TheVat

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Let's really think outside the box here. One could build a Temple of Nothingness....out of nothing! Buy an inexpensive lot, put up a sign, maybe mow the weeds and put in a low-maintenance ground cover and...done. Maybe an area covered with wood chips where congregants can stand or sit and worship. Enormous saving on construction costs, permits, utility bills, property taxes. This could mean funds going directly to worthy causes like sheltering the homeless, feeding hungry children, promoting justice and peace. And when people thanked you for helping, you would just reply, "Oh, it was Nothing really."

So let me drill down into this question (haha). I am Thorvald Vatsson, and I have one billion dollars* to reduce CO2, without leaving Iceland to do this. What will give me the highest overall CO2 reduction per gigawatt - build a fancy air scrubber, build geothermal generation capacity for my country (or export), or some optimal combination of the two? (planting a fast-growing forest is off the table, this being Iceland) I know there are some "depends" issues here. But I would hope there could be some way to determine a break even point, in a very rough way. *US dollars, not those nearly worthless Canadian ones

That is, essentially, what any method that slightly slows the asteroid does. Hit it frontally with a kinetic weapon, it slows a tiny bit, thus arriving at the impact point a tiny bit later...and Earth has moved slightly farther along in its orbital path. You "moved Earth out of the way." 😀

That was where I was poking at the idea. You make a fair point - as they say, "politics is the art of the possible." And I was also looking at the technical side. I.e. if my country has 20 gigawatts accessible from geothermal, is it more efficient to use that all for power (plus export, say, as hydrogen or filled superbatteries), or to use some for air capture? If the former keeps 50 million tons out of the air, and the latter only keeps out 30 million tons, then the scrubber would have to remove >20 million tons just to break even on the process. So one should look at break even points on these expensive scrubbing systems. Also compare them, in longterm cost, to forest plantings (or seagrass meadow plantings, say) which remove and fix equal amounts of carbon. Hence my question as to planting forests, seagrass, boosting phyto in the sea, etc and how they compare in overall carbon removal. The C capture approach strikes me as the fancy boutique approach - looks cool, captures lots of publicity and hype - but I wonder how it really makes much dent.

Reading in the paper about the opening of the world's biggest carbon capture plant, I had to wonder if this expensive tech-heavy approach was the most efficent way to reduce atmospheric CO2. https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-solutions/2024/05/09/climeworks-mammoth-carbon-capture/ Wouldn't using Iceland's "plentiful goethermal" to power homes and vehicles etc be a more efficient way to keep carbon out of the air? The most efficient carbon capture, it seems to me, is not putting carbon in the air in the first place, i.e. promote green energy and agriculture and industry. Rather than letting big carbon polluters "greenwash" their industries, i.e. validate their continuing business as usual by purchasing carbon offsets. And there's also forest restorations, which if done properly provide a longterm, eventually self-maintaining system of carbon capture and fixation. I think people are blinded by technophilia so they forget the Earth has many natural carbon filters that can be restored and augmented. (from an engineering perspective, forests also do double-duty, in both grabbing/fixing carbon and also rendering heat-stressed areas especially in the tropics more habitable, less prone to lethal wet-bulb temperature heat waves.)

Cool. Well, I recalled a little more about Stirling (looks like he wrote about fifteen more novels set in that universe, and they leaned more towards fantasy, which is probably why I just read the first one) and it seems he really ducked the scientific aspects. I did give some thought to how one could implement a planet-wide deactivation of ballistic weapons. Seems like you would need some kind of "bloodhound" nanotech that would permeate the atmosphere and sniff out the relevant chemicals to denature them. Kind of like an artifical airborne virus that quickly infected all stores of explosives. In response, you would have people trying to improvise other chemical alternatives that could provide enough bang to propel a bullet or shell. E.g. say someone might try to devise a gasoline gun (though I think its heat of combustion, and volume and rate of expanding gases, would only provide a weak explosion, too weak for ballistics). But say there were chemicals that would work, then the nanobots would have to sniff them out, also. Also, IIRC charges in munitions are compounds which are self-oxidizing, so that the reaction isn't slowed by the need to draw in atmospheric oxygen. It's all about FAST oxidation. I think a couple folk here are more up on that type of chemistry than I am, so they might have other ideas.

The point that people are responding to more than just "spectacle." There is more to mass shooting data than just numeric data on fatality - creating public terror of public spaces has real measurable effects on civic life, and quality of life assessment, even if the risk assessments that people make are wobbly. Tyson is correct, but I felt he was ignoring the psychological effects of mass shootings over time. There's also a copycat effect, with mass shootings, that one doesn't see with other morbidity causes he lists, which further ratchets up public fear and distress.

What makes them even more problematic is that the names mentioned are no longer alive (they'd all be well past 100) so can't address any questions about the documents. Like it would be helpful if the two doctors who allegedly conducted these autopsies were around, to vet the claims made. Not to mention that, with such extraordinary claims, the originals would properly be subjected to full forensic analysis - paper composition and watermarks, ink, type font (including retyping passages on a 40s typewriter to see how keystrokes land), official stamps, etc. Sagan's law really applies here, eh?

Well, thank you. So, am getting a glimmer now of what this is about... This famous Gould assertion would also make a great thread here at SFN. UAPs are disparate phenomena, not necessarily arising from some common phylogenetic tree branch, is what you're saying?

It's hard to decipher some of your oracular comments. Can you offer a summary of what the podcast is about, in case I don't have the 41 minutes required to hear it? And how it's relevant?

Bas van Fraassen, The Empirical Stance.

I think the comparisons are what philosophers call "trivially true." His math is correct but it misses the point. Medical errors kill more people than mass shootings but medical errors don't jump out in a movie theater or shopping mall or school and start slaughtering. Mass shootings have unique aspects of horror because of their psychological effects and ability to spark mass fear - and destruction of what were perceived as safe spaces in our lives. So, yes, Neil does tend to be glib and dismissive sometimes.

You may want to read Dies the Fire by SM Stirling. Read it about twenty years ago, enjoyed his exploration of that same idea. I don't recall any pausible explanation of how explosives were nullified, but many details of the book elude me atm. Being a pointed sticks guy (i.e. humans can't really be trusted as a species with anything beyond pointed sticks), I will follow your inquiry with interest. Sounds like the Hard SF end of the spectrum. Good place to be! I notice, when browsing the fiction section of a library, that there is a cluster of really good hard SF authors under the letter B. Stephen Baxter, David Brin, Gregory Benford, Ben Bova, Greg Bear, couple others. And of course Arthur C. Blarke! 🤔

The stapedius muscle, which regulates sound intensity in your ear, cannot react swiftly enough to a sudden pecussive noise. IIRC, if the sound is continuous, the stapedius has time to react and the ability to diminish the sound up to a hundred-fold. So it can drop a 100 db sound to 80 db, the scale being logarithmic. That's why I don't use earplugs for the vac, but do use them when pounding in nails.

What a weird echoing labyrinth your mind must be.

Documents appear fake. One description of the craft includes photomultiplier tubes that sound much like a 1940s idea of advanced tech. Oppenheimer and Einstein were consulted? And yet said nothing about it for the rest of their lives? Fermi and Teller had a famous chat at Los Alamos a couple years later in which it was clear they were unaware of any aliens visiting Earth, so I guess they weren't consulted on this amazing find. Some of the other descriptions of a propulsion system sound suspiciously like futuristic technology you would find in pulp sci-fi of that era. Several paragraphs gush over the lack of rivets and smooth skin of the craft - a big preoccupation at that time, before stealth technology began to develop smooth-hulled craft. And then we have the humanoid corpses. Please. A high school sophomore with a basic understanding of evolutionary biology could explain how nonsensical that is. I had a good laugh at the part about MPs who were so traumatized by the find that they commit suicide. Seriously? You just helped find and wrangle alien corpses and their spaceship, and instead of being out of your mind with excitement at how interesting your dull job became, you think I'm going to kill myself. Life was so much better when I had to stand by a doorway or gate for hours, or shlep equipment around or break up tavern fights. No more fascinating stuff, please! It's killing me!

- Will Rogers, in a 1932 newspaper column criticizing Herbert Hoover.

One aspect of investigation of anomalies is asking how credible witnesses can have their perceptions tampered with. (e.g. ghost sightings in haunted houses are more prevalent where black mold infestation is more common) Anyone can be fooled by optical phenomena. Though I had in my younger days interests in photography, astronomy, and various optical phenomena, I was utterly baffled one foggy night going down a quiet country road as a cluster of red glowing balls appeared ahead and slowly rose into the air as I moved towards them. It took a while for my WTF moment to give way to comprehension. If they had been flashing, and there hadn't been fog, I would have understood right away that I was approaching a wind turbine farm. But there was some glitch that night in the electronics that set the normal strobe rate (30/m). So the FAA-required beacons were stuck on, shining continuously. So what would normally be flashing red dots atop distinguishable turbine towers were turned by fog into slowly ascending glowing red balls. A few years later the utility company, in response to complaints from farmers, put in Aircraft Detection Lighting Systems (ADLS), which use radar systems that only turn on turbine lights when an aircraft is approaching the wind farm.

My quote was a quote from the article I posted on Saito - the interview makes clear that his critique of capitalism and consumerism is more complex than what you seem to be taking away from a brief clip. Saito devotes an entire book to it. I know this site has codified the idea that people can discuss a topic without reading linked articles, and can just respond to pull-quotes. I do not always agree with that.

I lean towards spacetime as a mathematical entity. What has increasing curvature near a massive object? The math. Curved geometry. No sheets, no bowling balls, no stuff. Like going to the bowling alley without equipment and saying, I'm ready, dudes, I brought pi, f=ma, and a couple other maths with me. What breaks down at the singularity? The equations do. It's math being employed to do things that it's hard for math to do. JMAPCO (just my astrophysics-challenged opinion)

It isn't reasonable, it's just one extra low-P thing to cross off the list. And I meant more in ongoing investigations. One can't inspect equipment or give post-flight physicals to people in the 1940s. I just meant investigators should strive to rule out even unlikely scenarios so that the investigation data isn't tainted later because someone says oh they didn't eliminate that. E.g. if something caused a short in some industrial equipment, I would think a cat crawling in there was improbable but I'd still check for burned fur or whatever.

To clarify, I don't think hypoxia is likely, I was just giving examples of how science eliminates red herrings. It would be like fingerprinting all the friends of a homicide - you may not suspect them at all, you are just eliminating them more decisively. Then one can focus on optical f/x in the atmosphere (or other) with more confidence. Since some tiny fraction of UFO reports did relate to pilot hypoxia, it cleans up your search field to eliminate it.

Which gets back to the limited value of really old data. My bet would be on some kind of optical anomaly. It's possible the only way to study that would be to recreate WW2 conditions - send flyers up in period aircraft in meteorological conditions which match the original sightings. And make sure the oxygen delivery system onboard has whatever quirks and quality issues there were in WW2. And have whatever land based light sources (including searchlights) there were at that time. So...basically impossible to recreate. We'll never know what the Foo Fighters were. (except Dave Grohl)

Exotic experimental flight technology seems the most plausible hypothesis to me, at this point. Per Ockham, requires the fewest assumptions and indeed fits well with what has been leaked about government disinformation methods. That said, I think it is impossible to assign a probability to an ET hypothesis. Most terms of the Drake equation remain so conjectural as to make it useless, with our current knowledge. It is like the SETI problem, where no one in the SETI community can demonstrate why aliens would stay with radio transmission and use it in such a way as to send a signal. And we have no way to really calculate a probability of a singular event, where a civilization far up the Kardashev scale could saturate the galaxy with probes, seeding devices, whatever. At this point, it just makes more sense to sift evidence for the secret human tech hypothesis.