• 0 Posts
  • 15 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
Cake day: August 9th, 2023
  • Intralexical@lemmy.worldtoUplifting News@lemmy.world•*Permanently Deleted*English
    1·
    1 year ago

    To be fair, the ambient temperature being 37°C versus 0°C already makes a significant difference in terms of e.g. the air density and the amount of lift the wings get, how easy or hard it is to start up the engines, whether ice is a problem, etc.

    If the 15% difference in delta also translates to a 15% cost/efficiency difference, then that can absolutely make the difference in whether the technology is economically viable to apply at scale compared to its alternatives.

  • Intralexical@lemmy.worldtoWorld News@lemmy.world•Saudi Arabia reportedly sentences man to death for criticizing government on social mediaEnglish
    21·
    1 year ago

    Current uranium reserves are expected to be depleted by the end of the century, at current use.

    More like somewhere between 200 years and a couple million years, assuming we fire back up and finish developing some 60-year old technologies.

    Fission as a serious replacement for just coal plants is a pipe dream without asteroid mining.

    pipe dream without asteroid mining

    …Yeah, no. At least, not yet. Plus, the energetic and engineering challenges to just throw “asteroid mining” into the conversation are insane— So you’re burning either fossil or synthetic/biofuels for the launch, electric ion (which is itself insanely difficult and expensive) I presume (so, I.e. nuclear or solar) for in-orbit maneuvering, for rocks that aren’t even that that big and which you don’t even have the technology to do anything with.

    We have most minerals in sufficient quantities in the Earth’s crust. And more importantly, we have the industrial processes to extract them efficiently. Fission is viable, has been for a long time, and will remain so for the foreseeable future.

    contrary to what people pretend we still don’t have a good answer for the waste.

    It’s rocks. Processed “nuclear waste” is literally just rocks. (Well, technically it’s solid glass covered in welded steel.) It’s not like air pollution that we end up breathing in, and it’s not like the chemical waste from other industries (including from batteries and rare earth extraction) which finds its way to the water cycle where it then bioaccumulates. If you’re picturing a glowing green river, or a barrel full of leaking sludge— Well, that’s not it.

    It can’t hurt you unless you powder it and huff it or build furniture with it or do something insanely stupid like that. And there are other much easier and more dangerous ways for malicious actors to hurt you too, that don’t involve breaking into secure facilities to steal the some of the heaviest elements known to exist.

    Dig a big hole and toss the waste a kilometer or two down the Canadian Shield, and it will sit there inert for a billion years long after it’s burnt through all its dangerous levels of residual radioactivity.

    We need a global fusion research project

    We already have a couple of those. If everything goes perfectly for them, they might become commercially widespread right around the same time the hard-to-reverse effects of climate change might become truly apocalyptic in the second half of this century. If the past history of this field of research is any indication, they quite possibly won’t really work, will work but only a decade or two behind schedule and several times over budget, or will lead nowhere except for some media coverage that’s good for military-industrial stock prices or whatever.

    This isn’t Sid Meier’s Civilization, where you can click “Global Fusion Research Project” and get a +100% boost to production after 20 turns. To quote Randall Munroe, “Magnetohydrodynamics combines the intuitive nature of Maxwell’s equations with the easy solvability of the Navier-Stokes equations”. Fusion is hard, or else we’d already be doing it, and though we know it’s definitely possible, there’s no guarantee of anything when it comes to actually engineering it.

    orbital solar.

    Uhh… No. Spending hundreds of millions of dollars to blast photovoltaics into an incredibly hostile environment, where they can’t even be cooled by dissipating into the atmosphere, is not probably going to bring energy costs down, at current or near-future technology levels.

    Plus any system capable of precisely beaming terawatts of power from space into localized collectors on the planetary surface is (1) probably by definition an omnipresent death ray and (2) probably at least going to fuck up a lot of migrating birds and components of the atmosphere.

    Simple as that.

    …

  • Intralexical@lemmy.worldtoNo Stupid Questions@lemmy.world•Apart from water and salt, are there any inorganic foods?
    25·
    1 year ago

    …That’s a salt, though, right?

    If you’re counting non-NaCl salts as answers, then basically any “mineral” our body needs would probably be delivered at least partly in salt form. Just reading off some multivitamins here:

    • Calcium Carbonate
    • Chromium Chloride
    • Cupric Sulfate
    • Potassium Iodide
    • Ferrous Fumarate
    • Magnesium Oxide
    • Manganese Sulfate
    • Sodium Molybdate
    • Sodium Selenate
    • Zinc Oxide

    (I haven’t fully checked all of these are salts­— But I mean, a lot of of them are blatantly chemical analogues of stuff that definitely is salt (E.G. “Potassium Iodide” vs. “Sodium Chloride”), plus they’re metals bonded to ionic groups so they’re definitely not alloys or covalent molecules or ceramics.)

    This is probably because in order for our body to absorb stuff, it basically has be water-soluble, which means salts work quite well.

    When eating real food (plants, animals, and fungi), I assume a lot of this won’t be in salt form, but rather it will mostly be bound up in proteins and DNA and such. For example, iron should be primarily in hemoglobin instead of ferrous fumarate. But some of it, for example the potassium, will definitely be technically in the form of dissolved salts/minerals in the fluids inside the food.

    You can of course also rearrange the compounds around. For example, this can of Windsor-brand “salt free salt substitute” I have here further lists:

    • Potassium Chloride
    • Calcium Silicate
    • Magnesium Carbonate

    You’ll note that these are some of the same components as in the list above, just a different combination. I’m pretty sure any ionic mineral that includes at least one ion that our body needs technically counts as “food”, as long as the other half isn’t poisonous— They should be basically the same when they dissolve in the water in our stomachs anyway.

    Meats can also be preserved by adding nitrates and nitrites to it, though technically I guess that’s more of a likely-carcinogenic additive than part of the “food”.

    Fun fact: Your body sorta knows when it’s low on minerals, and will want to start eating dirt and rocks in order to make up for it! Over 100 different types of primate do it too. So in that case, you could probably argue that plain rocks and soil literally are food, in that they provide vital nutrients the body needs and that your brain is smart enough to know that. …These days it’s apparently considered a mental disorder, but I swear it made much more sense back when the likeliest thing you were going to eat was some mud, rather than lead-contaminated radioactive refrigerants or whatever it is we’ve surrounded ourselves with.

    Enjoy, also, this lovely video from a chemistry Youtuber and his friends taste-testing which alkaline-chloride salt tastes the best!

    I am not a doctor. Don’t go around eating rocks unless you’re a bird or some other type of dinosaur.

  • Intralexical@lemmy.worldtoNo Stupid Questions@lemmy.world•*Permanently Deleted*
    1·
    1 year ago

    Wearing or sporting an American flag gets all the wrong kind of attention. I really don’t want to deal with it. Frightening minorities and getting thumbs up/nods from racists isn’t really my thing.

    Then stick it next to a rainbow flag, or a Statue of Liberty, or a peace sign, or the date of the Emancipation Proclamation, or any of the symbols that y’all actually do still have for actual freedom.

    It’s all about the messaging. Make it clear: “This is the flag of the nation, for everybody in the nation, and anyone who flies a mutilated version of it is a coward.”