[checks URL]
[is not surprised]
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âI learned about the solar system in fourth gradeâ
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âI havenât thought about it since thenâ
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âThe world revolves around
the sunME, it revolves around MEâ -
âThe solar system only exists on schoolroom posters and as a memory exercise for childrenâ
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âThe arbitrary, meaningless information I learned in fourth grade must remain the same foreverâ
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Hereâs the MIT press release.
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well I should hope so. The alternative would be alarming.
Engineer 1: Well, weâve done it. We can scrub CO2 from the air, potententially solving the climate crisis.
Engineer 2: Whatâs the catch?
Engineer 1: Deployment canât begin until emissions reach 1600 ppmâŚ
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Yeah, but that has been state of the art. Mind you, I see this as only a mitigation strategy - the amount of scaling up needed to compensate for current carbon emissions would be mind boggling. I also think they are understating the costs - this captures the carbon, but more (possibly much more) is needed to lock up the CO2 thus captured.
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and, if you have an industrial source that needs scrubbing, concentrations can be a bit denser than the average.
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This is where it might work, though. More CO2, more leaves to the battery stack. It sounds fairly linear.
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Considering that theyâve been announcing discoveries of extrasolar planets, without knowing all of those details about them, it makes sense. Why have different standards? Doesnât really matter though, itâs all pedantic whether you call it a planet, planetoid, dwarf planet, or leprechaun ball.
A bigger transgression was that in the Mutant Chronicles fiction, finding an alien artifact on Pluto was what started all the madness, but in the movie adaptation, they just accidentally blasted through to a buried vault right here on Earth and never even did anything with the other planets.
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I think NASA should keep an open mind, and ask for a few billion to probe Erisâtabulate any similarities etc.
Unfortunately Eris is in the wrong part of the solar system,
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The article says the polymer is layered on carbon nanotubes. Scaling that up seems really difficult.
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Not necessarily. The thing modularises neatly. Need more capacity, add more leaves. The nanotubes arenât particularly difficult to make, and they arenât requiring something finicky like single walls, I gather.
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all we need to know are masses and orbital periods, the math was done decades ago
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Because as Iâve said above, the IAU has to keep track of literally a hundred thousand objects, so itâs extremely important to them to have some sort rules around their nomenclature? And terminology matters for conveying our understanding the solar system. And in this case, the choice they made is a well-reasoned one to reflect that understanding, one I could have recommended a decade earlier from the stuff I loved learning about what I was little. It in a very literal sense is telling you âhey look, there is more than just Pluto out there!â
And for the record, this is still close to what we know of extrasolar planets too. When you detect something by how it wobbles its star, thatâs inherently something with an orbit cleared of anything similar. Things detected by eclipses can be less clear, and on rare occasion weâve found a couple in the same orbit. But certainly none of them would be belt objects. Right now we see belts by infrared excess from the dust they generate; we are a long way from being able to find individual objects in them at all.
But of course this isnât the point. After all, every single one of these stories has someone who says âwell, then, there are no planets because none of them have cleared their orbitsâ. Which means every single one of these stories is based on someone who couldnât be bothered to so much as understand the wikipedia entry on orbit clearing before sounding off. And then they all make side points like how Pluto has a moon, but they never mention Idaâs moon or Titanâs atmosphere or Tritonâs origin or Makemake or Plutinos at all, because who cares about all that science stuff weâve been discovering.
No, this is about American boomer nostalgia, the only thing other than money thatâs still sacrosanct. And scientists didnât respect that, so now instead of being excited about what weâre learning, we need to keep handwringing and pretending itâs somehow a mistake for the rest of the generation. I hate it so much.
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tee hee.
I read a sci-fi story as a kid that centered around the inhabitants of a mining asteroid named Fredâs Ball. it wad not named after the discoverer, nor the mine owner, nor any of the miners themselves.
rather, it was named because, from space, it resembled Fred Flintstoneâs bowling ball.
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theyâre not getting âmy very educated mother just served us nine pizzasâ back
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I think Iâve forgotten the old and new mnemonics for geological periods. Except of course trustworthy Ediacaran, Cambrian, Ordovician, Silurian, Devonian, Carboniferous, Permian, Triassic, Jurassic, Cretaceous, Paleogene, Neogene, and in some versions Quaternary.
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It would seem for the later generations, âmy very educated mother just served us nuggetsâ
This is based on my siblings children who still - in that later 20s - find chicken nuggets a proper meal.
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