Yes, I know, I've worked with such systems.
and it’s routinely done with systems, such as hydraulic actuators and oil drilling rigs, where the environment and pressure gradients are orders of magnitude more extreme than what humans would face on the Martian surface. Basically it’s a solved problem.
No. It's a solved problem for liquids in a variety of pressure environments. As I and others here have told you repeatedly, the relevant properties of gasses - particularly their viscosities and interface mechanics - are NOT THE SAME as those of liquids. You currently sound like someone demanding that people stop being silly about "aquaculture" and just use the things we know work for cows and sheep because obviously they'll work equally well for prawns and oysters.
Solutions that work for viscous liquids mostly do not work for gasses. (Solutions that work for gasses will generally work for liquids, except in cases where making them strong enough to resist the pressure is difficult.)
You also might want to look up "cold welding", to see why using metal-on-metal pressure seals with a near vacuum on one side is very much not like using them between two filled with gasses at different pressures. It's not just the pressure difference that matters.
]]>There's a reason why we distinguish between "watertight" and "airtight"; they're very different requirements.
]]>Offhand I can think of three major reasons, though I wouldn't care to try and order them:
1) transporting large quantities (10s of GW minimum) of electricity is hard - you can't just put it on a boat. Transmission losses scale with the square of current, and ultra-high-voltage undersea cables have their own problems.
2) you're talking about a lot of jobs, relative to oil wells, at least initially. If you give them all to foreigners (a) you're exporting all your profits (b) the local population will object, possibly with sufficient force to effect a change of government. But if you employ locals, you have to spend years educating a suitable workforce, because that's specialised technical work and keeping the population ignorant has suited the rulers very well, thank you. Building technical schools, training technical teachers, and then training the workforce all has to be done before you can start constructing the actual hardware, takes decades, and lets everyone else know what you're planning. And leaves you with a large highly educated citizenry likely to ask difficult questions like "who elected you, anyway?" and "what if we execute all these princes and split their money between the rest of us?"
3) by effectively announcing that you think the age of oil is over, you start everyone else on a rush for renewables too, which both undercuts your planned future and starts cutting into sales of your current product earlier than you'd expected. And the countries that already have substanial higher education systems have the aforementioned decades' headstart on you.
An oil state that started a high-quality mass higher education system at around the time OPEC formed, with the intention of gradually transitioning into IT, aerospace, pharmaceuticals, and other R&D heavy advanced industries, would be well-placed to switch to renewables. But...
]]>I suspect anyone who's a heavy user of facebook or similar has dumped enough text about themselves into the LLM input streams for it to generate a similar pattern of truths and half-truths followed by fiction.
But another possibility would be to ask it for a list of famous people who {went to your school/grew up in your neighbourhood/worked for your employer} or similar. Choose one where the category is likely to be small (school is likely to be good unless you went to Eton or equivalent) and fact-check it on wikipedia. Or see how many you can ask for before it produces something obviously false. ("It says here that Queen Victoria and George Washington both went to West Coalfields Comprehensive School, despite being long dead when the school opened.")
]]>Well, in theory we've stopped. But practice is never the same as theory, is it?
So in practice the Ffos-y-fran "Land Reclamation Scheme" is still going despite having lost their licence last year (appeals ongoing). The precise scale of current operations is (presumably intentionally) unclear, but they've extracted somewhere between 100kt and 300kt in the ~9 months since they should have stopped. Not a huge amount, but even 100,000 tonnes would allow you to run a few emergency trains for government use. And keeping the site open means you can potentially scale up output at need, if the reserves are there (I've not seen a good figure for the actual amount of coal at Ffos-y-fran).
And then of course there's the proposed new mine at Whitehaven which gOvE approved last year on the grounds that it wouldn't affect UK climate change targets "because most of the coal will be exported". Supporters are strangely reticent about how much coal it will produce, focussing instead on jobs created; local news suggests ~ 3Mt/year, for 25 years... Meanwhile there are the plans (supported by, among others, the hon. member for the 18th century) to give permission for a site in Wales to extract a couple of million tonnes a year for 15 years. For [cough] environmentally friendly uses [cough cough] only, of course...
]]>And from the other side the neurodivergent community, which is finally (after a long struggle) making some progress towards depathologising autism, adhd, etc, will have (well-founded) concerns about what "curing" sociopathy looks like, whether the (hypothetical) social good can justify the (potential) individual harms, whether it'll lead to a return to harmful "cures" for autism (etc) or even to calls for outright eugenics...
]]>b) as someone who did quite a lot of quantum physics, albiet over 25 years ago now, I'm not sure you can have a field without an associated particle. Of the four basic field interactions, the only one we haven't positively identified the particle for is gravity, and given how hard it is to study gravity waves (especially over a period not measured in centuries), that one probably just needs some more time.
And even farm fields have onions, after all.
]]>HDMI-to-VGA and DVI-to-VGA adaptors are widely available* in the UK for about GBP20-30, which is a lot less than even a bottom-end graphics card.
While there are undoubtedly some holes in Bujold's worldbuilding, that isn't one of them.
Firstly, the process only works (as I recall) with a sheet written out by the magic user doing the transfer (which is part of the creator's enthusiasm for getting it working with metal plates rather than wooden ones). Which means that if you want a book made that way, you need to have a sorceror write it out longhand. Which brings us to the second, much larger, problem.
The limiting resource for the process, in that world (even if we allow the use of a printed sheet to create a new plate) is the availability of a sorceror to do the job. Temple sorcerors are rare and in great demand, and in any case their priorities are decided by the White God, with the temple hierarchy assigning whatever's left after that. Creating new temple sorcerors is a lengthy and demanding process, and attempting to take shortcuts or arrange your own supply is ... unwise even beyond "normal" attempts to appropriate a God's power for your own purposes.
Hedge sorcerors powerful enough to do the job are probably even rarer, and very unlikely to do anything that leaves such an obvious mark because of the attention it will draw. And while "just making books" might seem excusably benign to those unfamiliar with Bujold's world, there are very good reasons why the temple hunts down free/rogue sorcerors and (usually) strips them of their powers. Untrained sorcerors are extremely dangerous to those around them (and indeed to themselves; they tend to die young, unpleasantly, and not from human actions), and the only way to mitigate that danger is ... divine approval and several years of seminary training. (NB for those unfamiliar with the series: I don't mean approval by the temple authorities. The White God gets personally involved, and the stories feature some very clear and unambiguous divine wrath pour encourager les autres.)
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