221–230 of 278 posts
Europa is definitely the most exciting part of the solar system that sparks imagination. Literally 100s of miles of pitch black ocean with thermal vents, ripe for life. Getting kiddy thinking about the leviathan sized aliens roaming the deep ocean of Europa. Does anyone else feel this way?
Europa Report (movie): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=avzqYgtpdMQ I enjoyed it ^^
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm curious why this would be worthwhile: since Singapore is an island conventional desalination would seem easier than either coping with the witches' brew of sewage (random amounts of random chemicals) or the expense of plumbing urine separately.
Seem being the key word here; if it's plain sewage, there's affordable, scalable and relatively low energy ways to turn it back into clean drinking water, vs desalinization which requires a lot of energy still. But it's not just sewage though, it's chemicals as well, e.g. from medication, plus whatever else gets flushed.
In Singapore's case the sea is the obvious sink for treated sewage, which kicks it back to desalination. Except that I believe that Singapore's water comes across the causeway to the mainland in a pipe.
Is the significance of CO2's presence 1) it's necessary ingredient for (our) life, 2) it's a likely biproduct of life, or both?
A rapid change in CO2 concentration could be a clue that something such as life is rearranging the molecules on a planet. In fact, I think the aliens have been monitoring us with a spectrometer for a few million years, and have guessed that we're here.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is the water I drink the same water I pee? Or does it get taken apart and put back together with different pieces?
Metabolism converts sugars and oxygen to carbon dioxide and water. Fire has the same inputs and outputs too! You can think of metabolism as releasing the same energy as fire but with more steps so our bodies can harness and use the energy via various other chemical reactions. Most of the water from metabolism is released in your breath. Water you pee is mostly water you ingested via drinking and eating.
The water that leaves via your lungs and the water that leaves via your kidneys all had to get there via your blood. There's no distinction made based on the "source" of that water.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is the water I drink the same water I pee? Or does it get taken apart and put back together with different pieces?
Metabolism converts sugars and oxygen to carbon dioxide and water. Fire has the same inputs and outputs too! You can think of metabolism as releasing the same energy as fire but with more steps so our bodies can harness and use the energy via various other chemical reactions. Most of the water from metabolism is released in your breath. Water you pee is mostly water you ingested via drinking and eating.
And the reason for that is that air is bad for heat exchange and transport, water is much better, and evaporates! While the body passively cools in air (either directly when air is colder or via sweat evaporation when air is too hot) most of the heat exchange happens actively via breathing, which is nice because it's easy and quick to adjust, just by breathing faster or slower, so as to maintain 37ish C-100ish F while the body is continuously burning molecules. Without breathing we'd not only lack comburant (oxygen), we'd overheat pretty quickly!
Earlier quoted context omitted.
or terrible news a la great filter arguments
Except those are utter nonsense. The distances involved, the speed of light and inverse square laws mean we wouldn't expect to have detected aliens yet if they are there, so we can't deduce anything about their existence from the fact we haven't detected them. The "Fermi" "paradox" is like someone locked in a bathroom going "OMG I can't see anybody! Everybody on earth must have died!!".
I’m going to try this today just to see how my wife reacts.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is why I roll my eyes at alarmist talk of various processes "consuming X zillion gallons of water". Water is much stronger than that. It just passes through our processes and will outlast us all.
And I roll my eyes at comments like this. There's a huge difference of usability between different water sources. You can't irrigate your orchards with salt water from the ocean. You can't bathe in waste water from most manufacturing plants. You can't drink ground water that has been contaminated by fracking. There is a finite amount of potable water. There is a finite amount of usable water for agriculture. Pointing…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
From an Arthur C. Clarke novel: > ALL THESE WORLDS ARE YOURS - EXCEPT EUROPA. > ATTEMPT NO LANDING THERE. So yes. Clarke thought it was special also.
Well, kinda, eventually. The book of 2001 points Discovery 1 at Iapetus, a moon of Saturn. Evidently, the special effects crew for the movie couldn't do a convincing job of faking Saturn because of the rings so they did Jupiter instead. Then when Clarke did the book for 2010 he retcon'd it to match the movie.
Nevertheless, Jupiter as the biggest planet within our star system being forced to collapse into a small sun feel extremely right
People must understand the following: if we find One Microbe in such environment, it basically means life is common in the universe. The other thing people must understand: "life" and "fully evolved intelligent life" are two very different stories.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Seems pretty. Will read soon.
The film version is flawed but still well-worth anyone’s time who got this deep in the thread & enjoys hard, near-future sci-fi. My theory is that 2010: The Year We Make Contact is a lot like Blade Runner , pre- the various Ridley Scott re-cuts. Drop the voiceover, tweak the ending to be less literal / sentimental, fix some of the FX matting, and you’d be left with one of the best serious SF films since 2001 .
I really wish the remaining books would be turn into movies and so the Clarke-Baxter' A Time Odyssey series.