New Mars Forums

RobS:-

    A herd of dairy cattle, eh?
    Now you're talking!  :up:   

Considering there are probably hundreds of billions of rocks strewn across the Martian surface, of all conceivable shapes and sizes, a hook-shaped rock is virtually certain to exist somewhere. (Not that I find your particualr hook-shaped rock all that convincing, to be honest.)
    In fact, if you looked hard enough, you'd probably find a rock which looks like Michaelangelo's 'David', too. That wouldn't necessarily mean Martians had copied Italian Renaissance sculpture, or that Michaelangelo himself was a Martian!  :;):

    I think you need higher standards of evidence.   

Srmeaney:-

    Are we talking about the death of Harold Holt in 1967?
    If so, am I right in thinking you mean to somehow implicate the United States of America in his death?

    Here's something about him from Google, which I found at http://www.naa.gov.au/Publications/fact … .html]THIS SITE. :-

    Various conspiracy theories surfaced about Holt's disappearance, including the idea that he was kidnapped by the Chinese in a submarine! 
    Many conspiracy theories could just conceivably be true and most of them are far more exciting than the mundane official explanations put forward. In this case, Occam's Razor guides us inexorably to the conclusion that Harold Holt went swimming, got into difficulties in rough seas, and drowned.
    Plain and simple. 

Yes, I'll go along with that - most definitely.
    Happy 33rd Birthday, CM !!   
    And may the remaining 2/3rds of your life be better than the first 1/3rd  :up:

[ P.S.
    MadGrad:-

    Yeah, but how do you know being dead isn't neater still - no one's come back to tell us?!  ???    
    As Isaac Asimov said:-
        Life is pleasant;
        Death is peaceful.
        It's the transition that's troublesome!
                 So at the very least, it's peaceful. And maybe it's cool!    ]

"Far-away fractures with strange-sounding names..."
Cindy:-

    Hmmm. I think I catch your drift, Julie .. sorry, Cindy.!
    (Planetary science is one of my favourite things, too.)

    Gas-giant planets in Sol's outer reaches;
    Big moons like Titan with rivers and beaches;
    Far-away fractures with strange-sounding names..
    Dione's features in black and white frames.

    Palely lit surfaces, craters, and patches;
    Strange-looking fissures like pussy-cat scratches;
    Plateaus all streaky and frozen in time;
    If you're not awestruck it's surely a crime.
       
    Planet-wide storms,
    Gossamer rings,
    All this beauty rare,
    I think of them any time I'm feeling blue,
    And then I don't seem to care.
                                                                         :laugh:

DonPanic:-

    My God, CC!
    That's twice Donpanic has said things I can agree with or warmly encourage.
    That's it!! .. I'm off to make an appointment with a psychiatrist.      

Hi Reddragon.
    I wasn't referring to any specific experiments when I said "stumbled across something fundamental" with cold fusion, just the general idea that, in the course of investigating electro-chemistry, we appear to have found reactions perhaps better explained by nuclear processes.
    The heat produced in some of the experiments simply cannot be explained by chemical changes; the only processes we know of which can release that much energy are nuclear.
    But it's not impossible that the energy is emerging from reactions which are connected with fusion but are actually something new - perhaps something which could open up new fields of study all together.

    However, this isn't really the thread in which we should be discussing cold fusion. May I direct your attention to http://www.newmars.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=3084]THIS THREAD?   
    (Especially the article I linked in my post dated: Mar. 25 2005, 06:51, which I think is quite informative.)

On this day in 1946, a good woman did us all a favour and presented the world with ...
    ... Wait for it ..
    ... Yes ..
    ... It was ..
                .... REX CARNES!!!    :band:

    Happy Birthday, Rex!   

   [P.S. We don't see you around here nearly often enough.]

Yeah, Spacenut.
    It would be interesting to have the Mars Science Laboratory rover in the line-up, too. A parade of past, present, and future! 

Bill:-

    This is absolutely correct and a suitable parry to my point about Gaia. I've thought about it often myself. And the point about Chinese coal is well taken too, fitting in well with a similar concern of mine in Brazil - how to stop the relentless logging and clearing of the Amazon basin on environmental grounds, when we First Worlders did the same thing ourselves in our respective countries before the word 'ecology' was thought of.
    It appears to me that petty international rivalries and 'primate politics' will probably cloud these issues long enough to allow very serious environmental degradation to occur before a recuperative strategy is agreed upon. China is, as we speak, engaged in mega-projects like the Three Gorges Dam. Projects like these were undertaken, with disastrous results, by the Soviet Union back in the 50s and 60s - go and look at the Aral sea .. or what's left of it. God knows what ecological mayhem will result from China's efforts!  And you can't tell them to stop because you'd simply be trying to use your 'evil imperialistic ways' to impose your 'evil capitalistic will' on the good socialist people of China.  :bars:
Bill:-

    This was discussed on the program I watched about global dimming and found to be untenable. Apart from the health issues of all that particulate matter in the air, it turns out that there's a problem with rainfall patterns also.
    As we all know, dust and pollen particles act as nuclei for the formation of raindrops. When enough water gathers around one of these nuclei, the mass of that water becomes sufficient to overcome the support of the air molecules around it and it falls to the ground. But we've added so many particles to the upper air, there's not enough water available to coat all those particles with enough mass of water to reach that threshold and allow the droplet to fall as rain. i.e. The water is spread out over too many particles to reach the critical mass required for rainfall and the water remains aloft.
    It's been found that the great Ethiopian famine of the 1980s is directly attributable to a shifting of the monsoonal rain belt away from those arid regions by the particulate problem inhibiting rainfall.
    We really can't go on pumping particulates into the upper atmosphere for these reasons. And yet, to eliminate those particles risks a surge in global temperatures.

    Your "engineering fix", Bill, may be all that's left to us. But I doubt the Third World will be interested if they perceive any such fix as stifling their right to progress or imposing economic restraints they feel they can't afford.

    That's why I'm excited about the possibility that, in cold fusion, we may have stumbled across something fundamental that would, if it can be exploited, revolutionize energy production and availability worldwide.
    Many years ago, in one of Sir Arthur C. Clarke's essays, he pointed out that, with abundant cheap clean energy, everything would change! It would mean plenty of everything for everybody; a genuine socialist Utopia that would actually work this time.

    My view is that we would need to simultaneously go about reducing the numbers of humans on this planet by strict birth control - something I've been strenuously advocating since 1969, when I learned that we'd just passed the 3 billion mark. If we could get the human population down to, say, 1 billion, our ability as a species to withstand a sudden climate shift or similar natural calamity would be very greatly enhanced. And, as Cindy has been saying for years now, a massive drive to encourage condom use all over the planet would be enormously helpful in the fight against AIDS also. (I have serious issues with the Catholic Church about this but that's another story.)
                                                                             ???

    By the way, Cindy, I'm flattered by your support and your compliments (blush, blush    ) but I don't take Bill's schoolyard baiting as seriously as all that:-

    Neither one of us has taken taunts like that seriously since about the third grade, I suppose, and it was all very tongue-in-cheek!
    Mind you, being accused of thinking the way the damned French would want you to think, is enough to make any self-respecting person stop and reconsider!!  :laugh:

Discovered http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/WEBONLY/re … .html]THIS ARTICLE just now. It's better than the New Scientist article, too.
    Looking good! 

Well, Bill. Just to show I can actually vary my stance on an issue, I've recently become more concerned than I used to be about global warming.

    The phenomenon of 'global dimming' has recently impacted on my consciousness via a T.V. documentary. Forgive me if this is all old news to everyone but, apparently, the amount of sunlight reaching Earth's surface has lessened by an average of some 10% in the last 50 years. Antarctica's been getting about 9% less solar energy and Britain some 16% less, if I remember some of the figures correctly. As far as I know, this conclusion was arrived at using light metering techniques.
    Two Australian scientists, aware of this little-publicized anomaly in Earth's insolation but researching something different, serendipitously came across data about something called the 'pan evaporation rate' (PER). This is simply the amount of water that evaporates out of a pan every 24 hours. It appears there have been farming people in Australia, and I presume elsewhere, who've inspected a pan of water every morning for decades, and recorded how much water is required to top up the level to a given mark - something to do with drought investigations and associated record-keeping, I believe. (They deserve a medal for dogged persistence and the two scientists said as much on T.V.! )
    Anyhow, the scientists noticed that the PER has been going down since the 1950s and they also determined that, among various factors which might contribute to this reduction, like temperature and humidity, far and away the biggest factor is sunlight intensity.
    They did calculations involving the amount of water evaporating and the energy required to achieve that amount of evaporation, and lo and behold, they worked out that the figures for the PER were precisely consistent with a 10% reduction in sunlight at the surface.
    This completely different experiment, running for 50+ years and never intended as anything whatsoever to do with the notion of declining insolation, had neatly and exactly corroborated the separate work of others on global dimming!   ???

    I think you will see where this is leading now.
    According to climatologists, Earth's average surface temperature has risen by about 0.7 deg.C in the last 150 years, purportedly because of man-made global warming. The small size of this increase has allowed some people, including myself to some extent, to regard global warming as less serious than some others have claimed.
    In my own defence, I have come out on the side of caution and backed genuine calls for CO2 emission controls, though I freely admit my catch-cry has been "the sky isn't falling!"
    But if this 0.7 deg.C rise in average temperature has occurred despite a drop of 10% in Earth's insolation over the last half century, that puts the whole question in a potentially very different light (literally and metaphorically)!

    Of course, global dimming is not because of huge fluctuations in the Sun's output; astronomers know this is not the case. It turns out that the problem lies with particulate pollution in the atmosphere literally shading the surface.
    And here's the conundrum. If we reduce particulate pollution, and we've been making some progress in this direction in recent years, we might well get back the 10% of insolation we've lost.
    But imagine what that might do to global temperatures!
    Those particles may have been masking the true extent of man-made global warming and it's difficult to say how far that warming might have gone already, in the absence of those particles.

    On the upside, I still have a great deal of faith in 'Gaia'. My gut feeling is that Earth and its ecosystem, in concert, are very good at regulating the environment - probably within well constrained limits.
    It may well be that, even with full insolation, global temperatures still wouldn't rise much more than they have already and may never be the threat they're touted to be. But the goalposts have been shifted somewhat and my level of concern has risen. On a scale of 1-10, my anxiety level has gone up from about 2 to about 4.

    The need for an alternative to fossil fuels, in my opinion, just got more pressing than ever before.

    [However, it's not impossible that the cavalry might be coming over the hill. I'm going to try and find the old thread about Cold Fusion and relay some recent information from New Scientist magazine.    ]