Peter Erwin

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• Commented on Pushing it back
  Bad estimate. Actually, it turns out to be probably a good estimate; see below. And you're ignoring my additional point that a working SPS requires more than just solar panels -- you can't just toss them into orbit and assume...
• Commented on Pushing it back
  Isn't that maybe ignoring the cost of constructing all the things you're putting into space? If you naively use the current cost/power of ground-based solar arrays (~ $1/W) -- ignoring the extra engineering needed to make them survive in space...
• Commented on Pushing it back
  That's where you've lost everyone who might have been following up to that point, I think. As a statement it's both obviously false and a demonstration that you've misjudged H's position It's true that my "hate and ignore volcanoes" was...
• Commented on Pushing it back
  A global amelioration of climate is a really good explanation for why civilizations started popping up on fertile lands near rivers in the Fertile Crescent, China, coastal Peru, and likely along the Mekong, Indus, and other areas that haven’t been...
• Commented on Pushing it back
  There are a couple of things to realize here. One is that there are two classes of explanations for Neanderthal extinction. One class is based on selection: they died out because they were inferior in some way. The other is...
• Commented on Pushing it back
  Re Neanderthal extinction: My understanding is that there isn't much of a consensus on the cause(s), and what consensus there might be is more around demographic factors (the historically small sizes of Neanderthal populations making them vulnerable to things like...
• Commented on Pushing it back
  You seem to be saying periodic where you mean predictable. Firstly, if you look at those graphs, even the most regular are not perfectly periodic over ANY scale; they're more complex than that. If you read the Wikipedia article, you...
• Commented on Pushing it back
  Sigh. Orbital mechanics IS a feedback system, and N-body effects (which those are) are generally not truly periodic, and are sometimes chaotic. Some of those variations look like well-behaved cyclicity, but others don't. Orbital mechanics is generally not a feedback...
• Commented on Pushing it back
  I have never been convinced that Milankovitch Cycles are real and not just a curve fitting artifact with noisy input data. They're not "curves fit to data". They're predictions from celestial mechanics: how the Earth's orientation and orbit change over...
• Commented on Pushing it back
  I mention the mass-less neutrinos, because nuclear reactors emit a LOT of antineutrinos, but since everybody "knew" they were mass-less and therefore didn't interact with matter, any report about living close to nuclear reactors at best mentioned them in a...
• Commented on Finding true love in the cosmos
  Nor have they ever met a clownfish—all the members of a school of clownfish are female except the dominant one, and if the dominant male dies, the top surviving female becomes male. It's actually the other way around: the fish...
• Commented on Oh, 2022!
  JBS @ 178 Yeah, but the conversion of Pennsylvania's German population into a Dutch population occurred a generation earlier, during the FIRST World War. No, they've been called "Dutch" since the 18th Century (and they've never claimed to be from...
• Commented on Oh, 2022!
  All of which have much deeper gravity wells -- and storms! Really big storms. Hauling a nuclear propulsion unit out past the frost line is hard enough even if it's only to provide power for an ion rocket and a...
• Commented on Oh, 2022!
  That's about the time all those "Dutch" people moved to Pennsylvania. Um, no. The "Pennsylvania Dutch" are descended from Germans who moved there in the 18th and 19th Centuries; "Dutch" is just a corruption of "Deitsch/Deutsch" (meaning German)....
• Commented on Oh, 2022!
  nearer isn't necessarily easier in those cases In this case it is, though. Jupiter is 4–6 astronomical units (au) away from Earth; the Oort Cloud lies between 2,000 and 50,000 (or so) au away. And, as I mentioned, Oort Cloud...
• Commented on Oh, 2022!
  Next century (if only because of the distances involved) someone is going to go helium prospecting out in the Oort cloud. Big snowball comets might well have enough helium to make it economically viable. There's vastly more helium in much...
• Commented on Fossil fuels are dead (and here's why)
  All references I see online are recent. I remember the stories, including in the underground newspapers (where the Weatherpeople would send communiques to) as reporting warnings. These are "recent" articles involving interviews with people who were there at the time....
• Commented on Fossil fuels are dead (and here's why)
  sigh Here you are, complaining that they don't want to talk to the elders, and bring up the bombing at UW-Madison. The Weatherpeople made it a point of not hurting people, but destroying symbolic property. The idiot who was killed...
• Commented on Because I am bored ...
  once they're dead, they strongly resemble planetary nebulae in both form and function, and gravity will recycle them. I'm afraid that doesn't really make sense. Planetary nebulae are expanding shells of hydrogen and helium, surrounding (and ionized by) the hot-but-starting-to-cool...
• Commented on Yet another novel I will no longer write
  Charlie @ 616: In your universe, when did Jim Crow end? Or discrimination against African Americans, red-lining, and white flight to the suburbs? The fundamental problem with your argument is that you are saying "X is an aspect of American...
• Commented on Yet another novel I will no longer write
  Then this narrative got appropriated and transplanted to America, in film, TV, and fiction. Where it hybridized with white settler fear of a slave uprising. The survivors/protagonists of the zombie plague are the viewpoint the audience is intended to empathize...
• Commented on Do my Homework
  In the 1950-1999 period, tales of the 21st century were everywhere. Where are the equivalent stories of the 22nd century, that should be being told today? They'll be written in the 2050-2099 period? In effect, you're complaining that people aren't...
• Commented on Test Case
  (Admittedly the UK driving test is a lot stricter than the US one and includes things like parallel parking and making a three-point or n-point turn.) There is no such thing as "the US driving test", since it's up to...
• Commented on Solarpunk rising, or how to turn boring bureaucratic meetings into creative fodder
  Also just to return the snark, the fact that you think you can accurately predict when a royal flush is going to be drawn is exactly Talebs whole point Because card drawing exists on a normal distribution humans tend to...
• Commented on Test Case
  ... the maximum penalty for vehicular homicide in Arizona is a mere three years in jail, which would be laughable if it wasn't so enraging. (Rob a bank and shoot a guard: get the death penalty. Run the guard over...
• Commented on Solarpunk rising, or how to turn boring bureaucratic meetings into creative fodder
  Also, what problem are "white roads" supposed to solve? I'm not very bright, but I do know that re-radiated insolation tends from the visible to the infra-red spectrum irrespective of the visible colour of the surface it lands on. There's...
• Commented on Why I barely read SF these days
  Not inventing a completely new class of substance unobservable except via its finagle factor pervading the universe (whether it be quintessence, aether or dark matter) is definitely simpler, in at least one sense. Right, because if 20th Century physics has...
• Commented on Why I barely read SF these days
  Interesting. I note that he favours MOND, which is one model that assumes Einstein's formula breaks down in its limits, just as Newton's did. [Sigh.] Modified Newtonian Dynamics ("MOND") is about postulating a breakdown in Newtonian physics, as the name...
• Commented on Why I barely read SF these days
  Are you familiar with Lee Smolin's cosmological natural selection model? Because you're getting awfully close to it... (One of the cool thing about it is that Smolin suggested random perturbations of the laws of physics in daughter universes spawned from...
• Commented on Why I barely read SF these days
  You simply can't have black holes accreting matter during inflation, for several reasons: There is no normal matter for black holes to accrete during the inflationary epoch. The inflationary model is a period of expansion when the only meaningful thing...