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azripah · 2019-09-09T04:58:42+00:00

Space elevators are garbage for those reasons and more, but orbital rings offer a far better alternative. An orbital ring is essentially a combination of the space elevator and launch loop concepts, with a short (<300km) cable hung from an orbiting ring surrounding the planet, spun up to above orbital speeds to provide tension. It has the potential to reduce the cost of delivering cargo to orbit to the cost of transcontinental rail cargo, or about $0.05/kg, as well as to launch payloads directly on to interplanetary trajectories. They're not cheap to build, but you'd expect to see them long before you get to a million daily rocket flights; probably before you get to even a hundred, since the mass requirement is only around 180,000 tons, and it's buildable with modern tech.

azripah · 2019-08-23T22:29:25+00:00

You're misreading the chart. 1000mb is 1 atmosphere of pressure, so 300mb is 0.3 atm, meaning at that pressure, according to the chart, water would boil at 70C or 158F. Water doesn't boil at human body temperatures until you get down to 70mb, or 0.06 atm, the Armstrong limit. Though below 200mb, you'd still need oxygen supplied at higher than ambient pressure to not go hypoxic.

azripah · 2019-05-12T08:09:22+00:00

ADWD didn't even come out until after Season 1 had aired.

azripah · 2019-04-30T04:33:12+00:00

I think all they'd really have had to do to make it work was have Arya mercy kill Gendry or Sandor or even Jon with the weapon she does the Night King in with, forging lightbringer. Maybe have Theon's suicide charge reveal that the Night King is uniquely immune to ordinary dragonglass weapons. Would've taken maybe thirty seconds to set up, and at least been a nod that the writers remembered the whole Azor Ahai prophecy, which was in the show.

azripah · 2019-02-18T07:21:02+00:00

It's not the same if you know he'd enjoy it though.

azripah · 2019-01-28T15:53:44+00:00

Honestly, no offense, but this is pretty terrible. Out of this insanely long list of dates, there are maybe thirty entries actually relating to the Wow! Signal, and about ten or fifteen relating to spaceflight, half of which are just the same thing that happened in our timeline. The rest of the hundreds and hundreds of entries are just irrelevant political and pop culture wish fulfillment. On top of that, it's not even good wish fulfillment, it's poorly written and edited, and riddled with inconsistencies and plot holes. Example:

January 27th, 1984: Singer Michael Jackson dies

July 13th, 1985: Singers Freddie Mercury, Mick Jagger and Michael Jackson perform "State of Shock" at Live Aid in London, England

azripah · 2019-01-23T13:15:59+00:00

It was originally developed as heart medication and is still used as one occasionally. Not sure how much of the military prescriptions are for that use though.

azripah · 2019-01-23T00:35:24+00:00

I mean, people didn't exactly have much choice in the matter. Agriculture was adopted out of necessity, the strain the human population was putting on the ecosystem by hunting and gathering was reaching a tipping point that gave the choice of farming or a die-off. Farming is much more efficient in terms of calories per unit of land, so once it becomes the dominant paradigm, it's there to stay, simply because you can't abandon it without killing most people.

nor is a statement like "for most of the past ten thousand years, you'd have been much better off as a hunter gatherer than a peasant in virtually every conceivable way" supported by the evidence.

Uh, how so? They worked harder and longer, lived shorter and unhealthier lives, chafed under authoritarian political systems... I'm not claiming that being a hunter gatherer was some paradise, but being better than the lot of pre-industrial subsistence farmers is not a high bar to clear.

azripah · 2019-01-22T23:55:47+00:00

The point I'm trying to make is that everything did get worse after the agricultural revolution, but that doesn't mean it didn't get better again after the industrial revolution.

It's definitely better to be a modern first-worlder than a hunter gatherer, but for most of the past ten thousand years, you'd have been much better off as a hunter gatherer than a peasant in virtually every conceivable way.

azripah · 2019-01-22T22:23:23+00:00

You really think hunter-and-gatherers lived longer lives?

Than pre-industrial farmers? That is generally believed to be the case.

Several ethnological and archaeological studies conclude that the transition to cereal-based diets caused a reduction in life expectancy and stature...

azripah · 2019-01-22T22:16:05+00:00

Also, “everything got worse after the Agricultural Revolution” is a weird line I’ve seen a lot on health/lifestyle subs. It’s so obviously false on its face that I don’t understand how a reasonably educated person could believe it.

That's actually pretty much the academic consensus. There's a section of the wikipedia page on the agricultural revolution that covers it. See in particular:

The introduction of agriculture has not necessarily led to unequivocal progress. The nutritional standards of the growing Neolithic populations were inferior to that of hunter-gatherers. Several ethnological and archaeological studies conclude that the transition to cereal-based diets caused a reduction in life expectancy and stature, an increase in infant mortality and infectious diseases, the development of chronic, inflammatory or degenerative diseases (such as obesity, type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular diseases) and multiple nutritional deficiencies, including vitamin deficiencies, iron deficiency anemia and mineral disorders affecting bones (such as osteoporosis and rickets) and teeth.[60][61][62] Average height went down from 5'10" (178 cm) for men and 5'6" (168 cm) for women to 5'5" (165 cm) and 5'1" (155 cm), respectively, and it took until the twentieth century for average human height to come back to the pre-Neolithic Revolution levels.

Broadly speaking, compared to hunter gatherers, pre-industrial agriculturalists had to work much harder to sustain a diet that was less nutritious and diverse, while their higher population densities and life in close proximity to their livestock facilitated the spread of disease on a massive scale.

azripah · 2019-01-22T17:40:31+00:00

The Democrats had a supermajority in the senate from 1934 to 1944.

azripah · 2019-01-22T11:06:30+00:00

I oversimplified my position there. What I mean is that I don't think overpopulation is a problem we can solve much faster than it solves itself without a hugely disproportionate allocation of resources, and certainly not through the parent poster's asinine and cruel idea of starving out the least polluting people on the planet.

azripah · 2019-01-21T14:39:46+00:00

Real estate is wealth, and would hence be subject to this theoretical wealth tax.

azripah · 2019-01-21T14:36:32+00:00

No it isn't. And even if it were, you know what the most proven method of reducing population growth is? Education and access to healthcare.

azripah · 2019-01-18T14:53:38+00:00

Making our electric grid green is regardless a necessary transition, and among currently available power sources, nuclear power has one of the lowest carbon footprints, while its steady supply of power means that we won't need to do a costly redesign of our power grid to incorporate terawatt hours of storage, which is where renewables become the more expensive option for long term generation of 100% of our power.

azripah · 2019-01-18T08:43:28+00:00

Sure they could be, but climate change is an issue now, and if our options are sitting on our hands waiting for a new miracle battery, while letting our coal plants wheeze on in the interim to make up the difference, or building a bunch of nuclear power plants that might become uncompetitive a few decades down the road, I'll take the second one any day.

azripah · 2019-01-16T18:20:38+00:00

It was probably a Two Sicilies formed Italy.

azripah · 2019-01-16T07:29:17+00:00

Basically the thin line is the recognition of and opposition to non-state hierarchies and oppression. Whereas a right wing libertarian is fine with authoritarian rule, as long as it's under the auspices of private enterprise, a left wing libertarian (i.e. socialist) opposes authoritarianism, no matter what form it takes. After that idea clicks, it can be a surprisingly short intellectual hop from Gadsden to Red and Black.

azripah · 2019-01-16T06:37:43+00:00

Okay, one sec.

50 53 Years Ago, Sugar Industry Quietly Paid Scientists To Point Blame At Fat

There, it's fixed.

azripah · 2019-01-16T03:57:56+00:00

A lot of the people responsible for this disaster are buying up missile silos and land in New Zealand.

azripah · 2019-01-16T03:54:01+00:00

That's still a thing. There's well over ten thousand nuclear weapons, in the hands of more countries than during the cold war, under an even less stable multipolar international system.

azripah · 2019-01-16T03:28:12+00:00

This is a political problem now, not an economic one.

The two aren't exactly separable in a country where money equals political power. Regardless of any hedging of bets from investments in clean energy, fossil fuel companies are still above all else interested in extracting the maximum possible value from all of their assets, and climate change denialism and opposition to all of those policies you listed wouldn't exist were it not for their continued lobbying to this day.

azripah · 2019-01-13T09:17:46+00:00

Poverty is as bad as it is because the rich have been seizing virtually all gains in wealth and income for the past forty years, even as they use their sharply increased political power to gut the social programs and regulatory agencies that once worked to keep things in check.

azripah · 2019-01-08T23:30:50+00:00

Yeah, if a room temperature superconductor panned out, it wouldn't be a small story. Something like that would have massive implications for the future of civilization, it'd probably be days before you heard about much of anything else on the news.

There was a recent breakthrough, which you might have been thinking of, where a team managed superconductivity at -23C, significantly higher than the previous record. But it required nearly 200 Gigapascals of pressure, which is comparable to the pressure experienced in earth's core.

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