Space and Science BS Thread

LZ-1

 

Random Tweet- 6/23/21 Edition


Now this is important science:
https://twitter.com/arstechnica/status/1407817751620734979?s=21


Kick Ass
https://twitter.com/nasahistory/status/1407835869768265729?s=21


Mark your calendars:
https://twitter.com/nasa/status/1407842649814585349?s=21


Anyone surprised?
https://twitter.com/spacenews_inc/status/1407838897942544387?s=21

 

Not really. I will give them a little leeway though. Every shop I've worked for has made at least 1 part for NASA and other major aerospace companies. And EVERY shop I've worked for has been understaffed and unable to find people, let alone qualified people, to fill the positions. It's hard to deliver things on time when you don't have people to make the things.

That said. Cnc machinist, welding, sheet metal. These are all decent paying jobs, with good benefits, and employers willing to take a lot of abuse because they don't want to lose people once they have them. And I've never seen a shop that said no to employees working overtime.

 

The rate of change is somewhat higher now than at previous times where carbon levels are at this amount. I think that folks should be data focused, and consider hedging against the particular changes that may occur in short/medium terms, regardless if they have occurred before or not.

Pretty much this. If you define 'fine' as extant, anyway. Adaptation will happen among other species besides humans, too.

 

I've delved into the area of climate change very deeply in the past. Both sides have good and bad arguments, but neither grasps the picture as a whole. In the end it's meaningless. The things that are claimed to be driving it are finite. Oil for example is expected to run out in 20-50 years. Which means in 10-25 the cost of oil will be so high that the majority of industry will stop using it. And just like in the past, when industry can no longer turn a profit with something they find substitutions, and those often tend to be better for the planet.

 

A driver is not finite when it passes a tipping point. At that time it doesn’t matter what initially drove it or whether that driver is still in play. Thawing permafrost and other warming trends will release increasing amounts of methane. Quibbling over debatable minutiae doesn’t help, we have a finite amount of time to make a difference significant enough to stop short of that tipping point.

 

Ha ha, being compared to Carl Sagan is an insult, I wish. It’s only hard to find data if your actively avoiding it.

Krakatoa sent tsunami around the world and darkened the skies as well but those effects have limited durations. What we do is ongoing 24/7/365 with several billion assiduously pitching in and that population doubling every 35-40 years. Unfortunately unacceptable doesn’t mean untrue.

 

I can't even count the number of tipping points I've lived through that have failed to come to fruition. At this point we are supposed to be out of oil, out of trees, no more room for landfills, the ice caps are supposed to be gone and we should be looking for Kevin Costner with gills.

Meanwhile in reality, they keep finding more oil, there are more trees now than any other point in recorded human history, and the park services are removing signs saying that the nearby glaciers would be gone by the year 2,000 before the growing glaciers can envelop and preserve the signs for future archeologists.

Now I'm not saying climate change doesn't exist. I'm also not saying mankind does not have a role in it. I AM saying that the results of the experts shows that they don't have anywhere near a complete understanding of it. And History has shown over and over that most problems are not solved until you actually come up to the tipping point, and we're not near it. We have another 50-100 years if we expect to maintain the same level of comfort and commodities. 1-200 if we say fuck it, leave it for future generations to struggle through, and 3-500 before it becomes completely irreversible. And considering the way and pace that technology is taking, it's really not as big as an issue as those that are spending hundreds of billions of our dollars are telling us it is.

 

“So you’re saying there’s a chance”.

 

Oh, yeah? Well you loose all credibility the minute you play the politics card in a science discussion.

The Carl Sagan reference was not pejorative.

Nothing I wrote had anything to do with politics, but if that's your exit ramp, OK.

 

First - Carl Sagan is the fucking legend. Kindness and intelligence in one camel-hair-jacket-with-leather-elbow-patches package. Anyone who disparages him is likely to also hate Mister Rogers - and those people are welcome to depart humanity immediately.

As for everything else, SHUT THE FUCK UP before the thread has to get nuked. AGAIN.

 

It's almost like climate change is a political issue or something and people can't help but push their politics whenever it comes up.

 

Politics pretty much ruins everything. End of story.

We could have pages of discussion on climate change, whether that's warming, cooling, human caused, natural, etc without having to bring up politics a single time. Even the potential solutions can be discussed outside of the political spectrum as they all have a basis in science, regardless how small, before a political group clings onto it as their answer.

 

IBTL…



https://twitter.com/SpaceX/status/1408057032188469248?s=20

 

So no launch tomorrow?

I wonder what they are looking at...

 

The rocket.

 

They refuse to launch until this thread gets off the political bent.

 

Or they've been smoking a pre-launch brisket and it's just not quite up to temp yet.

 

Mine took 14 hours last weekend.

 

It could be the payload.

Just sayin...