71–80 of 110 posts
If we took a fleet of tug-boats and towed this ice to the Middle East, I wonder how long the fresh water would last?
An interesting theoretical thought exercise. The money and fuel bill for tugboats sufficient to move that would probably be better spent on massive fields of photovoltaics and electricity-intensive seawater desalination equipment...
> "I have spent so much time now looking at the satellite images, and I really love this ice shelf, it would be such a tragic thing to see this thing go." Reminds me of Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy. We humans can fall in love with large chunks of ice just by looking at them long enough. How will we ever bring ourselves to terraform another planet?
Bringing ourselves to terraform another planet will be very easy -- the one who pushes the button will be one who hasn't looked at the planet long enough to be attached to it.
If you're ready to do something about this, consider volunteering for http://brandnewcongress.org
Alternatively: Use public transit, encourage friends and family not to be wasteful, invest in alternative fuel sources, vote for people who will use taxpayer dollars to invest in alternative fuel sources, so on and so forth. What is anybody else going to do that you can't do yourself already?
The decisions that can actually change something are made on government level and depend on believes ingrained into culture / society.
A nice example is Israel and it's shortage of water. There, children are educated from very early on (kingergarden) to be careful with and conserve water wherever possible. It's a common and accepted fact that they have little water and must preserve it.
But changing this kind of thinking for something way less observable and direct, such as global warming, is harder. And needs a unified effort by government, education and media. And takes decades.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why is it so important that we terraform other planets? Is it really a desirable thing to spread across the solar system and beyond like mold on stale bread?
Well, it’s important to the mold.
Could we be... just a means for mold to spread across the universe?
If we took a fleet of tug-boats and towed this ice to the Middle East, I wonder how long the fresh water would last?
Not easy. This was a problem my high school math tutor, a glaciologist [0],[1] discussed with me one evening doing some applied math.
From memory, using a tug to pull an iceberg from Antartica to the Australian mainland would be difficult because of the forces involved. As the tug would try to pull the iceberg, the iceberg itself is acted on by other forces (gravity, currents). The tug pulling the iceberg, connected by a cable would be acted on by the forces applied by the iceberg resulting in the berg and tug rotating in circles around each other. [2] Adding another tug has similar problems.
The idea isn't stupid, it's just the physics get in the way of achieving a result.
[0] 1970 - 2003 http://www.antarctica.gov.au/news/2003/antarctic-ice-man-and...
[1] 2003 - 2016 https://rmdb.research.utas.edu.au/public/rmdb/q/indiv_detail...
[2] If memory serves me, Jo used 'moments of inertia' to describe this problem ~ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_moments_of_inertia
From the article, regarding sea level rise: When ice shelves lose large chunks, it does not raise sea level because these bodies are already afloat. However, the loss of an ice shelf can speed up the seaward flow of the nonfloating glacial ice behind it, and this ice can in turn contribute to sea-level rise. Researchers have estimated that the loss of all the ice that the Larsen C ice shelf currently holds back would…
The faster that levels rise the sooner we are to get off our collective asses and make a difference.
They say humans won't act until it's too late... Luckily, it's too late!
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Bringing ourselves to terraform another planet will be very easy -- the one who pushes the button will be one who hasn't looked at the planet long enough to be attached to it.
Isn't it already common knowledge that Mars cant be terraformed? No magnetosphere, cold core too iirc (and thats related to the moons being tidally locked.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terraforming_of_Mars#Protectin...
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Isn't it already common knowledge that Mars cant be terraformed? No magnetosphere, cold core too iirc (and thats related to the moons being tidally locked.
It was speculated that it is possible to create magnetosphere, by creating giant magnet :) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terraforming_of_Mars#Protectin...
Thanks, in more ways than one.
> "I have spent so much time now looking at the satellite images, and I really love this ice shelf, it would be such a tragic thing to see this thing go." Reminds me of Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy. We humans can fall in love with large chunks of ice just by looking at them long enough. How will we ever bring ourselves to terraform another planet?
Why is it so important that we terraform other planets? Is it really a desirable thing to spread across the solar system and beyond like mold on stale bread?
If you are happy for the end of the species, then that's fine.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You don't experiment on your production planet. Mars could be a decent staging planet!
In software, the testing environment usually isn't more expensive by several orders of magnitude.