Good news, but for me there was little doubt that Europa had an ocean of some kind. Jupiter’s tidal forces would generate enough pressure to make some of Europa’s ice melt under the surface.
Nice. Did you read the comments. Maybe Pluto has a liquid ocean as well. Remember the Seymour Simon books from the 1980s
Also, Earth’s moon is almost the same size as Mercury. Why isn’t Mercury considered a satellite or a dwarf planet? My theory is that at one time in history, Mercury was Venus’ moon, but because of their proximity to the Sun, the Sun took Mercury from Venus, thus both of them not having a moon. Bet if Earth were a little close to the Sun, the Moon would be orbiting the Sun as well…
Mercury is neither a satellite or a dwarf planet because our definitions say so: things that orbit the Sun aren’t called satellites and nothing else is in Mercury’s orbit so it’s not a dwarf planet. If it seems a bit arbitrary, that’s because it is. Try not to think about it too much, because scientists are not always the best at giving names (supersymmetrical quark => squark? gtfo…)
Also yes, when you try to orbit two bodies that are too close, all orbits become unstable. There’s a critical radius inside of which stable orbits become physically impossible (Click me!) So yes, if the Earth were a little closer, we would have no moon.
But if we have no moon, what would we call showing someone our bare ass?
There will be a time in the distant future where we have no moon. Science needs to solve this problem NOW.
So, you agree that Mercury once orbited Venus in the past?
No, I don’t, but I do think it’s plausible. I just have no idea.
Can’t post up a descriptive summary for now, maybe during the weekend. TLDR is: we’re now past 400ppm CO2 in the atmosphere and are likely to never go below it in the future. 400ppm is an important tipping point for certain long-term ramifications. Read for more details.
Lol turned on a UGA(Universal Gas Analyzer) and took a sample of atmospheric gas just to make sure it worked correctly. CO2 is in much higher concentration than almost everything else. Quite frightening seeing it quantitatively. I’m on the side of Co2 in the atmosphere is a huge problem.
That article is superficial, and the title is bait. It’s not a tipping point at all. Also the measurement was for Antarctica, which has no plants or trees to uptake any surplus of CO2.
“Corrections: This story originally stated that 13 million people are projected to lose their homes due to rising sea levels, and has been updated to say that number reflects US populations alone. It has also been altered to reflect that most scientists say the carbon levels at 400 parts per million are a “milestone,” not a “tipping point.” We also altered the language in the extinction paragraph to reflect that these are estimates from The Nature Conservancy. And we added that thermal expansion is another cause of sea level rise, and corrected the implication that ocean acidification was a cause of coral bleaching.”
The author needs to do better research.
Yeah sorry, I clicked the link and found I left the intermediate site in. Read the linked blog post from Scripps Institute of Oceanography, that’s the one I should have linked. The measurements were for Mauna Loa, but your point still stands, yes.
Anyway, I’m rarely up for talking about climate change, let alone some article about climate change, so I’ll just leave my post be and that’s the last I’ll say about it.
In other news, I am just swamped with work all the time that I don’t get to post here anymore, but I’ve been reading tidbits off the Physics StackExchange.
One of the new things I learned: how we know dark matter isn’t baryonic, and must not be hidden planets or MACHOs or anything like that. I’m on mobile so it’s inconvenient to link to anything right now, maybe later.
Also another thing I might link to later: insight into what c really is – not the *speed * of light or anything, but just a parameter that arises because of our imperfect units.
Fundamentally, Lorentz transformations show that space and time aren’t different things, just two sides of a single thing. But because of the way our meter and second were defined, the equations relating space and time need a scaling factor. Because it relates space and time, dimensional analysis shows that the scaling factor must be a unit of space over a unit of time: something more familiar to us as a unit of speed.
There is nothing inherently special about light, such that its speed is such an important universal constant; it’s just that a certain “constraint” or scaling factor governs changes in space against changes in time, which dictates “how fast” causal influence can traverse a distance. And it just so happens that electromagnetism is one of our known interactions that transmits causal influence, which hardcaps the speed of electromagnetic waves to our scaling factor (which we subsequently call the speed of light).
I don’t post here but just stopping by to say that I enjoy people’s thought processes in here and it’s good to see people in SRK thinking about how things work and why.
@ThePurpleBunny I’ll read the article but I’m laughing a bit because biological processes already do the same thing for free.
EDIT: Read it and it sounds very hand wavy, general and impractical. Especially considering mass production isn’t really possible with something like that.
THIS TINY GLASS ‘SUPERMAN MEMORY CRYSTAL’ STORES 360TB FOR ETERNITY
Intersting new observations about the Dark Energy