Sergey: In Soviet Russia, Rocket Detonates You! 146
theodp writes "'We were all foolish enough to go on this adventure,' Google co-founder Sergey Brin told the assembled Brainiacs at Google's Solve for X event last week, recalling the time he and Google co-founder Larry Page took their Gulfstream on a $100K journey to watch a 2008 Soyuz launch in Baikonur, Kazakhstan. 'If the rocket blows up, we're all dead,' Sergey overheard a Russian guard say. 'It was incredibly close,' Sergey continued. 'We drove in toward this rocket and there were hundreds of people all going the other way. It was really an astonishing sight. If you ever have the opportunity, I highly recommend it. It's really not at all comparable to the American launches that I've seen...because those are like five miles away behind a mountain, and the Russians are not as concerned with safety.' Sergey received film credit for the recently-opened Man on a Mission, a documentary on the Russian Soyuz mission that wound up putting Ultima creator Richard Garriott into orbit (for $30 million) instead of changing the course of Google history."
Not Necessarily Dead (Score:5, Informative)
In 1983, a Soyuz rocket exploded on the launch pad. The crew was lifted to safety by the launch escape system, and there don't seem to be reports about any casualties on the ground due to this this incident.
Re:Not Necessarily Dead (Score:4, Insightful)
Well, not all casualties had to be reported in 1983 in USSR, after all, when Chernobyl blew up they covered it up for days and days, people came out to the 1st of May parade (International labour day was always celebrated with big parades then), nobody stopped them coming out even in the surrounding cities and it was very dangerous for people in Kiev for example because of the wind pattern.
However Brin says they came too close to the rocket, and people don't have to be that close during launch, there is always a command bunker near the launch site.
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I added up all the fuel weight, less than 400 tons. You could be quite close to that exploding, really, less than 500 m and survive.
Okay, so you could survive :)
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nedelin_catastrophe [wikipedia.org]
This one had over a hundred dead.
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In 1960 R-16 exploded on the launch pad. Chief designer and 78-150 spectators/staff killed. There don't seem to be official reports about any casualties on the ground until 1989.
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Luckily, Sergey Brin didn't report that contrary to protocol, he was forced by Soviet commanders to attempt hasty launch pad repairs on the upper stages a rocket while it was still fully fueled with volatile hypergolic propellants.
Even luckier, more than 20 years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, his secret potential demise hasn't become one of the most widely known no-longer-secret episodes in the history of the cold war.
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I'm sure it was awe inspiring, but... (Score:5, Interesting)
you wouldnt find me close to a rocket launch
Here's a compilation of videos from a failed Soyuz launch - it got up off the launch pad and then came right back down, very close to the spectators. One person died.
Foton M-1 launch failure [youtube.com]
If you hadnt guessed, the video contains lots of expletives.
Wow! That's what Sergey's talking about! (Score:2)
Amazing how quickly the exhiliration @3:30 [youtube.com] gives way to fear and panic @4:15 [youtube.com]!
If the rocket blows up, we're all dead (Score:3)
A fellow guard responded, "Yeah, if it doesn't fall down on us, Putin will. Reality that doesn't agree with his propaganda of sending rockets to Proxima Centauri and winning 99% of the vote for it? Gulagistan for the both of us!" The guard recounted his story on condition of anonymity to avoid the ex-KGBer's customary punishment of death by judo.
America to the Rescue (Score:5, Funny)
err (Score:3)
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I am lucky enough to work at KSC and I've seen the last couple dozen launches from the VAB parking lot which is 3 miles away. One thing to remember is that the Soyuz puts out about 800,000 lbf of thrust at liftoff. The Shuttle puts out close to 7 million lbf of thrust. So you need to be a bit further away. It's still so loud that you can feel loose clothing shake on your body and triggers all aftermarket alarm systems in the parking lot.
Baikonur Cosmodrome was always chaotic. (Score:2)
hahahaahah (Score:2)
All top brass move with impunity everywhere and they always have a sidekick or two in tow
you seem to be speaking from experience.
Slashdot goes reality (Score:3)
And rich men spending their money on junkets and toys is news how Slashdot? What's next, keeping up the Kardashians?
NASA launches can be like this (Score:3)
(or will be when they get back into the heavy lifting business.)
Get a press pass to a NASA launch. You're close enough that the temperature in the room almost immediately goes up by 20 degrees. Fortunately you're in a reinforced bunker.
Truck Number (Score:2)
Two very high ranking members of Google not only stand dangerously close to tons of high explosives but also ride on the same executive jet. If they had both died Google could have been hosed.
what the heck? (Score:2)
What on earth this puff piece doing in Science section?
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in soviet slashdot , first post gets you
Re:Greenhouse gas emissions (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm going to go with yes, Mr. Emissions Police.
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Yes, you are.
Re:Greenhouse gas emissions (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Greenhouse gas emissions (Score:5, Informative)
Get your facts straight. USSR has existed for 73 years and despite many people think otherwise, Stalin died in 1953 and Stalinism died with him, thanks to Khrushchev.
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"Leave it to Brezhnev"
I like the 4-episode series where he accidentally gets his eyebrows burned off.
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really? I liked the later story arc where he get liquored up and goes into the tat parlor and gets the map of the USA tatooed on his forehead. then bribes his mother to say it was "birthmark" . pure genius for the writers
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Get your facts straight. USSR has existed for 73 years and despite many people think otherwise, Stalin died in 1953 and Stalinism died with him, thanks to Khrushchev.
If you're telling me that after the rule of Brezhnev, Andropov, Chernenko, Putin, Medvedev, and maybe Putin again... that the spirit of autocracy died with Stalin, I suggest you open your eyes. Look at the history of Russia: long periods of harsh rule interspaced with brief periods of liberalization, only to be replaced soon with autocracy again.
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Comment removed (Score:4, Informative)
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Yes. My immediate thought was on the "...the Russians are not as concerned with safety."
But by all means, we should entrust manned launches to them.
We really, really need to further accelerate devlopment of the Delta Heavy and Atlas Heavy families of rockets, and get them man rated. Stat.
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Re:Greenhouse gas emissions (Score:4, Interesting)
not if it leads to those with a lot of money to invest more in lift systems, and get us off this planet, so we have no need to rape it anymore. or to discover a new propulsion system as a side effect of the research that can change transportation, something that doesn't pollute the atmosphere or politically destabilize portions of the world
it's ok to have a conscience. it's not ok to have no imagination
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Seriously, the annual oil production of Germany (about 3mio tons and perfectly insignificant in the grant scheme of things) would be enough to put as much stuff into orbit as people put
Re:Greenhouse gas emissions (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Greenhouse gas emissions (Score:5, Interesting)
The cleanest rocket fuel is liquid hydrogen with liquid oxygen as the 'oxydizer'.
And where does that hydrogen comes from? Magic elves?
No, as the post you utterly failed to understand already said, it comes from turning Methane into H2 and CO2. Or turning Coal into electricity and then using that to split water. Not very environmentally friendly at all.
Simply moving the pollution from one place to another is not being more environmentally friendly, it's called being short sighted.
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Simply moving the pollution from one place to another is not being more environmentally friendly, it's called being short sighted.
So I'm assuming you're a big fan of compact fluorescent bulbs.
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Since they reduce overall pollution, yes I am.
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Funny, I meant the private jet ride to view the launch :) But the actual launch will do too :)
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I never said the process t
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I never said the process to make the hydrogen is clean, just that the burning of the hydrogen is clean. Read what I wrote already.
And I called you an idiot for having such a limited viewpoint on what counts as "clean." Please do keep up.
It gets me when people claim that electric cars are so much 'greener' than internal combustion cars, patting themselves on the back because they 'don't pollute'. All they're doing is exporting their smog someplace else.
People have done the math, even assuming coal power plants it's still better to use electric cars. So congratulations on once again showing yourself to be small minded.
Electric motors have 80+% batteries-to-wheels efficiency. Internal combustion engines have 20% efficiency gas-to-wheels. Modern power plants get close to 50% efficiency. So basically, electric cars are more efficient and that's not count
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On top of what Rakishi said, you also have to consider, not every power plant is coal. My power comes from nuclear which is way far and above cleaner than even "clean coal". On that case, absolutely the electric car is cleaner. Also, when the power plants get upgraded to better tech over time, the electric car automatically gets a green boost, whereas the ICE car is still stuck in the dark ages.
What tech are you going to use to power your amazing non polluting steam engine? Last I checked, we don't have
Re:Greenhouse gas emissions (Score:4, Insightful)
And this is unlikely to change, because rockets are a mature technology, like ships and aircraft. Ships haven't gotten all that much faster over the years; modern container ships are only about twice as fast as the last clipper ships, not ten or a hundred or a thousand times as fast. Similarly, a modern commercial airliner isn't radically faster than the first jetliners that flew in the late 1940s, maximum cruise speed of a 777 is about 600 mph, versus around 500 for the first jetliners. And rockets are the same way: the economics of rockets haven't changed radically since WWII when von Braun was lobbing V2s at London. Back then you were throwing away a lot of fuel and metal to launch a small payload, almost 70 years later we're still doing the same, just with bigger rockets. In short, a mature technology. It was extraordinarily expensive to launch stuff on a rocket 70 years ago, and it's still extraordinarily expensive, which suggests it will be extraordinarily expensive 70 years from now. To make space colonization or resource extraction practical, you'd need to increase the efficiency of space travel by multiple orders of magnitude. That's probably impossible with anything that remotely resembles existing rockets; instead if humans ever leave the planet it will require some completely new kind of technology.
Re:Greenhouse gas emissions (Score:5, Interesting)
Ships haven't gotten all that much faster over the years; modern container ships are only about twice as fast as the last clipper ships, not ten or a hundred or a thousand times as fast.
That's only because nobody cares about making them faster. They already run them slower [bloomberg.com] than their maximum speed intentionally because the primary design consideration for container ships is efficiency, not speed. And if you look at the amount of freight transported per ship and per crew member compared to a clipper ship, I suspect it is in the range of ten to a hundred times more.
But let's assume you're right:
rockets are a mature technology, like ships and aircraft.
OK, so don't use rockets. I keep hearing about this magic carbon nanotube space elevator that we'll have Real Soon Now.
Even if you want to assume that never happens, let's consider another alternative: You pick a proverbial "asteroid the size of Texas" out of the many floating around out there. Find one in the habitable zone. Then you send a team there with some industrial equipment, not to mine the asteroid and bring it home, but to mine it and use the raw materials to construct a large compartmentalized living environment. Start off by building a few dozen acres of greenhouse, and fill it with plants so that you have food and oxygen recycling. Then proceed to build yourself a little home away from home -- but in a place that has lower gravity, so that you can build yourself a space elevator. Create yourself a city in space with a population of a few thousand people.
That gives you a foothold. You create an industrial city that can export its products to the universe without burning ten thousand gallons of fuel fighting gravity. Then you can branch out. Colonize and mine more asteroids and small planets. Once you have a large enough industrial capacity in low gravity areas, you can build yourself a city-to-go and just land the entire thing piecemeal on a suitable planet. Next thing you know you've got a million people living on Mars and several expeditions on their way to colonizing habitable planets in other planetary systems.
I'm not saying what I've just laid out would definitely work. Maybe, maybe not. What I'm saying is that we haven't yet exhausted all the possible alternatives, so giving up now is nothing but defeatism.
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It's not about giving up. It's about the reality of chemical rockets. As long as they are the only thing available, we simply don't have chemical energy resources on Earth to move all the people off this rock. End of story.
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What about nuclear-driven spaceships? Not project Orion, but the ones that basically vent steam? Apparently they could be very effective.
And if everyone really wants to migrate off Earth (not bloody likely) then I'm pretty sure it won't be done with chemical rockets.
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Yeah, but you're talking about technology that doesn't exist. In terms of space hardware, if it hasn't been to orbit yet, then you don't need to worry about it. That is, unless you're the one who is developing it, in which case you need to worry a lot.
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As long as they are the only thing available, we simply don't have chemical energy resources on Earth to move all the people off this rock. End of story.
There's a simple solution to this problem. A few months of solar power falling on Earth can be converted into enough chemical energy to launch everyone and their stuff into orbit. This is not at all the bottleneck that keeps us from putting things into space.
The real bottleneck is that there simply isn't much to do in space that has positive return on investment, either as money or some other thing of value. The economic obstacles are far more serious than the physical ones.
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Except that to set up such conversion, you'd almost have to deplete the hydrocarbon bootstrap we happen to have :)
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Except that to set up such conversion, you'd almost have to deplete the hydrocarbon bootstrap we happen to have :)
Why do people think that the only form of energy on Earth is in the form of fossil fuels?
For example, the Delta IV uses liquid hydrogen and LOX. You can get that by decomposing water into hydrogen and oxygen using electricity from solar cells. Or you can use biodiesel in place of fossil fuel-derived kerosene.
Sure these forms of chemical energy storage are somewhat more expensive to obtain and use than fossil fuel derived sources, but that's not much of an issue for rockets where propellant makes up a
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You need hydrocarbons to make all those solar thingies, unfortunately.
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You need hydrocarbons to make all those solar thingies, unfortunately.
Two things to note here. Hydrocarbons are not a primary input. You need small amounts for insulation, seals, etc. Those don't need to come from fossil fuels. Second, the primary inputs are silica and energy. You can get silica in abundance almost everywhere on land and energy can be obtained from the solar panels you make.
It doesn't make any sense to claim here that we're depleting fossil fuel resources.
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To get that capsule just to low Earth orbit (let alone to another planetary body), you are throwing away all that fuel and metal, not to mention all the resources and energy needed to build and launch each rocket.
The only resource that is expensive here is highly skilled labor. As to the rest, they'd probably have to throw away about ten times as much metal or a hundred times as much propellant, to get significant changes in cost.
Re:Greenhouse gas emissions (Score:5, Insightful)
The aircraft analogy doesn't work. 100 years ago, the idea that high volume air travel was possible wouldn't be that fantastic given what was happening in 1912. The airplane had gone from a short flight of 120 feet at Kitty Hawk in 1903 to the French flying across the English Channel in 1909, a span of only 7 years. And look at what was happening in 1912 according to Wikipedia: you had the founding of major aircraft corporations like Sopwith and Fokker, seaplanes, carrier tests conducted by the U.S. Navy, the first use of aircraft as bombers. On the engineering end of things, they had gone from the Wright Brother's first use of the wind tunnel to the development of Prandtl's lifting-line theory and theories of supersonic flow. In short, in 1912, aircraft were nowhere near a mature technology. Over the past 50 years, however, the pace of change has slowed dramatically. Rockets show the same pattern: an initial rapid rate of change in the technology's capabilities and efficiency, followed by a longer period of much slower change as the technology runs up against basic limits imposed by materials and physics.
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Rockets show the same pattern: an initial rapid rate of change in the technology's capabilities and efficiency, followed by a longer period of much slower change as the technology runs up against basic limits imposed by materials and physics.
The fundamental difference is economic. There's not much to do in space that has positive return on investment (either financially or in some other sense of value). If the Moon was habitable with an economic similar in size to Earth, then we'd have passenger rocket services just like we did for airplanes.
That means that developments in space are much slower than they would be for the aircraft analogy. In that sense, you are right. Aircraft ended being different. But in another sense, if there was nowhere
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There's nature, and then there's good wishes and optimism. Nature doesn't care about the latter. There's pessimism, then there's being a realist. Chemical rocket technology is going nowhere but where it's been at for the last half century. You want to efficiently travel even within a solar system, you need another technology. That's where there's room for optimism, not where we have all the theory and engineering we need to know that we've hit the limits and that's the end of it.
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Dude, it isn't cheap easy pessimism. Travelling around the planet, like we've done for thousands of years, but faster isn't nearly as big a deal as going into space, where everything is hostile to human life and there is no deserted jungle island out there that you can survive on if your plane crashes. The problems of space travel are considerably larger than anything we've faced before and will take considerably more resources and a concerted, well-thought out planning step. We can't just throw some men on
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We can't just throw some men on a boat and have them survive when they arrive and along the way. We have to plan every detail, plan for every conceivable error and failure step and build very precise machinery using the best technology of the day. Sure, we can do it, but it'll be extremely expensive, very dangerous and unlikely to yield anything more useful than bragging rights.
Funny, everything after your first sentence describes early trans-oceanic seafaring exactly.
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Nope. The difference is in the amount of energy needed to go anywhere, but of course it has been left out of the discussion and thus is assumed to be irrelevant. It's not as newsworthy, perhaps -- too bad. The energy expended by the Apollo rockets that got to the moon is probably greater than the total muscle and wind energy used for sailing in the entirety of human history up to say 1500s. All space launches in our history probably expended thermal energy equivalent to all wind, muscle and coal energy used
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Yeah, not really. I mean, they did have to plan, but they were going to other land, just like the land where they came from. They can breath the air of the ocean along the way, bask in the sun, gather resources from any islands they encounter, etc. Trans-atlantic voyages were like regular voyages, but more. Space travel isn't like that. It's not like airplanes, but more supplies and a little more savvy. It's a hugely different beast.
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There was no cheap pessimism before the internet, right? Nothing but unbridled optimism and credulousness, right? Get off it. You're no better than the people you're complaining about.
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consider what i am responding to
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you're responding to someone more intelligent than you who has been trying to hit you over the head with a clue stick, and is so far apparently unsuccessful.
enthusiasm and optimism is great, but real advances in technology need a lot more than that. the person/people you've been arguing with have so far shown a fair bit more insight than you have.
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this would be the mindless negativity we are talking about here?
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all the other guy was saying is that it will take more than the technology we have without our reach right now.
he was saying we will need something much better than rockets based on fossil fuels.
anyway this isn't my argument, i'm done here.
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It's not about pessimism, you dolt. It's about being realistic. Just because you wish something it won't make it true if what you wish for is not realizable in the universe we live in. Sorry, Nature cannot be fooled.
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Ugh, another human hater. We aren't doing anything different than other life forms on this planet. Unless you think life itself is a virus, then you don't have a point.
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pah, what a weak strawman. so what was the person I was replying to meaning when they were talking about us raping the planet? how come I "don't have a point", yet you feel the need to refute it with your strawman, not addressing anything I said directly, at all? figures, huh?
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Yeah, I see, I was supposed to respond to the GP. Well, pretend that's what I did and maybe you'll feel better.
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Am I the only one whose first thought after reading the summary was - "man, that's a ton of greenhouse gas emissions and wasted fossil fuel for a joyride"?
Yes, but the mileage is unbeatable!
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Well, speaking only for myself, my first thought was "Wow, I wish I could drop $100K on a whim."
Regards,
dj
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Well, speaking only for myself, my first thought was "Wow, I wish I could drop $100K on a whim."
Well, start the next Google and you, too, can do that.
Personally, I'm not exactly concerned about the environmental impact caused by the number of people who can afford to burn $100,000 worth of fuel per day. Notice that the grandparent poster doesn't mention the much worse effects of a billion not-so-Red Chinese who will soon be driving their own cars and SUVs. That's because it wouldn't give him the same eco-
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Yeah, you probably aren't alone.
But of course, there were also people saying, "They can't fly to Russia from California because the world is FLAT!"
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Pretty much. You'll get over it.
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Water vapor is the larges greenhouse gas going, in effect and in amount. It literally dwarfs methane and CO2.
Without water vapor, we'd all freeze to death.
--
BMO
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Water vapor has different properties, namely that its cycle is a lot shorter and is affected by day to day weather, allowing it to be modulated by shorter term phenomena as well as CO2 and methane. Creating some water out the back of a spaceship is inconsequential, since it will simply rain back out in short order. CO2 doesn't have that property.
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That wasn't the point of my post. The parent declared that Water Vapor isn't as much of a greenhouse gas, when the opposite is true.
Which is a greenhouse gas but not as much as co2 or methane.
Water vapor is as much as 72 percent of greenhouse according to Wikipedia.
Gas Formula Contribution (%)
Water vapor H2O 36 - 72 %
Carbon dioxide CO2 9 - 26 %
Methane CH4 4 - 9 %
Ozone O3 3 - 7 %
Yes, water vapor has a 9 day cycle, but there is so much of it, that CO2, methane, and Ozone ar
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What's RP-1?
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That's what 1 billion other people say, too.
A billion other people don't actually have the money to fly a private jet anywhere.
And if you try to do something that would cause those billion other people to reduce their oil consumption, like raising the gas tax, they start a lynch mob and accuse you of not caring about poor people and destroying the economy.
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If you are not worried about anthropogenic CO2, then increasing the gas tax to stop the increase is a really dumb thing, because it would hurt the economy and poor people for no good reason.
Premises determine conclusions.
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The are many many reasons why a gas tax to cut CO2 would be a sensible even if anthropogenic CO2 had no effects. The most obvious are the socio-political concerns around foreign sources of fossil fuel and the economic benefits of modernizing.
Many people who a 'very worried' about CO2 believe we may be too late (already, or will be before anyone bothers to do anything). If this is the case then space travel may be our only hope, even if it contributes to the problem.
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The are many many reasons why a gas tax to cut CO2 would be a sensible even if anthropogenic CO2 had no effects. The most obvious are the socio-political concerns around foreign sources of fossil fuel and the economic benefits of modernizing.
No, you would take different actions depending what you want to accomplish. If you want to reduce CO2, then you would switch to nuclear, for example. If you only want to switch away from oil, you might encourage natural gas or ethanol cars.
Many people who a 'very worried' about CO2 believe we may be too late (already, or will be before anyone bothers to do anything).
They better find a better way to explain their worries, because right now they haven't managed to convince anyone who matters.
If this is the case then space travel may be our only hope, even if it contributes to the problem.
Or we could learn to swim. :) I'm totally in favor if space travel.
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Almost all of the people that have looked at the evidence for AGW carefully enough with any kind of open mind (including some skeptics) have come to the conclusion that it's almost certainly happening. There's virtually no scientific controversy, but that doesn't stop people trying to give the impression (often very successfully) that there's a lot of controversy.
But there isn't.
This fact, that there's little controversy over the basic facts, is not well known in America in particular, and that's really pre
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have come to the conclusion that it's almost certainly happening.
This is the most vaguely ambiguous statement I've heard all day. If you actually intend to have a conversation, please clarify.
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Not too long ago, there was virtually no scientific controversy that all the planets and the sun revolved around the Earth. They used such things as epicycles to explain why Mars' orbit would retrograde occasionally.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deferent_and_epicycle [wikipedia.org]
Real science isn't about appealing to consensus, as that can be way off too. It wasn't too long ago that Pluto was considered a planet either. The unfortunate thing about "Climate Change" (can't call it global warming, that one was shot down t
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Its a false idea that in absolute terms space tourism releases a lot of CO2.
That's a bit like saying that Concorde was a massive creator of carbon dioxide. While it produced a few times that of a 700 series flying London/NY, in global terms it was utterly insignificant. And that would have been true even if the aircraft had sold in quantity, there just weren't going to be enough aircraft.
And space tourism is the same, nobody is going to be building the hulls in sufficient quantity for them to EVER use a glo
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In Europe, gas is actually expensive (1.5 euros per litre), in part because we don't have our countries constantly attacking the middle-east to secure oil, and because we don't use techniques that ruin the land to extract it; indeed, our land being not as huge as the US, we'd rather take care of it.
On top of that, gas is heavily taxed, cars are banned from city centres on certain days, and the government strongly encourages the use of public transportation over cars, to the point of replacing car lanes by t
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in part because we don't have our countries constantly attacking the middle-east to secure oil
I would love to see this magical oil the US has secured through war...
because we don't use techniques that ruin the land to extract it
Oh? The US doesn't use techniques like that, I have heard of Canada producing oil from shale, but it isn't very widespread yet.
our land being not as huge as the US, we'd rather take care of it
and the government strongly encourages the use of public transportation over cars
That right there is the issue, because European countries are smaller, they are better able to build public transport. In the US, it just isn't possible. The major cities have metro rail systems, but you still have to drive your car to the nearest train station if you don't live in the city. The US is enormous
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Thanks to war, the US now has very influential connections with the governments and the economies in the middle east.
Shale oil is getting fairly important in the US but isn't properly government-controlled and has serious environmental impacts.
I don't suppose it is very publicized on TV.
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So what are you doing right now, besides burning electricity?
Re:Greenhouse gas emissions (Score:4, Funny)
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what story? the whole thing is pointless.
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"Larry Page and Sergey Brin were on hand to watch the rocket lift off at Vandenberg Air Force Base."