great white: are WE the before timers? (grim but.)

[fearless-falcon]

sorry sorry okay right so a friend of ours has written a book about profercy and survival we can't dowload it at all coz our site crashed and we haven't the financial backing to get it back up plus we need to get some profit out of it
right i realize i'm not being too specific yes well i'm mainly targeting the native american profercies
they all really say the same thing and also nostradamis
they all say the world's going to end and low up ect ect so i do have a book that is all about that and explans it all
now if you do want one you have to send me a cheque and i'll mail it to you location may be a problem but we'll figure out postage and handling and put that on the price i'm sorry there isn't really another way! so really my belif is that we'll be facing earth changes and ww3 in 3-4 years so my plan is to head for the hills
and you can build your own underground hidey hole
there is a mention of that in this book as well
it's called earthchanges get ready by a cherokee indian by the name of marc eagle eyes who has collected all the profercies over the years to make this book! so tell me via e-mail if you want to ask about getting one
$30 auz dollars
bout $25 american dollars
that includes pah
e-mail if you want one it's a serious read and includes fullcolour photos of what the underground "stormcellers" look like
hope i'ver explained a bit better for you guys!

[MajiKat]

i swear, if i can get my hands on enough vegetable oil, i am going to make bio-disel! there should be more of it about!

when i think of the destruction of the earth, i'm not thinking that it is going to blow up, collapse into a blackhole or wherever stars go when they die, of crumble into a million pieces to float around space forever. i am thinking of the fact that many of our actions, if we do not do anything to stop it, will result in the planet being uninhabitable for humans and possibly animals, although the animals have been here a lot longer than we have and they have adapted/evolved to suit their changing environment. i think we would find that harder to do.

we are so much about changing and adapting our environment to suit us, hence the terrible devestation we have caused already. unfortunatley, we are about power and control. humans seem to view the natural environment as something that needs to be controlled, manipulated, tamed. we have not lost that conquering spirit our ancestors displayed.

perhaps for the earth to be saved humanity needs to rethink its situation. we are not invulnerable to harm. we are mortal. we cannot possibly go on forever, and i don't think we should, but there is no reason for us to take the earth down with us.

there are so many options available to us to help the environment, but i see the biggest problem lying in not wanting to change our lifestyles. as the most (supposed) intelligent creatures on the planet, we can be pretty dumb. i was thinking about this the other day - there are so many things i know i could, if it came down to it, give up from my day to day life. there are so many things that exist in our society that we simply do not need to survive. but, unlike the animals, who live the way (well, try to) they have since their inception, we seem to think we need all these little things to survive. we don't. we don't need microwaves. we don't need 75 story buildings that block out the skyline, we don;t need alot of things. too many to mention, but i think you all know what i mean.

MK

[had]

Oh, sure - we certainly can kill off all life on this planet. I've said it before, I'll say it again - we are, honest to goodness, buggering this place up. If we try hard enough, we could probably make it uninhabitable for millions of years.

All I'm saying is that no matter what we do, it's extremely unlikely that we'll be able to bugger it up for good and all - you may take some comfort in the fact that we are not going to destroy the planet for all time.

I don't, however, think that the problem is microwaves and tall buildings - I think the problem is the dominance of economics. Corporations have become ever more powerful. Going back to 'a simpler state of existence' really won't help much - and, in general, a lot of the modern inventions that have extended lifespans and made life better for the small section of the world's populace that can afford them depend on power. It's all about energy, really - if we have enough energy, we can fix most anything. If you've got enough energy, drinking water can be produced from seawater through desalinisation. If you have enough energy, you can filter anything you please out of emissions. If you have enough energy, you can - literally - create matter. It's simply a problem of where you get that energy from. As it stands, we burn far too much fossil fuels. They're okay, if you use them at the rate they're replenished - otherwise, you're putting more CO2 into the air then was there originally. Take that too far, you have problems.

Currently, we use fossil fuels orders of magnitude above the rate of replenishment. Hence, the problem.

Unfortunately, we still haven't come up with a workable method of generating the power used by modern civilisation - and don't kid yourself, it's unlikely to decrease by enough to make known methods workable. We're addicted to power. Indeed, it's more likely that as 3rd world nations finally get out of the poverty spiral, the use of energy the world over will increase substantially.

Solar power, wind power, tidal power, geothermal power, etc., are all lovely - but they physically cannot produce enough energy. This is quite easily demonstrable mathematically. Even a combination of all of them wouldn't work so well. Additionally, solar power requires loads of highly refined silicon, which is expensive to produce.

Fission power (i.e., nuclear power, but I consider that an inaccurate label) is a definite no-no, because it produces a heap of fossil fuels in the extraction and transportation of uranium, it's even more expensive then solar power, and you have to dump the waste somewhere - about the safest option is blasting it into space, but what if the launch fails? And even then, there's only a limited amount of uranium we can extract power from.

Aneutronic fusion would be an absolute dream, if we could do it - fairly efficient, the only fuel required is generally light elements, which are extremely common, and can be extracted bacterially in a lot of cases. The only emissions are generally light elements, and if you pick the process carefully, you can generate non-radioactive substances. More research needs to be put into this, in my opinion. Unfortunately, the temperatures and pressures required for aneutronic fusion are currently well beyond our reach, and regular fusion is distinctly more dangerous, because neutrons are seriously bad for your health, and also for the structural integrity of the fusion plant. Finally, regular fusion will likely cause the walls of the fusion chamber to become radioactive over time as the emitted neutrons crash into elements in the walls. It's a definite future possibility, but nothing to be certain about.

Burning hydrogen is another idea, and one of the most practical ones, in my opinion. Basically, you can breed bacteria that can extract hydrogen from various substances quite easily. Then, you just take that hydrogen and throw it in a fuel cell. Efficient, the only emissions are water. Water is a greenhouse gas, but if you're careful, you can get around that by making sure that it doesn't spit water vapour into the upper atmosphere. Unfortunately, fuel cells are incredibly expensive, and they currently require some rare elements - platinum, for example. Possibly better used for personal transportation - cars, etc. - then as a full-scale source of mains power.

There's another option that I sort of like, although its not massively practical. Basically, space is extremely big. There's lots of room out there. Additionally, the sunlight out there doesn't have to deal with passing through the atmosphere.

If you build a massive solar array out in space, you can capture an incredible amount of energy. Then the only problem is getting it back to Earth. If some clever engineer can come up with a way of fixing that, a solar array at one of the Lagrange points could prove to be a solution to power problems.

...Well, that was a long, rambling discussion, wasn't it?

[DragonRider/Robin]

Hell yeah.

Why were humans given the cursed gift of want of dominance? Humans aren't just killing the Earth, we're also killing ourselves. We wage war, murder, maim and just mistreat eachother. It seems that humans are quite capable of killing ourselves. I mena, it's a lot easier killing than it is creating life, isn't it. I think the people of our planet will have to find some alternate place to live when/if the Earth is destroyed. The only thing is, where? There's not going to be much left, and some of the suffering people left behind wouldn't want to rebuild our society on Earth. They'd want to live somewhere else and then rebuild society on another planet, maybe even a moon. But where?

[Dark One]

had said:

If you build a massive solar array out in space, you can capture an incredible amount of energy. Then the only problem is getting it back to Earth. If some clever engineer can come up with a way of fixing that, a solar array at one of the Lagrange points could prove to be a solution to power problems.

Some people proposed a solution to that many years ago. You'd convert the sunlight ot microwave radiation, beam it down to a collecting station on Earth, which would convert it to a useable form of power

[had]

The problem with that is turning the microwave radiation back into power at the other end - which might be difficult - and losses when turning the energy into microwave, when turning the microwaves back into energy, and the quite significant loss of energy when it passes through the atmosphere.

And how would you aim it? You're shooting for a target that's small, a long way away, and refraction will get in the way.

Worse yet, if you miss, there could be serious problems.

Really, I'm all in favour of sticking a massive cable all the way out to a Lagrange point. It's more workable then a lot of other solutions, and we need a space elevator, anyway.

[Dark One]

Yeah, thats pretty much why one hasn't been built yet, (though i suspect its mainly the cost)

The question of aiming it i thin was solved by having the orbiting station in a geostationary orbit, directly over the collection station.

However you are right in saying that if the beam is off by even a small amount it would cause lots of devestation. You've also got the problem of birds and possibly aircraft flying through the beam.

Theres a company that were looking at building a space elevator, though i can't remember who at the moment. i'll try and find out

[fearless-falcon]

HMMMMMMMMMMMMM
now i dunno if that would work either trying out spacy ideas i rekon we should all ride horses!
and then fuel wouldn't be a problem but the great white is still a problem too and well the sun will explode one day................. i guess whatever we do we're SCREWED
..................

[had]

The sun isn't going to explode, it'll just turn into a red giant. In several billion years time. I believe the figure is around 3 or 4 billion.

That's a ridiculously long amount of time. If civilisation doesn't collapse by then, we'll almost certainly have mastered wormholes and other such interesting physical devices. At the very least, we'd be able to build an 'ark ship' and live on that for the n thousands of years it would take to get to somewhere else.

Of course, entropy is steadily increasing in the universe, so heat death turns up eventually. But even then, thermodynamics is based upon what's called 'statistical mechanics' - it's about the average of the actions of millions and millions of molecules. It's not actually impossible for a warm body to get warmer while a cold body gets colder - just incredibly unlikely. As the two bodies approach the same temperature, it becomes more likely. There is some suggestion that heat death could be staved off indefinitely by the probabilistic nature of thermodynamics.

Even then, that's trillions of years in the future. Humanity isn't ultimately screwed, if we do things right here.

[Hannai]

Unfortunately horses produce methane. so do cows pigs and people.

But it could be an answer. There are ways to produce methane gas and convert it into energy. manure and landfill can be used to produce the gas as well as a type of bacteria. Its classification as a renewable or non renewable resource really depends on how the gas is produced. pennstatebehrend.psu.edu/academic/science/degrees/biology/energyfieldtrips/methaneContent.htm

I did an assignment on it for school a couple of years ago, ill c if i can dig it up when i visit home this weekend.

[MajiKat]

what i have been wondering is do we really need all this energy to survive as a species? do we really need to use so much energy to live? i don't think so. if the problem really is about economics and energy/supply (which i'm not disputing at all - the world is power hungry) aren't there some things that we can do without?

at the moment i have two computers and a fridge running. thats all. no lights. no TV. nothing else. just that. and even then i am wondering whether it is worth it. i need my fridge - food is a necessity, but even then, if i had land, i'd have a cow, i'd have a huge garden for all my food (i grow heaps of my food at the moment in the space i have, so it makes me wonder how much more i could do if i had more room), i don't eat meat so i don't need to refriderate that...when i think about it, everything in my frigde probably doesn't need to be there. i onoy really buy food as i need it so things don't sit in there for weeks.

what we need are huge market gardens, community spaces for people to grow their own food.

i like the idea of riding horses, but then again i work 100km away from home. not really a plausible idea at the moment.

does anyone else buy green energy from Country Energy? i do. for an extra $3 a month. that money goes into funding renewable energy sources that country energy use, and maybe a small percentage of that goes back into my home (you don't get to use green power simply because you pay for it - everyone should put that extra bit of money in and then we can actually make a bit of a difference).

nuclear power - i hate the idea! where does the government think they are going to dump the waste? who is going to want that in their backyard? i'm vehenmently opposed to the idea. if Johnny and Co have enough money to help fund a war, why don't they put solar pannels on everyone's roof? and while they're at it, they could give people tanks as an extra water supply (yes i know it actually needs to rain first...)

thats another thing. we use so much water! i grew up with tanks, so it has been drilled into me that water is not a commodity. it is a blessing, and we should never take it for granted! there are so many things that people can do to reduce their water usage, but no one seems to care! i mean, i have a garden which needs water, but i plant drought tolerant plants. i plant native plants, those that are already adapted to our climate. i live in the tropics, so i plant accordingly. pretty little cottage gardens ala England are cute, but we do not have the climate for them (you get tonnes of rain don't you DO?) i have an automatic washing machine, but it has an eco wash feature, and is environmentally friendly (it doesn't use much power). i don't shower - i have baths. does anyone know how much water a toilet uses in one flush? its something like 9 litres. think about how many toilets get flushed every single day! thats alot of water. again, if ihad space, i'd have a composting toilet.

there are so many things we can do. but no one seems to want to do them on a large scale. we need to wise up.

[had]

We probably don't 'need' to use that much energy, but we're not going to cut back on it significantly. We're addicted now, and there aren't any self-help groups for addicted species.

Even if we used 50% of the energy we use today, we'd still be using far too much to generate using our current renewable sources. They're a good idea for cutting it down further so we can set up something big like the Lagrange-point solar station, or fusion power, or something. Or, at the very least, for reducing the amount of fossil fuels we use until we can get lagrange-point-solar-station or fusion power. (In fact, we've got solar panels on the roof and a water tank at our house.)

Fission power is just a dead-end, currently. It's just not efficient enough to be worth it, even minus waste that'll be extremely dangerous for millenia. It's worth stressing that even fusion power doesn't escape that - the neutrons spat out by most fusion reactions can cause elements in the walls of the fusion chamber to become a radioactive isotope, so fusion chambers from non-aneutronic fusion will be radioactive enough to make someone sick after a while, but that's not waste on the scale that fission produces. And aneutronic fusion would avoid that problem, mostly.

Water is a real, real big problem, but easy to fix - if the government decided to get serious about the idea, they'd subsidise farmers moving to more efficient irrigation systems, then make it law that farmers have to use something efficient. Agriculture uses something like 70% of the water in SA, and most of the farmers here still use open-channel irrigation that loses ridiculous amounts of water to evaporation. Water recycling is something that can be done if you still need more water, but that's fairly energy intensive, and can only do so much. Plus, the public doesn't seem to like the idea of drinking recycled wastewater, even if it is cleaner then 'standard' tap water. (I'm always tempted to point out that there's fish poo in river water and cow poo in spring water, at least your poo is filtered out of recycled water)

[MajiKat]

The idea of drinking recycled water does not bother me - for starters, i don't even drink the tap water here. its full of god only knows, so i boil it, and then i filter it - i have one of those ceramic water filters. to me, thats problem solved. those people upset about it - go buy a water filter! it tastes just like tap water, thats why i love it!

i have just spent most of the day in my garden. the last tenants at this house did not have green thumbs, so the place was a mess when we moved in, but we have done so much work already. i made a new garden bed for my herbs today, and we mulched and weeded and weeded some more (damn potato vine its everywhere). i spend almost $100 on the garden today, and we are only renting, but i like to think of it as doing something for the environment. we have, since we moved in, planted at least 50 plants, and we have a couple of flowering trees to go in soon - a hibiscus and a gardenia. there are fruit trees here and we are going to plant a passionfruit vine. we don't have alot of space, but i still like to make that space useable. i hate growing flowers when i could be growing something i can eat.

Had, thats awesome that you guys have solar panels and a tank. more people should be like that.

[DragonRider/Robin]

We'd do that, but we can't, 'cos we live in a rented house, and my family isn't really interested in conserving energy. They're more into conserving money, seeing as we have seven in the family and only three work (but I have an excuse - I'm too young).

Anyway, in the distant future, if humans are still living when the sum becomes a red giant, humans would be screwed by then, because the sun would swallow up the inner planets (including earth) and jupiter would be the hottest and closest planet, which would still be screwed anyway because the sun would eventually either become a black hole (after it exploded), become a supernova and explode, explode or implode.

I think humans like having all this energy at their disposal; we have many luxuries and we indulge ourselves with electrical appliances (I believe I am guilty of this) and other items involving energy. We wouldn't be happy without it - or at least most energy hogs wouldn't. This, somehow in my brain, connects to the human need of competitence, dominancy, and basically power. I don't know how I got that, but I did. We have a dominant need for dominancy.

[Hannai]

Hey if you drink adelaide tap water its got murray water in it, in which there is fish, water rat, cow, horse and any other animal that is near the river
Personally i dont touch it.

I grew up in a farming area near Mannum in SA, There used to be open dich irrigation all over the area, but in 1999 they were all replaced with pipes. Flood irrigation was also phased out.

However i know its still going on upriver.


The other problem is with the crops we grow
Cotton and rice are the two highest water using crops known and we are growing them! (its not like we cant import them cheaply)

Hemp fibre plants could replace both crops, have twice the yield (hemp has an extra crop per year)

Oh yeah, and it uses the smallest amount of water!

At my parents we had huge tanks something like 18000 gallons (over 80000 L) but where i grew up theres no mains water.

People don't appreciate water because they have mostly never had to work for it.

Oh yeah we also have solar water heating

[Dark One]

mysterikat said:

where does the government think they are going to dump the waste? who is going to want that in their backyard?

We in the UK seem to process and store most of the worlds Nuclear waste.

mysterikat said:

(you get tonnes of rain don't you DO?)

Well, yes we do get tons of rain, but we still have hosepipe bans, and drought orders in some areas. The problem we have in the UK is that we have very old water pipes, which the water companies (despite making huge profits) don't seem to want to replace, so at least a third of our water gets lost duie to leaks in the system!

MK: We're always taught that you should have a shower and not a bath to save water

tropicalfish said:

Anyway, in the distant future, if humans are still living when the sum becomes a red giant, humans would be screwed by then, because the sun would swallow up the inner planets (including earth) and jupiter would be the hottest and closest planet, which would still be screwed anyway because the sun would eventually either become a black hole (after it exploded), become a supernova and explode, explode or implode.

As had mentioned before, the sun won't do that for another 3-4 billion years. By then we'll should have built ships to take us to the stars, and technology that enable us to easily colonise extra-solar planets.

When the sun expands and becomes a red giant, it will swallow Mercury (and possibly Venus), but wont expand far enough to swallow the Earth. However, it will be close enough to vapourise the water and burn off our atmosphere, leaving the earth scorched and dry. Mars will briefly be warm and simple life may form if the conditions ar right.

The sun doesn't have enough mass to go nova (and it certainly doesn't have enough mass to collapse in on itself and become a black hole!) Once it has burned off its excess hydrogen, it will shrink to become a brown dwarf i believe (its been a while since i've thought about this). Once the sun shrinks, the solar system will become cold. The gas giants will still retain some heat, due to the forces at work inside them, but any remianing inner planets would not recieve enough heat from the sun to reamin habitable.

[had]

What happens is that when the Sun starts to run out of hydrogen, it starts collapsing in on itself - you see, it's in in equilibrium, currently. It isn't the size it is because of contact forces - for example, Earth can't collapse much further because you have to squeeze rock together - it's the size it is because of an unsteady truce between its massive gravitational pull and its equally massive energy output. The heat and EM radiation generated by nuclear fusion keeps it at the size it is.

If fusion starts to run low, it starts shrinking because there isn't as much heat any more, so gravity can start dragging it in. But as it shrinks, that gravitational potential energy has to go somewhere - and most of it goes into heat. The core heats up until the star can start fusing helium. When it does, it expands out massively, because helium fusion produces more heat then hydrogen fusion.

This process of starting to run out of fuel, shrinking, and then getting the right conditions to fuse something else continue for a while, with the star gradually shifting up the periodic table. It can't last for ever - stars that go supernova end up reaching iron. Fusing iron takes energy, rather then producing it - as does fusing every element after iron - so the whole star collapses and everything fuses and fisses (Present participle of fission, doncha know) at the same time and you get a nova. Bang.

Most stars - such as our own - aren't big enough to reach iron. Eventually, the gravitational potential energy to heat conversion doesn't give them enough energy to start fusing the next element in the series, and it collapses on itself. Helium fusion is incredibly sensitive to temperature, and you can increase the reaction rate ridiculously by boosting the temperature a bit. As the temperature goes up as the star collapses, the helium remaining fuses incredibly rapidly. It's not a nova-style explosion, it doesn't produce devastation - but it produces enough energy to puff out the outer layers of the sun into something called a 'planetary nebula' - for example, the Ring Nebula. This leaves the white-hot core of the star sitting at the middle of the system, where it stays, slowly cooling down.

Yeah, I like astrophysics a lot

Standard tapwater is fine. It's filtered, it's decontaminated - it's perfectly safe, basically. Adelaide water in particular is decontaminated fairly well, which is what gives it that 'chlorine' taste. Boiling it is probably an unnecessary waste.

Growing cotton and rice in the driest state on Earth (Antarctica isn't a state, so neener neener) is almost certainly one of the biggest 'what the hell?' things about Australia. Honestly, what were the settlers who came up with that idea thinking?

[Dark One]

Thanks had

Thats essentialy what i was getting at. Its been about 15 years since i've discussed anything like this properly, so its nice to know that my memory isn't entriely wrong

[DragonRider/Robin]

I'm only getting things from what I hear when wandering around or watching T.V. (a rare case), what I squeeze out of my science teacher and the rest I get from not-so-wild speculation. I still think we're screwed.

[Hannai]

Hey irrigation istelf is one of the stupidest farming practices we use, that and superphosphate fertilizers...

The first irrigation scheme on the Murray was started by the Chaffey brothers of Canada in 1887 irrigating two sites near present day Mildura. by 1897 both locations were showing the effects of irrigation induced salinity- Ironically its still a problem today that is just getting bigger!
this is from the National Government's salinity action plan website at www.napswq.gov.au/publications/salinity.html#what
How is salinity affecting Australia?

* More than $130 million of agricultural production is lost annually from salinity
* More than $6 million is spent every year on building maintenance related to salinity in South Australia
* Salinity causes $9 million damage annually to roads and highways in south-west New South Wales
* The area of salt affected land in Western Australia is increasing at a rate of one football field per hour
* If salinity is not effectively managed within 20 years, the salt content in Adelaide’s drinking water may exceed World Health Organisation standards for desirable drinking water in two of every five days
* Increased salinity could cause the extinction of approximately 450 species of native flora and 250 species of invertebrate water fauna in the Western Australian wheat belt

[MajiKat]

DO - growing up we all had baths - we shared our bath water during droughts, and when we were kids mum would shove us all in there together. The sharing was funny - the cleanest people would go first, with my dad last cause he was always dirty from the farm. sometimes when water was really scarce we would go to my nans and bathe - she was on her own and had heaps of water for just one person.

Had - the chlorine taste is why i don't drink tap water. its foul. its such a strong taste in our water here (NSW north coast) its like drinking from a swimming pool! yuk!

We never farmed crops, so water on the farm would only become a major issue when all the dams dried up and there was nothing for the stock to drink. Dad built a huge dam years ago that has never dried up (its the size of a football field) so we always have water for stock now, although mud around the egdes causes problems when the sheep get stuck and you have to pull them out! our farm has no natural waterways so dad has build so many dams over the years.

[had]

I'm used to the 'chlorine taste', I think. Actually, water without it tastes weird to me now.

Really, it just indicates that it's clean. But I suppose there's no accounting for taste.

[MajiKat]

Lol! my dad complains cause his water tastes like leaves! i told him that if he cleaned the gutters more often he wouldn't have that problem!

ahh there is nothing like tank water for drinking! water, to me, is not meant to have a taste, so the chlorine taste kinda freaks me out occassionally - its a shock sometimes how chemically it tastes

[Dark One]

All water has a taste, even rain water.

Its just tap water tastes different cos of what the local authorities put into it

[Fuil Dearg]

we get our tap water from an underground well. i'm glad it's that way, that it isn't chlorinated and treated and that it's not city or town water. it definitely has a taste but it isn't bad. sometimes though, when it's after raining very heavily, the taste becomes a bit more bitter and maybe acidic or tart and i think it might be cos of coniferous trees near the water source. my father has a filter jug and he usually uses it to filter our tap water. it does taste a bit better afterwards but i'm happy enough with it either way.