Hard Light Productions Forums
Off-Topic Discussion => General Discussion => Topic started by: Kosh on April 03, 2009, 08:02:13 am
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That ain't so good (http://www.universetoday.com/2009/04/02/will-rocket-launches-deplete-the-ozone/)
A new study predicts that Earth’s stratospheric ozone layer will suffer significant damage from future unregulated rocket launches. The study provides a market analysis for estimating future ozone layer depletion based on the expected growth of the space industry and known impacts of rocket launches. The increase in launches could cause ozone depletion that eventually could exceed ozone losses from CFCs (chlorofluorocarbons) which were banned in the 1980’s. “As the rocket launch market grows, so will ozone-destroying rocket emissions,” said Professor Darin Toohey of CU-Boulder’s atmospheric and oceanic sciences department, a member of the study. “If left unregulated, rocket launches by the year 2050 could result in more ozone destruction than was ever realized by CFCs.” The study says more research should be done on how different rockets affect the ozone before imposing stricter regulations on chemicals used in rocket fuels.
Current global rocket launches deplete the ozone layer by no more than a few hundredths of 1 percent annually, said Toohey. But as the space industry grows and other ozone-depleting chemicals decline in the Earth’s stratosphere, the issue of ozone depletion from rocket launches is expected to move to the forefront.
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Srsly, this depends on a massive increase in rocket flights, which I frankly don't see in the near future. That being said, instituting regulations now, while the Market is relatively small, is probably a good idea.
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Srsly, this depends on a massive increase in rocket flights, which I frankly don't see in the near future.
China?
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If we start regulating our own rockets we can pressure China into doing the same before things get out of hand.
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Wait, aren't greenhouse gases increasing, leading to global warming?
Rockets could be our answer to the problem! yay rockets!
*This post brought to you by the Foundation of People who don't Understand Science
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If we start regulating our own rockets we can pressure China into doing the same before things get out of hand.
China's not doing it for any logical reason, only as a prestige thing (more or less), so they are not going to be regulated by logic.
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North Korea anyone? :nervous:
Well, to be honest, I don't really understand the purpose of that article. What do they pretend to do, interrupt all rocket launches? We need satellites and space exploration should not be abandoned.
The O3 layer can be preserved in many other ways.
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North Korea anyone? :nervous:
You can't be serious can you? North Korea's rockets/ICBMs are a lame attempt to get respect or get other people to fear them. What they're really doing is embarrassing themselves... :lol:
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The O3 layer can be preserved in many other ways.
:doubt:
Such as?
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The O3 layer can be preserved in many other ways.
:doubt:
Such as?
/me thought that the only feasible way for the tri-oxide layer to survive/recover was for it to be left The Hell alone.
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I'm all for space flight. A moon colony means less people on the Earth to pollute it. Same with a Martian colony, except you can cram more people on Mars and Phobos and Deimos than on the Moon. And just wait until we get FTL travel. People will be abandoning the Earth in droves to settle and terraform new planets.
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If we start regulating our own rockets we can pressure China into doing the same before things get out of hand.
China's not doing it for any logical reason, only as a prestige thing (more or less), so they are not going to be regulated by logic.
Well it would hurt their prestige somewhat if we were all looking down on them for dirty rockets. That's why they bother to hide human rights abuses and such.
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The O3 layer can be preserved in many other ways.
:doubt:
Such as?
Google them...
Space exploration shouldn't be halted by a handful of environmentalists.
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Google them...
Space exploration shouldn't be halted by a handful of environmentalists.
It doesn't need to be, it just needs some regulations on the emissions, like cars.
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I'm all for space flight. A moon colony means less people on the Earth to pollute it. Same with a Martian colony, except you can cram more people on Mars and Phobos and Deimos than on the Moon. And just wait until we get FTL travel. People will be abandoning the Earth in droves to settle and terraform new planets.
Umm, no. At least not for another thousand or so years.
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It doesn't need to be, it just needs some regulations on the emissions, like cars.
What about the space elevator? :nervous:
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It doesn't need to be, it just needs some regulations on the emissions, like cars.
What about the space elevator? :nervous:
All we need for that would be building materials with the needed tensile strength, and research into those is ongoing (carbon nanotubes to the rescue!)
I'm all for space flight. A moon colony means less people on the Earth to pollute it. Same with a Martian colony, except you can cram more people on Mars and Phobos and Deimos than on the Moon. And just wait until we get FTL travel. People will be abandoning the Earth in droves to settle and terraform new planets.
Read this. (http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2007/06/the_high_frontier_redux.html) Not the whole thread, just the blog posting. Bottom line: Space colonization is not going to happen, unless several "magical" technologies (in the Arthur C. Clarke sense) are developed that allow humans to not only go out there, but stay there indefinitely.
That said, colonizing the space near earth is most definitely possible, but I find it highly unlikely that the amount of people going up there would make a serious dent in the population totals down here. Oh, and you DO know that Phobos and Deimos are just asteroids, right?
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And I think that we will invent super-cool technologies. I'm an optimist when it comes to mankind's future. I believe that mankind can and will invent all sorts of technologies, including FTL, artificial gravity, and all those other handwavium-powered advancements. First step to all of this is working FTL. After that we're all good.
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Then I have some bad news for you. (http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/arxiv/23292/) While this doesn't mean it's impossible per se, it does mean that a solution has become just that much harder. Oh, and I'm not stopping you from believing in handwavium, I just don't expect to see any in my lifetime. (Hell, I'll be glad if we get fusion reactors to work, or understand how gravity works...)
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FTL is theoretically impossible, but I do believe that new technologies could really make planets like Mars habitable enough for mankind to colonize them.
But we're not going to see it. We'll be all dead. :p
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Read this. (http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2007/06/the_high_frontier_redux.html) Not the whole thread, just the blog posting. Bottom line: Space colonization is not going to happen, unless several "magical" technologies (in the Arthur C. Clarke sense) are developed that allow humans to not only go out there, but stay there indefinitely.
That said, colonizing the space near earth is most definitely possible, but I find it highly unlikely that the amount of people going up there would make a serious dent in the population totals down here. Oh, and you DO know that Phobos and Deimos are just asteroids, right?
Only idiots think interstellar travel is at all practical in our current timeframe, but it will become at least economically viable some thousand years in the future. Humans are notorious for inventing laws of physics and then seemingly defying them (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superfluid) the next day. Hell, there's a thread below this one discussing electronic brains and nanotube muscles. Space travel will never be the way we envision it to be, but it will exist, in some form that we are unable to comprehend right now, in the distant future. I don't care how impossible space travel seems, if the existence of the entire human race is dependent on getting to another planet, we'll figure out a way to do it.
And some of us might live to see it, if present technologies continue.
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The O3 layer can be preserved in many other ways.
:doubt:
Such as?
Google them...
Space exploration shouldn't be halted by a handful of environmentalists.
Well research needs to go into at least reducing emissions that are harmful to the ozone layer.
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As far as I know, the ozone layer either cannot be restored or can only be restored very slowly with current technology. There have been some claims to the contrary in this thread, but these are as yet unsubstantiated.
So, as much as I love space travel (and really, I do) we cannot afford to trash the ozone layer. Therefore, we need to invent better rockets or alternative propulsion methods OR invent some kind of ozone restoring machines.
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It does seem very stupid to destroy the Earth's environment before we can leave it. Then again, the Human species isn't known for it's smart decisions. =/
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FTL is theoretically impossible....
Ermmm...I've sat few a through lectures with some very educated professors in the realm of physics and astrophysics who say that FTL is theoretically possible but practically impossible. Given current understanding of course.
Not much over 100 years ago conventional wisdom that heavier than air flight by mankind was also impossible. Just a little over 50 years ago people were convinced that breaking the sound barrier was also impossible. We're very good as a species of setting up all sorts of barriers for ourselves and then breaking them. I'm sure somewhere along the line someone will go "Eurkea! FTL!" Could be a while...a good long while.
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I'm all for space flight. A moon colony means less people on the Earth to pollute it. Same with a Martian colony, except you can cram more people on Mars and Phobos and Deimos than on the Moon.
*snip*
Having more places to live isn't going to mean less crowding at home. At the very best, it would mean your kids can now be forced to move to another planet in order to not have to struggle for survival. The problem is, the exact same thing that happens here on earth is no less likely to happen on the moon (which is, by the way, much smaller and has a significantly lesser biomass :ick: ).
"Put them on the moon" might work as an answer to "where can we put people when there's no room left on earth?", but that's a stupid question. If there are no additional people, you don't have to worry about where to put them.
Of course that falls apart if one group of people (a country, a religion, people with the same ethnic background) works on population control and another doesn't, because then they have more people, thus more workforce, more potential military manpower, more potential democratic voters, ...
Then again, the Human species isn't known for it's smart decisions.
Thing is we don't make decisions as a species, we make them as individuals. And any "good for future generations" planning or decision-making depends on our personal views of what is good for them. Things like:
- Is being very numerous but with a poor quality of life preferable to being few but content?
- Is one person being euphoric better than several people being content?
Welcome to the hard parts of moral and ethical philosophy.
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I've only skimmed the paper, but it looks like they're analyzing a pure Alcubierre warp rather than Van Den Broek's "double-bubble" (my term) warp.
It's been known that the strong field gradient at the warp boundary is hazardous if matter is encountered (Halt, Held, Hoiland et al.'s 2006 paper) so the possibility of Hawking radiation isn't that much of a surprise; the question is whether it's strictly "within" the bubble (and thus confined to the "shell" of a Broek warp) or not.
The stress-tensor energy instability is another issue, and I hold out hope because it only implies bubble instability. Instability can be overcome by dynamic control of the bubble, provided that the timescale of the control mechanism is shorter than that of fluctations caused by instability.
In other words, there's still room for me to handwave away these problems in my science fiction stories (grin). And in real life, if we ever figure out a way to create a warp in the first place, we may find a way to control the instability (if it indeed exists). Might need a quantum computer, though. ;-)
Not that I can confirm any of that, of course, since it's way over my head.
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FTL is theoretically impossible....
Ermmm...I've sat few a through lectures with some very educated professors in the realm of physics and astrophysics who say that FTL is theoretically possible but practically impossible. Given current understanding of course.
Not much over 100 years ago conventional wisdom that heavier than air flight by mankind was also impossible. Just a little over 50 years ago people were convinced that breaking the sound barrier was also impossible. We're very good as a species of setting up all sorts of barriers for ourselves and then breaking them. I'm sure somewhere along the line someone will go "Eurkea! FTL!" Could be a while...a good long while.
Didn't some guys from Baylor University come up with a theoretical model for a warp drive?
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FTL is theoretically impossible....
Ermmm...I've sat few a through lectures with some very educated professors in the realm of physics and astrophysics who say that FTL is theoretically possible but practically impossible. Given current understanding of course.
Not much over 100 years ago conventional wisdom that heavier than air flight by mankind was also impossible. Just a little over 50 years ago people were convinced that breaking the sound barrier was also impossible. We're very good as a species of setting up all sorts of barriers for ourselves and then breaking them. I'm sure somewhere along the line someone will go "Eurkea! FTL!" Could be a while...a good long while.
Didn't some guys from Baylor University come up with a theoretical model for a warp drive?
I forget from where but yes....someone did the math and figured out what was required. Energy was a big problem...if you had extreme amounts of power then it was quite possible.
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"uncontrollable singularities in the renormalized quantum stress-energy"
"If a Minkowski spacetime contains a compact region Ω, and if the topology of Ω is of the form Ω ~ R x Σ, where Σ is a three-manifold of nontrivial topology, whose boundary has topology of the form dΣ ~ S2, and if, furthermore, the hypersurfaces Σ are all spacelike, then the region Ω contains a quasipermanent intra-universe wormhole."
Reading about FTL is fun. :p
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I wonder what effect FTL drives will have on the ozone layer, if the earth even has one by then. <_<
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Quasi-permanent? :wtf:
Seriously?
....
....
:ick:
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I forget from where but yes....someone did the math and figured out what was required. Energy was a big problem...if you had extreme amounts of power then it was quite possible.
Well we went from being theoretically impossible to hugely impractical, that's a step in the right direction. Hopefully sooner or later we can make it less and less impractical.
Back on the main topic, I was thinking recently, what kind of ozone depleting substances do rocket launches make?
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I wonder what effect FTL drives will have on the ozone layer, if the earth even has one by then. <_<
Given the energy required and likely inefficiencies, using FTL anywhere near Earth would probably cook everything on Earth.
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Only if the FTL drive involves generating heat.
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Didn't his FTL theory call for the power of some odd billion suns? :no:
I'm still holding out for subspace. :yes:
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There is a way to save the ozone layer: (multiply by 3 495 000 000) - 100 just so there's some left. They will do this themselves.
[attachment deleted by evil Tolwyn]
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I'm all for space flight. A moon colony means less people on the Earth to pollute it. Same with a Martian colony, except you can cram more people on Mars and Phobos and Deimos than on the Moon. And just wait until we get FTL travel. People will be abandoning the Earth in droves to settle and terraform new planets.
You want an idea of the nitty gritty of FTL space travel and terraforming? Go read The Night's Dawn trilogy by Peter F. Hamilton.
The Great Dispersal did nothing to relieve the population burden of the planet. Of course the concept of the Armada Storm is kinda FUBAR but it's an interesting plot device.
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^^ Basically what I said but in a fictional context.
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Only if the FTL drive involves generating heat.
Or light.
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I'm all for space flight. A moon colony means less people on the Earth to pollute it. Same with a Martian colony, except you can cram more people on Mars and Phobos and Deimos than on the Moon.
I think its interesting to note that the size of (ever growing) desert area on Earth is about the same size as Moon. So.. in principle you could house as many people there. And it would be *waayy* more easier. For some reason no one ever fantasizes about that ;)
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We already have people living for long periods of time in Antarctica though, even though it's pretty inhospitable down there. (Kudos if you get my thread. (Hint: above post)) At least you've got plenty of fresh water in Antarctica.
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I think its interesting to note that the size of (ever growing) desert area on Earth is about the same size as Moon. So.. in principle you could house as many people there. And it would be *waayy* more easier. For some reason no one ever fantasizes about that ;)
Actually, the expansion of the various deserts, particularly the Sahara is troubling. A few hundred years and Africa will be lost to us.
I don't know about the Gobi and the other deserts tho.
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nuke the ozone layer!
problem solved
Actually, the expansion of the various deserts, particularly the Sahara is troubling. A few hundred years and Africa will be lost to us.
thats probably a good thing, that way i wont have to waste ammo nuking africa.
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My nukes are better than your nukes. They have monocles painted on them. :drevil: