralling insurance prices, for cover on electric cars. And the figures they were giving were formidable. People were complaining of their insurance renewal quotes for their electric vehicles being four and five times the previous price, some even more. The reports were giving the rationale that insurance companies were giving was the much higher repair costs involved in claims on electric vehicles, not a higher incidence of claims. Maybe the industry isn't ready for major repairs on electrics? If that's the case, the insurance price explosion could be a blip, or maybe it's going to be a permanent cost, of owning electric cars. The sums involved are so big that it's likely to mean that the cost of insuring an older electric vehicle is going to dwarf the buying price. Does anybody have any experience of rapid rises in insurance for EVs ? ‘The quotes were £5,000 or more’: electric vehicle owners face soaring insurance costs | Car insurance | The Guardian

Doing it the old traditional way, yes. But there is a way round it, for those prepared to take it. A smaller party could carry frozen eggs and sperm from a wide cross section of humanity, and use them as donors instead of each other's samples to maintain genetic diversity in the next generation. Keeping the stored gametes super cold wouldn't cost anything in energy or equipment terms. They might even develop artificial wombs in the future, that can carry a fetus all the way from fertilization to birth. So in theory, you could send a small party, with billions of sperm, and millions of eggs, and they could start a new colony with healthy genetic diversity. Of course, all of the humans and eggs and sperm would need to be fully shielded from cosmic radiation, to prevent damage over a very long period. And shielded from collisions with space dust, which would be very destructive at significant fractions of c. And of course, there wouldn't be much point in just sending humans. You would want a big store of plant seeds, and animals. Don't know how you would go about all of that. The mind boggles at the complexity and sheer weight of it all, were it really to be attempted to go to the nearest star on a mission to create a colony.

Photons are massless bosons that propagate at the speed of light. Like the hypothetical Gravitons. But there's no suggestion that they can have any effect across an event horizon. Can a graviton even be a graviton, inside a black hole?

I thought that it was the constant flux of gravitons that was hypothesised as creating the field ?

Maybe someone can quickly clear up a problem I have with the possibility that gravity is mediated by an elementary particle, the Graviton, that is massless and propagates at the speed of light. As I understand it, it's considered hypothetical at the moment, meaning it's considered as one possibility. I can't see how it's possible. My reasoning is pretty simplistic. Take a black hole at the centre of a galaxy. It's gravity clearly affects the stars and materials that are orbiting it. We can calculate the mass of the black hole by how it's gravity affects everything else. But how can a boson escape a black hole, and affect the surrounding stars? As I understand it, nothing can escape a black hole. Photons are massless bosons, that travel at the speed of light, but they can't exit a black hole, so how could a graviton? Is it immune to the action of other gravitons? Is that theoretically possible? Please don't respond by saying that the existence of the graviton is not accepted theory, I already know that. The question of this OP is, can it's existence be positively discounted, for the reason I've given above? And if not, why not?

Just imagine the stuff that you would need to take along with you, if by some technological marvel, you could get the theoretical travel time down to 1,000 years. What would be the minimum number of humans that would constitute a worthwhile manned expedition? And how much food etc would you need to load, to make it even survivable? You could of course be growing food, using nuclear energy, and recycling everything. But what's the weight of such a nuclear plant, including all of the components needed to run it for a thousand years? And you would need living and exercising space for the humans, and a hospital, and all of the medical equipment and drugs for three thousand generations of humans. The size of the craft needed would be absolutely impossible to accelerate this end, and decelerate at the other. So you have to conclude that humans ever going to the nearest star is an absolute impossibility, even with technology that is only being imagined at the present. Miniature space probes, with cameras, robotics and radio communication are slightly more feasible, but they would be relatively pointless from a practical point of view. They would be on a par with a space telescope. Interesting from an academic point of view, but with no kind of payoff at the end of it, so the incentive to invest in it would be much lower than a manned mission. Who's going to put billions into a probe that will, if all goes well, be sending back data in a thousand years time? It just won't happen. So even though stellar travel is an attractive idea, it won't get to reality. Probably never ever.

I remember reading that the majority of our dna is shrivelled remnants of viruses and parasitic bacteria that invaded long ago in the distant past, and eventually became part of the organism. The mdna especially is thought to have originated as bacteria that developed a symbiotic relationship with the original organism, and became an essential part of the whole thing. A bit like the photosynthetic unicellular dinoflagellates in corals.

I just came across this youtube video, on this very subject, by a physicist who really knows what he's talking about, and works on this very subject for a living for NASA. Les Johnson. It's worth viewing, if you're interested, after the introductions. He knows his stuff, examines all of the possible, and some of the more speculative methods, of travel to planets and stars. Some of the bottom lines are that with current rocket power, getting to the nearest star with a lightweight probe would take in the region of 100,000 years. And he takes as his base number a period of 1,000 years, as a realistic target, if more advanced methods become available. He does actually address the nuclear fission theoretical boom boom method, although he doesn't address how you stop it destroying the craft, other than saying you would need a massive shock absorber. But it's a very good video, worth watching, and bottom line, to get men to Proxima Centauri, the nearest star system, with very speculative technology that we don't have yet, would take an optimistic tens of thousands of years travel time. And that's the nearest star.