MigL

Do you remember what happened to 'Jarvis' ? ULTRON ... ( or were you serious ? )

Every "ideal' system is wonderful. Democracy, dictatorships, even a monarchy; as is capitalism, communism and even fascism. They all have 'advantages', and while you can try to minimize the disadvantages, some unscrupulous people always choose to take advantage of those disadvantages for their own gain. Unfortunately 'ideal' is not attainable.

Now I feel guilty. One of my favorite Greek dishes is grilled octopus tentacles, ( and their Italian cousins, 'calamari', also ) I hope they grow back.

Infinity is not a number, and has certain specific rules that must be followed. For instance, if you add to infinity, or subtract from infinity, you still have infinity. Doesn't matter if you add 1 or 1Trillion; if it changed after the addition, then you didn't have infinity to begin with. IOW, you can 'add' as much extent as you want to an infinitely extended universe, an it will still be infinite.

Democracy was thought to be the system of governance most resistant to corruption and totalitarianism. Then D Trump came along on Jan 6.

Sagittarius A at the heart of our own galaxy has a mass of 4.3 Million Suns, based on the tracks of the stars orbiting around it. The size of its event Horizon is about half the radius of Mercury's orbit, and it is about 27 000 light years from us. Note that the stars of our galaxy do NOT spiral in towards this massive Black Hole, nor do they do so from all sides; galactic rotation is strictly planar. If stars did spiral in towards the central BH, it would be termed an 'active' BH ( not by us; we, and most other life, would be dead ), more commonly known as a Quasi-Stellar Object, or Quasar, and emit more energetic radiation than the rest of the galaxy's stars combined. Fortunately Quasars only exist far away ( actually, long ago, in the early universe ). If this is the 'model' that you scaled-up to explain expansion, clearly, it doesn't work the way you think. Maybe, before thinking you have a 'referenceable' theory, you should acquaint yourself with a little basic astronomy and physics, and take advice from people on how to make your idea ( not model ) testable.

"Democracy is the worst form of government ... except for all the others that have been tried." W Churchill's cynicism is only exceeded by our own Phi. Besides, I did say 'in simplest terms', and did not go into the nuances. Thank you. It's about time you said something nice about me 😄 .

In the simplest terms, the American Civil war was a clash of ideologies; whether slave labor should be allowed to continue as a major factor in the Southern economy. Both sides were democratic and used the Constitution, but in the southern States "We, the people ..." did not include Black slaves. ( actually they were considered 3/5ths of a person for a state's population to determine representation and taxation ) This rift in ideology led to the secessionist Confederacy of the southern states, and war with the northern Union.

You seem to have put a lot of effort into this idea. Let's forget all objections to it, and see if we can 'add' to it with some quantitative analysis. The closest thing we have to a universal frame of reference is the CMB, which is very smooth, to 1 part in 1 million level, although colorizing the temperatures makes it appear to be coarse. There are however, two areas one 'bluer' and the other 'redder', which indicate our galaxy group's motion through the CMB; we are moving towards the 'blue' and away from the 'red' at a speed of about 627+/- 22 km/sec in the direction of galactic longitude l=276o+/-3o, b=30o+/-3o, from Cosmic microwave background - Wikipedia . If we were to consider this speed of our galactic local group as the orbital speed around the super-massive Black Hole central to your idea, it is simple enough to make some 'rough' predictions about the size and distance of this super-massive BH. Now I don't particularly care for the idea, so I'm not going to make those estimates, but, as you seem to have a lot invested in this idea, perhaps you should, and see if they fit with current astronomical observations. if they should, perhaps the idea might be taken a little more seriously, as, so far, you've done a bit of hand waving, and called on Occam's Razor to justify your ideas. I would say your idea depends heavily on it.

Burning fossil fuels releases carbon stored for millions of years. Burning a tree releases carbon that was sequestered for tens or hundreds of years. Wood was once a tree, a living organism; it may not be 'fossilized', but it is no longer living. You're making essentially the same point. It is the rates of release compared to re-capture that have changed dramatically and are throwing the equilibrium off-balance, Increasing the rate of re-capture, or sequestration, can, in theory, be just as effective as reducing the rate of release, in controlling amounts of atmospheric CO2. Possibly not as easily achievable, but if Iceland has a workable method, I see no reason to dismiss it.

If looking at it in terms of economics, of course it is cheaper to just stop doing what is causing the increase in CO2 levels. What about when you take into account the economic losses from such an approach ? That's the beauty of trees; it doesn't matter where you plant them. If you use the geothermal energy generated in Iceland to provide irrigation to arid African savannah, you could grow a forest that captures CO2 from the whole atmosphere. The trees don't need to be in Iceland.

I was just about to explain how calculus arose out of the limiting value for a function when the change approaches zero when you posted your excellent response; including the product rule, no less.

OK no PM; how about the boxing gloves approach? Might beat some sense into both of them 😄 .

The question does not make sense. Is the asteroid frozen water/methane, or a pebbly rock, or metallic ? All would require different methods. As the question stands, my solution ( also non-sensical ) is to move the Earth out of the way.

I think you are ignoring part of the 'problem', or the source. The burning of fossil fuels is not the problem, as it was done since the 'invention' of fire, with no adverse consequences ( other than cigarette smoking 😄 ). Even forest fires, while releasing carbon into the atmosphere, make way for new arboreal growth that recaptures that carbon, and maintains equilibrium. It was only during the last couple of hundred years ( industrialization ) that the rate of man-made release of atmospheric CO2, surpassed nature's ability to re-capture and sequester that carbon into living organisms, creating increasing CO2 atmospheric levels, and a shifting equilibrium. The problem is then twofold; the rate of release has increased, and the rate of re-capture hasn't kept pace. The solutions ( simplistically ) are, reduce the former, or increase the latter.

Oh my ... I do believe we have a childish feud going, which now threatens to derail a second thread. Please take it to PM, or one of you travels to the other's location and you both put on boxing gloves, and step in a ring.

I've only ever attended Brock University ( southern Ontario ), which, at the time was about 10 years old, and its sciences departments were run in the old Corning Glass Lab separate from the main small campus. One of my nephew's best friends, graduated from there and went on to do a PhD in Physics, at the Max Planck Institute in Germany. The daughter of my ophthalmologist also graduated from Brock, and went on to complete her studies at Princeton to also become an ophthalmologist, specializing in glaucoma, but unfortunately ( for me ) in Philadelphia. Those two schools of higher education have probably turned out more Nobel laureates than the next 10 combined, and would have been my first choices for Physics. So the US has 50 % of the ( what I consider ) best universities.

The Earth is a closed system. All the carbon was already here before atmospheric CO2 levels started to rise. I didn't come from anywhere else, and it won't be going anywhere else. Any reduction will come from 'locking it' in other forms, such as in solution or rocky compounds, or even plant and animal life that in a few million years become fossil fuels. The problem we currently have is that the rate of release of carbon into the atmosphere is much greater than the natural processes that re-capture it; adding to, or speeding up, those processes, can help just as much as reducing the rate of release.

I firmly believe people should stick closely to what they do best, and not venture too far outside their area of expertise. I am sick and tired of actors, musicians and other entertainers pushing their opinions on social/political/climate/etc. matters, that they have no clue about, but whose opinion carries a lot of weight simply because they have a large audience for their views. I'm also tired of failed entertainers, whose only claim to fame as an entertainer is as a caricature of themselves ( with orange hair, no less ), running for public office ( or the Presidency even ), and half of the population of the most advanced country in the world actually thinking he'd be good at it. I wonder what N Degrasse-Tyson would say about that ? He is a scientist, excellent science communicator, and his comments about mass shootings are scientifically accurate facts, albeit, not very sensitive. Then again, he's not a sociologist, so why expect a socially sensitive comment from him ? He's had other problems ( with women ) in past years also. Why does America expect people with even the slightest bit of 'fame' to have an answer for any problem or be great human beings ? N D-T is good at what he does; other aspects of his life, or opinions, are just as valid/invalid as Joe Blow's at the local bar.

Oh, you expected me to read the book before replying ? ( just kidding; I know what you mean )

Atomic weapons are different. You don't need to control the know-how, if you can control access to the fissile material. Have you tried getting some Plutonium or enriched Uranium ? That's when the black choppers will land on your front lawn, and you'll disappear.

There are two factors associated with risk analysis. One involves the severity of the occurrence, the other is the probability of occurrence. Consider a city. There are numerous sidewalks with litter on them, and only one sidewalk with a 20 ft deep hole. The probability of tripping on litter is very high because there is so much of it, but the severity is very low, maybe a twisted ankle or scrapped knee. The probability of falling in the hole is very low, as there is only one, but the severity is extremely high, resulting in death. I think Dimreepr and MSC are each focusing on only one aspect of risk analysis. Dim is focused on the improbability of a nuclear exchange, with respect to the much higher probabilities of other death producing incidents; after all, none have happened for 70 years. MSC is concerned about the severity of a nuclear exchange, that could destroy our way of life, and disregarding the probability of it occurring. Think you guys can cut each other some slack 🙂 ?

Absolutely. Since technology, transportation and agriculture are such large sources of greenhouse gas emissions in developed countries, let's scale it down, and stop sending food aid to those countries that don't emit nearly as much GHGs, but can't feed themselves. Oh ... wait. That's not what you had in mind ? I don't mean this as a criticism of your post; we certainly have excesses. It's not a simple problem, and it certainly doesn't lend itself to simple solutions

A lot of this stuff was declassified a little over ten years ago. The Area 51 File: Secret Aircraft and Soviet MiGs | National Security Archive (gwu.edu) What would you have told him in the intervening 30 years ? Probably that it was a weather balloon or atmospheric anomaly. I don't think they ever claimed these unidentified events were of alien origin. ( maybe Earthly alien, as in foreign, such as Chinese 'weather/spy' balloons )

Both are hypothetical, as is much of the other stuff mentioned. I can, however, show you pictures of a Black Hole. ( or you can google it )