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Easter Island heads have bodies

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Re: Easter Island heads have bodies

#71

Post by GeneTraylor »

randallsquared wrote: post #69
GeneTraylor wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>> Why? We have a whole solar system right on on our front porch This is an honest question, not a rebuttal. How would you get those resources here, or us over there? >>> Water doesn't just get used once and then disappear forever. Now, one could certainly make an argument against (say) sucking water out of the Oglalla Aquifer faster than it gets replenished, but that's a localized problem. We aren't going to "run o…

How would you get those resources here, or us over there? There are a number of high-startup-cost, low-running-cost schemes for putting stuff in LEO, and as someone once said, LEO is halfway to anywhere in the solar system, energy-wise. Some possibilities are laser launching, space elevators, launch loops, and electromagnetic guns. Some of these have much higher startup costs (to be effective for human launching, a g…

I've actually thought about this a bit, and I think that a really interesting design for a launch gun would be to encase the payload in a cover composed of diamagnetic material and then pump liquid nitrogen through channels made inside the material. The material would become perfectly diamagnetic and it will repel all fields, so you can easily levitate it and use it's tendency to go from a stronger to a weaker field to accelerate it.

I don't know for sure, but I think that the main advantage of doing something like this versus just putting a magnet over there, would be the fact that an accelerating magnet in such an assembly would generate huge amounts of back-emf and you would have to a) sink that and b) compensate for that.

However I don't know much about what other people's designs are, but I would like to change that. Do you know any resource where I can learn more from the scratch on how to build something like this?

Also where can I read more in detail about launch loops, laser launching, and space elevators?

Re: Easter Island heads have bodies

#72

Post by dfc »

tripzilch wrote: post #36
dfc wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Read the FAQ and tell me how a story about art/discovery/paradigm-shifting is OT... tl;dr hn is not a technews aggregator.

> Read the FAQ and tell me how a story about art/discovery/paradigm-shifting is OT... Art, okay. But how is this paradigm shifting? We already knew they have bodies below surface for at least a couple of decades. And a good deal of the statues are well above ground with their bodies. They're just called "Easter Island Heads" because their heads are often disproportionally large to their bodies. PARADIGM SHIFT! If tha…

What is the point of your post?

Do you agree/disagree that this is a story for HN? I can't tell.

Re: Easter Island heads have bodies

#73

Post by GeneTraylor »

jmelloy wrote: post #70
GeneTraylor wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I'm thinking about buying the book as soon as I have the spare cash.

Put your college professor mindset on, because you're going to need it. For books about war, famine, disease, and horrible death, I find his books incredibly dry.

Hm. I don't think that's going to be a problem, it might take me a while to read his work, but that's okay. That said, I'm used to such books and a world rife with war, famine, disease and horrible death.

Re: Easter Island heads have bodies

#74

Post by slevcom »

gbog wrote: post #58
GeneTraylor wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>> nice prose of your Thank you, but my prose is far from being nice. You should see my boss with a red pen around my prose. :-) >>>but the tiny blue ball thing is bullshit Carl Sagan has another take on the matter. :-) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p86BPM1GV8M >>>Any plane on window seat will show you that the Earth is enormous and empty for most it's parts, even in China. Don't think I advocate more cars and buil…

I see a demographic problem if and only if Americans continue spreading their unhealthy way of life.

I smell a troll.

Re: Easter Island heads have bodies

#75

Post by GeneTraylor »

randallsquared wrote: post #67
GeneTraylor wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>> nice prose of your Thank you, but my prose is far from being nice. You should see my boss with a red pen around my prose. :-) >>>but the tiny blue ball thing is bullshit Carl Sagan has another take on the matter. :-) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p86BPM1GV8M >>>Any plane on window seat will show you that the Earth is enormous and empty for most it's parts, even in China. Don't think I advocate more cars and buil…

we would drink up 2 205 000 000 000 litres of fresh water in a day, but the total possible water supply we can access (and this includes the glaciers) is only 3.5 × 10^19 litres... That's quite an easy way to run out of water. Water doesn't vanish after it's used. Also, putting your first number in scientific notation helps put this in perspective: 2.2 x 10^12 . Seven orders of magnitude. Close to 15 000 0000 times a…

>>> Also, putting your first number in scientific notation helps put this in perspective: 2.2 x 10^12 . Seven orders of magnitude. Close to 15 000 0000 times as much. Hm, I made a big mistake in that comment. I should have added that we have access to this much, but the real catch is energy and how we are currently limited to tapping into it and the total resource we can access is X.

Thank you so much for pointing this out.

>>> it mostly just requires more energy Yeah as I argued in another comment, that really is the unmentioned catch over here. I should have elaborated upon that in the parent. Sorry.

Even if most of humanity doesn't reach that level of consumption, we will need to start unlocking some of this resource sooner or later. What really worries me is the amount of energy we need to unlock all of this water locked away in glaciers, ice caps and so on and then actually manage to process and distribute it for final use.

That's a really interesting but hard engineering problem.

>>> Technology which is clearly within our reach would allow the earth to support trillions of humans -- admittedly at a more crowded level than I would prefer. :) Can you please elaborate more?

Re: Easter Island heads have bodies

#76

Post by gbog »

mooism2 wrote: post #59
gbog wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see a demographic problem if and only if Americans continue spreading their unhealthy way of life.

It's not about Americans spreading their unhealthy way of life. It's about non-Americans claiming that life (more or less) as their own.

Well, you know, I live in Chine since 8 years and, in some ways, there is a profound influence of the "American way of life", mostly through the channel of Holywood movies. The matter could be worse: Chinese have the weight on their side, they can't change so fast as to lose their identity, but still, they have an idea of what should be an happy life that is formatted by these f* movies (really hate then, sorry). For instance, they think everyone should ought to live in an appartement in a tower, own a car, drink canned soda, eat industrial food cooked in microwave, have only one overprotected child, work in suits, go shopping each Saturday, watch baseball on a gigantic TV on Sundays, etc.

They can't believe it when I tell them I am living in a cheap courtyard house, rides a bike to work, never drinks soda, eat home cooked food, never watches TV, know nothing about baseball, climbs mountains on the week-end. In fact, it is the way their parent and grand-parents lives (eg. my neighbors) and the younger generation don't want that, they want the "American way", the supposed "comfort". Maybe a personal taste, but I think Chinese way is better, for me, my family and even for the little big blue ball floating in the universe.

Don't get me wrong: I know US citizen do not live like described, and I tell my friends and colleagues as much as I can. But the problematic part is, again, those f* Hollywood movies that have too much worldwide influence. (I therefore welcome any other influence, Mangas, Bollywood, Hong-Kong kungfu, anything else is better.)

Re: Easter Island heads have bodies

#77

Post by antics »

tripzilch wrote: post #41

Of course they have bodies! How is this news to anyone? A good part of these statues are well above ground including their bodies, and we've known the sunken ones have bodies below the ground for several decades already. They've been excavating these statues for quite a while already. Here, go read the Wikipedia article on Moai, it's way more interesting than this article (which is just a copy of the first few paragr…

Just before people get all excited, to clarify, the great pyramids have 4 sides that are visible and 1 side that faces the ground. Not 5 sides that are visible.

Re: Easter Island heads have bodies

#78

Post by dfc »

lurch00 wrote: post #18
dfc wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Read the FAQ and tell me how a story about art/discovery/paradigm-shifting is OT... tl;dr hn is not a technews aggregator.

http://www.eisp.org/ has way more information on the topic than the linked blog. I don't think it's off topic, I just think it's a poor article which has no real substance (hence the reddit comparison). Eh. I guess I'll just stick to HN classic.

Is hn:classic how you started reading HN?

Re: Easter Island heads have bodies

#79

Post by alexwolfe »

antics wrote: post #13
alexwolfe wrote: post #7

This is one of the most amazing discoveries I have seen recently. The sheer weight of that stone is absolutely insane. I'm still a little stunned this was just discovered. I would love to know what the people who made this were thinking. To create a work of art that detailed and massive just to bury 75% of it seems very odd. I'm sure there was a good reason to do it (in their minds at least), I'd love to know what th…

Just to ameliorate possible confusion, we've known about the bodies since at least the 90's, though possibly earlier. True, that's relatively recent given how old they are, but it's not desirable for readers to come away having concluded that we've just discovered them, like, yesterday.

Thanks for the clarification. Should have guessed that by the clothes in the photos ;). The 90's is still very recent. I'm interested in hearing some of there theories behind why/if they were buried so deeply.

Re: Easter Island heads have bodies

#80

Post by sateesh »

jmelloy wrote: post #70
GeneTraylor wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I'm thinking about buying the book as soon as I have the spare cash.

Put your college professor mindset on, because you're going to need it. For books about war, famine, disease, and horrible death, I find his books incredibly dry.

Jared Diamond tries to make sense of history in a methodical manner referring to researches done in diverse areas spawning evolutionary biology, archaeology, ecology etc. I would expect any such serious book (though targeted towards readers not steeped in diverse fields which he refers) would appear dry.
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