insane_alien

look how long it has taken to assemble the ISS. it only has a mass of a few hundred tonnes. a space mirror capable of shading the areas concerned would have a mass of millions of tonnes. we simply aren't capable of launching that much mass in a reasonable period of time. not to mention the incredibly high cost.

do you know how long it would take to build these space mirrors? with current launch capacity, millenia. and then there is the maintenance of those mirrors, lots of debris up in space, its going to get damaged pretty quick. and then there is the problem of which orbit to put it in, you can put it just anywhere as there are likely satellites that go through that area of space already. and some will definitely broadcast through it. and then you have to make sure it is always between the sun and the desired area(which will be quite a feat if you can have the orbit and not cause massive problems. you'd be FAR better off using the money this would cost to or i don't know, make a few desalinization plants and build a water infrastructure over the affected area capable of supplying the needs of the populace and irrigation for farming. and you can use whats left of the money your saving to build them some schools, power plants, houses, hospitals, roads, public transport system etc etc out of solid gold. space mirrors are horribly unpractical. why not just do it the realistic way and not the still a few hundred years beyond our abilities way?

Yes, this is what it done in ultra high power lasers used in fusion research. requires some pretty fancy optics and control systems though. and those are not cheap. not if you do it properly, more losses would come from the collimating optics. potentially, but you'd be cheaper and easier getting an actual 80 watt laser in terms of home lasers, yes. in terms of industrial lasers, no its not tank busting. a tank would be unaffected by it as it doesn't deliver enough energy to do damage. if you are using it on a presentation, well, you might set fire to the backing if it's made of a flammable substance like cloth. but do you really want to be swinging around a massive laser(and diesel generator for the powersupply)just for a presentation and run the risk of instantly and permanently blinding members of your audience?

Captain, you forgot sublimation of the meteorite itself. personally, I think that the size of a meteorite will play a big role. It needs to be big enough to get through the atmosphere without burning up completely yet it would need to be small enough to lose the majority of its kinetic energy to the upper atmosphere and then hit the surface at its terminal velocity. If it's too big, ie, big enough to cause disintegration and deformation of the impactor, it is likely that it got too hot during impact with the ground for an organism to survive. If it formed a fireball on impact then definitely nothing survived. http://articles.adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-iarticle_query?bibcode=1934PA.....42...59W&db_key=AST&page_ind=0&data_type=GIF&type=SCREEN_VIEW&classic=YES < this link is useful basically ,you don't want to be looking at iron meteorites as those will heat up all the way through during re-entry and hence kill anything living on it. stony ones are better as the have a lower conductivity and it will mainly be the outer layers that get hot while the inside could remain much colder carbonaceous meteorites would seem the most likley to me as they contain potential food sources(not only for the origin and transport of the organism, but for when it is 'activated' on arrival at a habitable destination. unless there are some yummy amino acids and sugars on the stony meteorite as well as a bit of water(although that could potentially be supplied with rain or ocean) then the poor bacteria might just die of starvation

for the moment, I will ignore the current impossibility of giant space mirrors. Have you considered the effect this would have on the climates of other parts of the world? making a massive change like that would have far reaching consequences, quite probably leading to the creation of new deserts.

you are being an idiot. what steps are you going to take to ensure that 1/ you have indeed produce the correct chemical('following the recipie' is NOT an acceptable answer as many many many chemistry students and chef's will tell you) 2/ there are no impurites 3/ you are not delivering it in a method that will produce toxic products(yep, the way you deliver a medicine can even make it highly toxic if it goes in the wrong way) unless you have a fully equipped analytical chemistry lab at your disposal with about $100,000 worth of equipment, you're not going to get by 1 and 2. and without a couple of years of clinical trials and simulations you're not going to get by 3. and then there are all the legal issues. you will be cheaper and safer getting the drug prescribed by a doctor and then shelling out some money for it.

eh? how would there be almost no way to turn? thats like saying trains have almost no way to turn yet those seem to work just fine. and why wouldn't a horizontal one work?

it also causes tissue damage from prolonged exposure to its solid form

well, the driving force is gravity for the seperation. the distribution (even of a well mixed solution) of ions is not uniform but random. there will be small pockets where the concentration is slightly higher than that of is surroundings and vice versa, this is the nature of a random distribution. due to this there will be separation by buoyancy. it will nto be a large effect due to the small differences in density and the lifetime of pockets of higher concentration(not long at all) but it will be present. you really don't stand a chance of even detecting this in a lab but if you made a column a few kilometers tall(need to be in a mine shaft for support) and filled it with salt water and let it sit for some time after mixing then i'm sure it could be measured. iirc, haloclines are something like this.

why must god's be trillions of times better? if god is capable of creating far superior technology then he is also capable of building slightly superior technology. and as he is omniscient, he will know everything about his competitors designs. he could build a machine exactly the same, but with perhaps a 1% improvement on the numbers. just cause god is supposed to be infinitely good at everything doesn't mean that everything he builds is perfect. you can design in flaws.

its not actually THAT ridiculous. i don't think it'd replace cars, but it could defnitely work for a replacement to subway trains. just evacuate(or partially evacuate) the tunnels and propell the cars by using the atmosphere.

depends on the temperature. it's likely to be much hotter down there. its 1.96133×10^10 Pa (19.6GPa) assuming constant density. however, the magnitude of that pressure means we cannot assume that the density is constant, water would be quite compressible at that pressure so its going to be greater than that. according to this diagram( http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/de/WaterPhaseDiagram.png ) it'd always be ice though even at the pressure given. even up to 600K. it'd be ice VII

seeing as it contains a much higher fraction of potassium, yes. but you'll still need to get rid of the OH. KCl or K2O would be much safer to work with than highly caustic KOH

ah right. well it has to do with the way lasers transmit energy and the basics of heat. heat is the energy containied in the vibrational modes of the molecules the object is composed of (basically, the faster they wiggle, the more heat they contain). Lasers send out a beam of photons. When the photons hit these wiggling molecules they are absorbed and they change how they wiggle because of the additional energy they now have. this makes them wiggle faster(and hence stuff heats up). in order to have anything resembling a freezeray you'd need to have a beam that extracts energy and the only way this can happen is if there is such a thing as negative energy but there has never been ANY observation that this exists and it may infact be impossible with current theories. well, thats the way its portrayed in movies at least. if we go to reality, there is a way to cool down stuff with lasers but it only works on stuff thats already very cold, in a gas state and very very low pressure. this works by adding energy in the right direction at the right time so it acts against the direction of motion. it seems pretty tricky and i don't understand it fully myself. i think its either swansont or klaynos that works with this technology and they could explain it better. but its definitely not anything like the movie freezerays (and klaynos is nothing like big arnie)

what do you mean by 'ice laser'? using ice as the lasing medium?

well, the first stage would be to extract the potassium(all of it) from the bananas(limiting yourself to bananas seems a really crap way of doing this, why not just but a big lump of potassium). once extracted, you'll need to vapourise the potassium and centrifuge it to seperate the isotopes(and this'll only work slightly) and get enriched potassium-40 to be honest, there are better, cheaper and easier methods of getting beta-emitters.

higher concentrations of salt are more dense than lower concentrations. this means that there will be a seperation effect however the effectiveness is limited by the diffusion of the salt due to chemical potential. if you had a greater gravitational field you could get a greater concentration gradient and i suppose with enough you could get such a difference that the salt would crystalise out however this would require black hole levels of g.

it shouldn't shatter unless A/ the cylinder is damaged B/ you're stupid and try to confine it to the cylinder by putting something on the top of it. the explosion really isn't that powerful, more a gentle push than anything.

can you tell us what a 'superpower' is in mathematics? i haven't heard of the term and an obligatory google search doesn't return any results featuring an operation, just some cheesy sites for kids about mathematical based superheroes. if you do just mean a power tower then, no i can't currently calculate it due to insufficient harddrive space to store the fully expanded number.

you'll be there a while, those are still on punch cards. for jaquard looms

do you know who banned you? send them a private message.

if that is what he means then it would be trivial to calculate it. you could do it on a home computer if you can be bothered waiting a while. a long while. and had a decent harddrive. but it could be done. i'm going to guess several days. its less complicated than the calculation of pi to stupid precisions (5 trillion decimal places) and that was done on a home computer (80 days of computer time)

oh, where's the science then. none at all on that site just a word salad (and not a tasty one either)

umm, venus has a weaker gravitational field than earth. only slightly weaker right enough but thats because the size and mass are pretty close.

thats a misrepresentation of freuds work to be honest. this is the strawman fallacy. as has been repeatedly mentioned, freudian psychology is only studied for historical purposes these days, no sane psychologist would use it to actually diagnose and treat patients.