UFO 🛸

That’s The West. They have dragons.

Wales? Them’s pit ponies son.

you might not realise how much of the north there is, if you live down south.

While when driving; there is the south, a bit of a gap, the lake district, more a of gap, the highlands – then there is a lot more of it than you thought. I almost reached the top before driving back down south again.

I seem to recall that when the weather forecasts started using weather satellite images, they used a map of the British Isles which was distorted to reflect the view from a satellite located somewhat closer to the equator. This had the effect of shrinking “the North and Scotland”.

I’m not sure the current maps are any different to this.

More recently when driving from Northampton to Aberdeen for Christmas, Carlisle or Edinburgh were about halfway, depending on route, and there’s a lot more of Scotland north of Aberdeen.

Grow your own Rick…

The reason it took forever to write that article is because I was paying more attention to the show broadcast.

The idea is to put some holes in the bottom (on purpose!), then some Charlotte potatoes and some soil. When it comes time to earth them up, some more potatoes and soil, and just build it up like that in… I don’t know, maybe four layers?

Decided the “bucket” idea was possible, especially with a free bucket?

If we take the observed difference (9%) and the general speed difference (5%), the average of the two is 7%. We’ll work with 7%, and note that this would mean that while the odometer reads 43,643km, subtracting 7% would imply an actual distance travelled of 40,588km.

Said before:

Divide by 1.07 (or divide by 1.09, or 1.05 – your other figures)

Among rock climbers Sheffield is neither north nor south but is referred to the Centre of the Universe.
It’s its abundance of gritstone crags, with some decent limestone for the the hardcore.

Among rock climbers Sheffield is neither north nor south but is referred to the Centre of the Universe.

I’ve climbed on Stanage Edge, but I gave up climbing after finishing uni in 1971. I carried on caving for a long time. Would go again happily enough, but haven’t actually been for probably twenty years. Main caving grounds were South Wales for a while, then Yorkshire Dales for a long time.

But surely Skye is the Centre of Universe for rock climbers?

Decided the “bucket” idea was possible, especially with a free bucket?

Free bucket helps, but mostly running out of space. Yeah, I know, a billion acres, but it needs to be prepared first…
https://youtu.be/lfu5BFVkhNw

Free bucket helps, but mostly running out of space. Yeah, I know, a billion acres, but it needs to be prepared first…

Chucking the used soil etc from the bucket into the ground prepared for other crops helps with next year. Then using fresh soil for next batch of taters and always avoiding re-use of the same soil for more potato growth for a few years

I have heard Rotherham described (by someone who lived in Sheffield) as the armpit of England. It is too far North for an alternative anatomical reference.

At the moment, there is very little evidence that the human race cannot survive almost indefinitely, unless you have a very static understanding of very dynamic processes.

The survival of the human race isn’t in a lot of doubt, short of an unsurvivable global heatwave – which is possible, but unlikely in the short to medium term

There are certainly some catastrophic scenarios like a major asteroid impact, but I don’t know of any physcially plausible mechanism that would lead to an unsurvivable global heatwave. A new ice age however is something we should fear, although the technology is already here to survive this.

but the survival of human civilization, and the continuation of human populations in the billions, is much less certain, even in the medium term.

Of course it depends on your definition of “civilization” and “medium term”. But at the moment, it looks like world population is maxing out somewhere at 10 billion people. And I would expect that survival of civilization would be easily possible with 20 billion or more.

Of course the doomers have been predicting the imminent mass extinction of humans for a long time now for various time scales (and Malthus was certainly not the first of them). But I never saw a credible scenario for that without invoking a global external catastrophic event. And the short-term history since the beginning of industrialization quite clearly shows that life has got a lot better for the vast majority of people, and technology enables us to support near indefinite growth.

Call me an optimist :-)

Call me an optimist :-)

I think a lot of the other (non-human) inhabitants would see your predictions as pessimistic 8-{

Humans don’t seem to know what caused the last mini Ice age about 20000 years ago – and why it receded about 10000 years ago.

There are certainly some catastrophic scenarios like a major asteroid impact, but I don’t know of any physcially plausible mechanism that would lead to an unsurvivable global heatwave.

Major impacts of heavenly bodies are infrequent. The odds of one happening within the lifetime of our species are quite small.

The probability of a substantial warming of the planet due to anthropogenic production of greenhouse gases is close to 100% – indeed it’s well under way. Exactly how much warming will happen is very uncertain, and how much would be enough to finish civilization is also uncertain. How rapidly will sea level rise, how badly will sea level rise and unpredictable changes in climate (and consequently weather) affect agricultural production, and how well will civilization cope in the fairly likely event that food production is quite badly hit?

I’m not saying that’s certain death for civilization, but I’m sure it’s a very significant risk – far more so than asteroid strike.

I doubt it would finish our species off – but it would very possibly reduce our numbers drastically, and leave us as savages ekeing out an existence among the ruins of civilization and in the gradually reinvading wilderness.

Optimism <- How much we know now that our forebears did not.
Pessimism <- How much we still do not know that we need to for survival.
Pessimism <- Who are the we that know or knew? What little we know is known only by a few.

Thinking about the thread title. If we (humans) can fly a UFO on another planet, why do we not think that stories about UFOs are not real?

Mind you, we still have some way to go to match technical abilities of the alien UFOs seen here!

If we (humans) can fly a UFO on another planet, why do we not think that stories about UFOs are not real?

Because there are rather a lot of orders of magnitude difference between the technology needed to fly a drone on a neighbouring planet, and the technology needed to visit a planet belonging to even the next nearest star. Perhaps a species with an expectation of (individual) life in the tens or hundreds of millennia might stand a chance – see http://clive.semmens.org.uk/Fiction/TempleZ/Anomalous.html

Nuclear engines :-)

Nuclear engines :-)

You’re still orders of magnitude short. Actually, nuclear power isn’t really particularly useful for rockets, where reaction mass is more of any issue than energy source.

Quantum Uncertainty. We might be here, we might be there. We won’t know until we dig up a star chart and look.

I believe that’s how the Warp Drive works, Rick.

nuclear power isn’t really particularly useful for rockets

Something that really bugs me about The Expanse (other than it looking like the spaceships are flying backwards) is…….

Why are the rockets always firing? What is the point of that? Space is a vacuum. Short of hitting something, there’s no atmosphere so no friction so nothing to slow the craft down.
Would it not suffice to fire up the rocket, get the ship up to speed, then turn the rocket off and let inertia do the rest?

Would it not suffice to fire up the rocket, get the ship up to speed, then turn the rocket off and let inertia do the rest?

Absolutely right. Although the most efficient rockets use a linear accelerator to accelerate your reaction mass to a very high velocity – efficient in terms of reaction mass consumption, that is, which is your limiting factor – and such a rocket has very low thrust, so you do have to fire it for a long time to get up to a decent velocity. But not all the way to the stars!

And of course such a rocket is only any use once you’re in free fall – you can’t get up out of a gravity well with one.

There was one idea to use small nuclear charges – firing them out the rear of the craft – bit like firing a pump action shotgun in a rowing boat.

There are design’s using a small reactor as a afterburner in a jet engine – the Yanks had a go at something like it the sixty’s – but dropped it.
It seems the idea might be taking up again.

RR seems to working on something.

The Russians seem to be playing with the idea – a radioactive leak in Siberia points at it.

[Edit]

There was one idea to use small nuclear charges – firing them out the rear of the craft

Project Orion, it was called. Bloody stupid idea. The very smallest nuclear charges would require the biggest springs and dampers you could possibly imagine between the “pusher plate” and the main body of the craft, to avoid everyone and everything in the main body being pulverized by the pulse of acceleration every time a charge went off.

Using reactors as afterburners in jet engines makes no sense either: any kind of thermal engine is limited by the temperature in the final expansion chamber and the supply of reaction mass, not by the energy source, because the velocity of the exhaust is limited by the temperature. To get a higher exhaust velocity – and hence economize on reaction mass – you have to go to a non-thermal engine. At present, that means a linear accelerator, until someone has some other idea.

The use of radioactive materials at present is long-term energy supplies at very low power for deep space probes, mostly for their communication systems. These aren’t reactors – they’re radioactive isotopes decaying, supplying heat to thermopiles. Tens of watts for decades, not rocket engines.