- pfdietzMany already were.
- The feelings of Europeans are not a justification for the taxing of Americans.
- It's easier to shield the GPUs if they're all grouped up.
- Solar panels can in principle be made very thin, since there are semiconductors (like CdTe) where the absorption length of a photon is < 1 micron. Shielding against solar wind particles doesn't need much thickness (also < 1 micron).
So maybe if we had such PV, we could make huge gossamer-thin arrays that don't have much mass, then use the power from these arrays to pump waste heat up to higher temperature so the radiators could be smaller.
The enabling technology here would be those very low mass PV arrays. These would also be very useful for solar-electric spacecraft, driving ion or plasma engines.
- Temperature is a property of systems in thermal equilibrium. One such system is blackbody radiation, basically a gas of photons that is in thermal equilibrium.
The universe is filled with such a bath of radiation, so it makes sense to say the temperature of space is the temperature of this bath. Of course, in galaxies, or even more so near stars, there's additional radiation that is not in thermal equilibrium.
- This sounds like vanity again. Oh noez, others think less of me.
- Dollar holdings outside the US come to about $1 trillion. What you are talking about there are holdings of debt. Yes, US prosperity has been propped up by borrowing increasing amounts of money. This is not sustainable.
One can view Trump's tariff actions as preparatory for US debt default. This would crash the dollar and make imports much more expensive.
- How is that? Are we taking stuff at the point of a gun?
The benefits would seem to flow to those countries that would have been swallowed up without Pax Americana.
- > It’s not that it’s not worth the expense, it’s that we’re unable to continue funding global peace and prosperity ourselves. And we shouldn’t have to.
That's just explaining why it's not worth the expense.
- Ok, now you're repeating the usual nuclear bro bullshit.
Nuclear isn't competitive anywhere. Even in China, vastly more renewables are being installed (even taking into account capacity factors.) If the putative excuse you are desperately depending on there is so powerful it applies universally, even in non-democracies, what chance is there it could be overcome?
The same regulatory burden isn't placed on wind/solar because there's no need for it there. Wind and solar are not subject to low probability, very high cost accident scenarios that are the driver for nuclear regulation. And, wind/solar have the advantage of being highly redundant, not being grouped into monolithic units with higher internal interdependency. This makes the renewables far less dependent on extreme reliability of components and their connections, and far less dependent on the skill and consistency of labor and those overseeing construction.
- It's because it's not worth the expense. Vanity is a hell of a drug, but it has its limits.
- "The third dredge-up brings helium, carbon, and the s-process products to the surface," (emphasis added)
In the early universe, stars had so little in the way of "seeds" for the s-process to act on that the few seeds that were there absorbed large numbers of neutrons, eventually producing weird stars highly enriched in lead (the end point of the s-process). These stars have been detected from lead (and bismuth) in their spectra.
- See also "dredge-up".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dredge-up
"By definition, during a dredge-up, a convection zone extends all the way from the star's surface down to the layers of material that have undergone fusion."
- The US is going to lose its edge regardless. American exceptionalism after WW2 was always going to be temporary. With just 4% of the world's population the US could not stay on top of anything forever.
- Not just captured; some of the isotopes were formed in situ by bombardment of the protoplanetary disk by ~GeV range protons formed in the supernova shock by the Fermi mechanism (basically, bounce particles back and forth between moving magnetic mirrors and their energy gradually but exponentially increases.)
- s-process elements (including radioactive ones like technetium) are detected in the spectra of the stars where the process occurs, which means they are right out at the "surface".
- No, gravitational segregation like that is a very slow process and would be overwhelmed by any convection. In Earth's atmosphere, for example, it doesn't occur until very high altitude (80 km or so) where diffusion is fast enough to overcome mixing.
- But they do leave. Stars not large enough to go supernova do still form planetary nebulas when the more gradually lose their outer layers to space. Only the core is left behind to form a white dwarf. This will be the Sun's eventual fate.