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Missile Defense

Technology has always found its greatest consumer in a nation's war and defense efforts. Since the last attempts at a "Star Wars" defense system, has technology changed considerably enough to make the latest Missile Defense initiatives more successful? Can such an application of science be successful? Is a militarized space inevitable, necessary or impossible?

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lchic - 06:06am Jul 2, 2003 EST (# 12801 of 12806)
~~~~ It got understood and exposed ~~~~

.... does 'cna' preceed 'dna' ... 'can' 'dan' .... does 'Dan' Dare?

lchic - 06:30am Jul 2, 2003 EST (# 12802 of 12806)
~~~~ It got understood and exposed ~~~~

"" ... The volcanoes produced two gases: sulphur dioxide and carbon dioxide. The sulphur and other effusions caused acid rain, but would have bled from the atmosphere quite quickly. The carbon dioxide, on the other hand, would have persisted. By enhancing the greenhouse effect, it appears to have warmed the world sufficiently to have destabilised the superconcentrated frozen gas called methane hydrate, locked in sediments around the polar seas. The release of methane into the atmosphere explains the sudden shift in carbon isotopes.

Methane is an even more powerful greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. The result of its release was runaway global warming: a rise in temperature led to changes that raised the temperature further, and so on. The warming appears, alongside the acid rain, to have killed the plants. Starvation then killed the animals.

Global warming also seems to explain the geological changes. If the temperature of the surface waters near the poles increases, the circulation of marine currents slows down, which means that the ocean floor is deprived of oxygen. As the plants on land died, their roots would cease to hold together the soil and loose rock, with the result that erosion rates would have greatly increased.

So how much warming took place? A sharp change in the ratio of the isotopes of oxygen permits us to reply with some precision: 6C. Benton does not make the obvious point, but another author, the climate change specialist Mark Lynas, does. Six degrees is the upper estimate produced by the UN's scientific body, the intergovernmental panel on climate change (IPCC), for global warming by 2100. A conference of some of the world's leading atmospheric scientists in Berlin last month concluded that the IPCC's model may have underestimated the problem: the upper limit, they now suggest, should range between 7 and 10 degrees. Neither model takes into account the possibility of a partial melting of the methane hydrate still present in vast quantities around the fringes of the polar seas. ....

http://www.guardian.co.uk/Columnists/Column/0,5673,988440,00.html

lchic - 06:36am Jul 2, 2003 EST (# 12803 of 12806)
~~~~ It got understood and exposed ~~~~

RU billionaire buys UK club

http://www.itv.com/news/1149599.html

rshow55 - 12:04pm Jul 2, 2003 EST (# 12804 of 12806)
Can we do a better job of finding truth? YES. Click "rshow55" for some things Lchic and I have done and worked for on this thread.

Gisterme can ask good questions faster than I can respond. He asked about global warming control - and I've been working at it, but am not finished yet.

Manbiot's piece "Shadow of Extinction" http://www.guardian.co.uk/Columnists/Column/0,5673,988440,00.html makes the case, as many others do, that global warming is a problem that needs to be fixed.

It is as big a problem as it is. Human resources are big, too. It shouldn't be beyond the wit of man to fix this problem.

Judging roughly from http://www.guardian.co.uk/globalwarming/graphic/0,7367,397009,00.html , world C02 emissions are roughly 15 billion tons/year - or about 3.75 billion tons/year of carbon.

Guessing from hay prices in the US, US agriculture could probably grow hay - in very large volume - for about 40$/ton of carbon - a little more efficiently than now.

3.75 billion tons/year at 40$/ton is 150 billion dollars/year.

Could that carbon be made and buried - taken out of the ecosystem - for that price? For some higher price, at least, such a thing could be done.

My guess, after a little work, is that aquaculture on the equatorial oceans could grow carbon - and bury it in the sea - for a good deal less - perhaps for a shadow price of 5-10$/ton - or even less. It would take an area roughly the size of Texas to do so.

Less than 2% of the ocean area between 5 degrees N and S latitudes, perhaps much less.

That would be a cost/year of 19-38 billion/year - compared to 800 billion/year spent now for crude oil.

A tax of 2.5-5% on oil transported over oceans would suffice to fund this.

I think that the global warming problem and the world's energy supply problem should be fixed together - on a money-making basis.

Perhaps carrying enough tax burden to fund the UN better than it is today - and fund immunizations and minimal public health expenditures world wide.

If the tax burden went with political facilitation of the work from the UN - this might be a straightforward thing to get done - with the level of human initiative it now takes to make a summer movie.

And with the organizers well paid, in both money and status.

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