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View Poll Results: Climate Change: Manmade or Natural?
Global Warming - Burning Fossil Fuels is going to kill the planet! 21 75.00%
Global Warming - It's a natural climate cycle, Manmade CO2 is not causing it. 0 0%
Global Cooling - Chlorofluorocarbons from your fridge are killing the enviroment! 0 0%
Global Cooling -It's a natural climate cycle, Manmade chemicals are not causing it. 0 0%
Climate Change - Does not exist. 0 0%
Climate Change - Exists but mankind is not causing it/can not do anything to stop or change it it. 7 25.00%
Acid Rain - Human Emissions are going to kill the enviroment, certainly a problem back in the 80s. 0 0%
Voters: 28. You may not vote on this poll

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Old 09-21-2014, 09:22 PM   #101
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Old 09-21-2014, 09:32 PM   #102
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John Oliver's Last Week Tonight about Global Warming
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Old 09-21-2014, 09:48 PM   #103
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My word, I lost far too many brain cells from reading unownmew's posts. Thank goodness we don't have to deal with an arch-conservative conspiracy theorist like him anymore.
I've been trying for the last half an hour to find an image or video that makes me wince as earth-shakingly hard as the statement "arch-conservative conspiracy theorist" does. Congratulations. You win.
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Old 09-22-2014, 03:55 AM   #104
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Would you prefer "Religious far-right nutcase conspiracy theorist?" Though that's redundant.

Also, young!me was wrong. Global Warming is definitely almost completely man-made and it will destroy much of the human population unless curbed.
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Old 09-22-2014, 09:07 AM   #105
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Talk about timing: the same day my friend showed me that NYT piece, it turns out 300,000 people marched through downtown New York protesting the world governments' inaction on taking painful but necessary measures to combat climate change. Amongst many reporting on the event (despite the Reddit link's title) was none other than the New York Times again, so you can check out their story if you like or you can read one of the many other news groups' stories provided at the top of the linked Reddit thread.
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Old 09-22-2014, 09:16 AM   #106
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Is humanities activities having a significant impact on the environment? Yes. Is it as simple as "slash emissions not rainforests"? No. The climate is not a simple system. Nor is it a case of "everything is fine and dandy and stable as long as we stop doing these large scale emissions". Climate varies. Just in human history we can look at the little ice age and the medieval warm period. On a longer scale, we're currently in an interglacial in the middle of an ice age. Do we minimise our impact on the environment even if that means returning to a glacial period with all the attendant extinctions, loss of ecosystems and difficulties for human society that entails? The Holocene extinction (that is, the current extinction event caused by human history) is not a major one in geological terms. We talk about climate change due to the systematic clearing of rainforests as if its something that just started happening in the latter half of the last century and ignore the prehistorical deforestation of Europe.

Converting to greener energy sources (personally favour nuclear) is a part of it, but really rather than saying "we should try to minimise our impact on the environment and everything will be fine!" we need to say "what do we want out of the environment? Which species and ecosystems are we okay with vanishing and which do we want to try to save that would've vanished without our input, as thousands did before we existed?" Control where we can, adapt where we can't.

Part of this is how humans view time. The extinction of x species now (even if said extinction is merely dwindling numbers and not any significant actual suffering on the scale of individuals of the species) is somehow sad, and yet the fact that our conservation efforts for one species might prevent the necessary ecological niche for a dozen new ones and therefore deny them the chance of ever existing doesn't phase conservationists in the least.
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Old 09-22-2014, 09:45 AM   #107
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Sure. But I think most can agree that they would like to live somewhere that doesn't regularly remain above 85 °F (29.4 °C); and I think most can agree that they would like to live somewhere that doesn't regularly remain below 32°F during the day. There are of course exceptions. Exceptional people enjoy exceptional climes. But most people in the developed world, and we're talking more the 90% sense of the word "most" here than the 50% sense, would probably like to live somewhere that has a daily peak temperature between 70 and 75 °F (21.1 to 23.8 °C); and, for winter-affected regions, a daily winter peak temperature that averages very close to 0°C at worst. (One or two degrees Celsius below, fine. Not ten or more.) So regarding your question, "What sort of world do we want to live in?", I think most people are going to answer you with, "The 70-degree world we have lived in up until now."

In short, when it comes to climate change, I think the vast, vast majority of people are what we might term "climate conservatives" -- people who want to maintain the climate status quo (ref. the 20th century's) at all reasonable costs.

Of course, this is just the simple majority. If we look at the specific subset of human civilization that lives in coastal areas that are at risk of becoming submerged by rising sea waters (e.g. Bangladesh), then I am sure that 99.9% of them would tell you some not nice words and that they very much would like to see the world come together to curb humanity's contribution towards increasing the mean global temperature of Earth.
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Old 09-22-2014, 10:13 AM   #108
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Sure. But I think most can agree that they would like to live somewhere that doesn't regularly remain above 85 °F (29.4 °C); and I think most can agree that they would like to live somewhere that doesn't regularly remain below 32°F during the day. There are of course exceptions. Exceptional people enjoy exceptional climes. But most people in the developed world, and we're talking more the 90% sense of the word "most" here than the 50% sense, would probably like to live somewhere that has a daily peak temperature between 70 and 75 °F (21.1 to 23.8 °C); and, for winter-affected regions, a daily winter peak temperature that averages very close to 0°C at worst. (One or two degrees Celsius below, fine. Not ten or more.) So regarding your question, "What sort of world do we want to live in?", I think most people are going to answer you with, "The 70-degree world we have lived in up until now."

In short, when it comes to climate change, I think the vast, vast majority of people are what we might term "climate conservatives" -- people who want to maintain the climate status quo (ref. the 20th century's) at all reasonable costs.

Of course, this is just the simple majority. If we look at the specific subset of human civilization that lives in coastal areas that are at risk of becoming submerged by rising sea waters (e.g. Bangladesh), then I am sure that 99.9% of them would tell you some not nice words and that they very much would like to see the world come together to curb humanity's contribution towards increasing the mean global temperature of Earth.
Sure, I agree. What I was trying to get at (poorly, apparently) is that curbing emissions and stopping deforestation doesn't in any way guarantee this. As an example, we're currently about eleven and a half thousand years into an interglacial period in the current ice age which is about the average length of previous interglacial periods. With evidence from ice cores, we know that the turnaround from interglacial to glacial period can be as short as a few decades. All we ever hear out of climate conservationists is "limit human impact!" with no thought as to whether natural cycles are going to turn out any better for us than the current anthropogenic climate change.

In the event of natural climate change, do we sit back and limit human impact or do we directly intervene to maintain what we're used to? If we choose the latter, is it going to backfire on us horribly? (See; efficient dealing with forest fires leading to a build up of flammable material and the eventual triggering of far larger forest fires than we can control or would have gotten had we not intervened). Will we have to choose to sacrifice this ecosystem to protect that aspect of the climate? It's not as simple as limiting our impact. It's deciding what we want, looking at where the climate is going - whether anthropogenically caused or not - and working out how to get from the one to the other. Maintaining the climate of the last century or two (from the end of the little ice age to now) is much more a case of us working out how best to actively interfere with global climate than it is about removing our impact. Slashing emissions not forests is an important but small part of it.
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Old 09-22-2014, 10:22 AM   #109
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What you seem to be saying: "There's no guarantee that use of a fire extinguisher can put out this fire. It may be too large a fire for a meager extinguisher to handle."

What they're saying: "Sure. But choosing not to use the fire extinguisher and to just stay the course guarantees that the fire shall burn out of control. We should at least try what we can to achieve/maintain our ideal tomorrow."

Not that I think you disagree with this either. I think you and I right now are devil's advocating in circles and are very much on the same page. ("Climate change real? Well look outside. Mankind contributing to it? Sure. Non-mankind factors also contributing to it? Also sure.")
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Old 09-22-2014, 01:21 PM   #110
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Actually, Concept's opinion on the narrow view of conservationists, combined with two events for me back in 2009-ish:

1. Visiting the San Francisco Academy of Sciences and being disgusted the whole thing is geared toward pro-green propaganda
2. Watching the diversity of life during the Ordovician Period in Animal Armageddon

...has reversed a lot of my pro-green, anti-emission views. I think green energy should be pursued less for its environmental footprint and more because being green is a side effect of being renewable.

What those two events did to me:

1. Visiting the museum made me realizes that a good portion of the anti-emission crowd is full of loons, having to exaggerate or manipulate their data to push for a sense of immediacy. I dunno if you guys have heard of "policy wedges" but they were a debate construct conceived as emergency humanity saving measures that required extreme financial sacrifice and uncanny cooperation amongst bickering nations to reverse global warming, with a timetable of about 100 years. The wedges were serious, but were primarily used to illustrate how impractical it was to try and fight what's already been set in motion. So why don't we welcome Water World?

2. Animal Armageddon showed to me that we're not even in the most diverse period of earth's history, and that the Ordovician Period was about as alien as anything out of science fiction. If you measure the world with geological time, as Concept says, the Holocene is just a blip. Heck, the United States is only 238 years old, which is super young for a stable country. Comparing geological time to human lifetimes is going to skew perceptions.

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Old 09-22-2014, 02:58 PM   #111
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Not at all saying don't cut emissions. I said that was an important part of it. Just, what you usually hear in regards to climate change is "if we just stopped pumping out CO2/cutting down rainforests/etc everything will be fine and dandy" and the implication that the global climate has been stable and the same for thousands of years until we started messing it up with industry, both of which are nonsense. Global climate can and many times in Earth's history has shifted significantly in the space of a few decades. What we imagine as the natural and stable global climate that we're changing has existed for maybe a century and a half since the little ice age, which itself lasted only a few hundred years. If we wish to maintain a stable climate we need to actively and deliberately impact it, or if we wish to severely limit our impact then we need to accept that climate will change one way or another without us. The two are not synonymous. Current human activities are driving the climate in a particular direction and we should take action to prevent this, but without it the climate could easily go in one of a dozen other different directions and we need to be prepared to either accept it or actively intervene.

On a smaller scale, conservationists are obnoxious as shit when it comes to ecosystems and extinctions, and seem to be of the view that any change is bad. They present the false dichotomy between current ecosystems/species and death and desolation, when what actually happens when ecosystems change and species die out is new ones take their place. Getting all upset about giant sloths dying out because we're chopping down the rainforests? Humanity wouldn't exist were it not for massive deforestation in the regions where our tree-loving ancestors lived.
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Old 09-22-2014, 05:39 PM   #112
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I feel like we can do better as a community than bitching about members no longer with us.

The argument that climate change is entirely man made always struck me as a little daft. We know that the climate changes all the time. We have evidence of this. We also know that other planets in our solar system have had different climates at other times which it's fair to say humans probably didn't influence. But then it's kind of like people who argue that we evolved from neanderthals. Well, no, we evolved from a common ancestor but at least you're on the right lines. We clearly need to take action on climate change. A fantastic report was recently published by the Global Commission on the Economy and Climate talked about how we can boost our economies while also saving the planet. It's little baby steps to acting in a sustainable way but it's a start. This area is as much about living with the fact that climate change is inevitable as it is about slowing it and being sustainable.
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Old 09-22-2014, 08:32 PM   #113
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Not at all saying don't cut emissions. I said that was an important part of it. Just, what you usually hear in regards to climate change is "if we just stopped pumping out CO2/cutting down rainforests/etc everything will be fine and dandy" and the implication that the global climate has been stable and the same for thousands of years until we started messing it up with industry, both of which are nonsense. Global climate can and many times in Earth's history has shifted significantly in the space of a few decades. What we imagine as the natural and stable global climate that we're changing has existed for maybe a century and a half since the little ice age, which itself lasted only a few hundred years. If we wish to maintain a stable climate we need to actively and deliberately impact it, or if we wish to severely limit our impact then we need to accept that climate will change one way or another without us. The two are not synonymous. Current human activities are driving the climate in a particular direction and we should take action to prevent this, but without it the climate could easily go in one of a dozen other different directions and we need to be prepared to either accept it or actively intervene.
I didn't mean to put words in your mouth if I did - not cutting emissions is my opinion, and I'm not exactly advocating mass air pollution to compensate for it. Rather, I think that sustained effort into reducing emissions will have very sharp, very sudden diminishing returns and that it's far more practical to just pursue renewable energy and make it economically viable so it's natural to turn away from petrol.
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Old 04-12-2015, 07:44 AM   #114
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I guess this is an okay thread for sharing this?



Solar energy officially all-around cheaper, joule for joule, than two thirds of the world's crude oil. ("[Brent] is used to price two thirds of the world's internationally traded crude oil supplies.")
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Old 04-12-2015, 02:37 PM   #115
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I wouldn't say that's surprising. Science fiction writers have been banging the pulpit for almost a century that solar is the ideal energy type. The problem is the technology is only just starting to reach the point of efficiency in how one doesn't need a near 24/7 super sunny spot around the equator to maximize solar collection. I don't even believe in Tesla Motors' electric car demanding electric fill stations since I think solar charging will have advanced to the point of not needing gas stations at all except as a vestigial, economic parasite

However, logistical concerns do exist. Solar panels are starting to be very popular in places like San Francisco, but they're insanely expensive and take decades to pay for themselves. It's even worse up here in the North without the exceptional power needs to justify that kind of fixed cost. Additionally, solar is not without an environmental footprint, unlike say wind. If we capture solar energy with near 100% efficiency, we deprive the Earth of warmth and other organisms of radiant energy. A future where we've built a Dyson Sphere to harness the Sun's energy is also one where the world is cold and dead.
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Old 04-12-2015, 02:45 PM   #116
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Whilst this is good news what really needs work is energy storage. We're really bad at large scale energy storage. With traditional power plants this isn't really a problem - when they anticipate a spike (during half time at major sporting events for example) they increase their production to meet demand. You can't do this with solar. We would need to store excess energy generated during sunny days/daytime hours to meet demand on overcast days or at night. We just don't have a way of doing that yet, not on anything like a sufficient scale.
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Old 04-12-2015, 02:53 PM   #117
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I wouldn't say that's surprising. Science fiction writers have been banging the pulpit for almost a century that solar is the ideal energy type. The problem is the technology is only just starting to reach the point of efficiency in how one doesn't need a near 24/7 super sunny spot around the equator to maximize solar collection. I don't even believe in Tesla Motors' electric car demanding electric fill stations since I think solar charging will have advanced to the point of not needing gas stations at all except as a vestigial, economic parasite

However, logistical concerns do exist. Solar panels are starting to be very popular in places like San Francisco, but they're insanely expensive and take decades to pay for themselves. It's even worse up here in the North without the exceptional power needs to justify that kind of fixed cost. Additionally, solar is not without an environmental footprint, unlike say wind. If we capture solar energy with near 100% efficiency, we deprive the Earth of warmth and other organisms of radiant energy. A future where we've built a Dyson Sphere to harness the Sun's energy is also one where the world is cold and dead.
Your arguments against solar apply 100% identically to wind, I should think. If a mountain stops a 100-mph gale, the other side of the mountain sees zero wind. If you're going to argue "collecting 100% of sunlight hurts," you're going to have to play fair and argue that collecting 100% of wind hurts too. The thing is, we don't yet live in a world that is anything at all like one where humanity is capable of collecting 100% of the wind -- and that goes tenfold for sunlight. I'm pretty sure that if we collect, with 100% efficiency, every drop of sunlight that hit precisely 0.5% of the Earth's surface, we could more than provide for the current energy demands of the planet. It's worth investigating what the negative side-effects of this could be, but I severely doubt that they'd be as ruinous as a runaway greenhouse effect.

As for extraterrestrial solar energy harvesting, a true Dyson sphere (one with functionally zero gaps) built around either the Sun or the Earth would be stupid. What would be significantly less stupid -- brilliant, even -- would be stationing solar collection grids in a perihelion orbit slightly wider than or slightly narrower than Earth's and offset to the side of the planet (so as to not be blocked by nor block the planet's reception of sunlight). Would this have negative consequences for other recipients of the Sun's light, e.g. Jupiter? Yes. Would they be significant? I very much doubt it. We were just saying that 0.5% of Earth's surface area would probably be sufficient to meet the demands of modern humankind; if you were to take the entirety of Earth's surface area and call it x, I can only imagine that the number of x's which lie in Earth's orbit around the Sun would be in the thousands to tens of thousands. In other words, the consequences for building an Earth-sized solar collection grid (LOL! WAY FAR OFF!) and having it orbit the Sun alongside us would be precisely 2x the damage that just plain ol' Earth causes. Modern times: "Oh no," says Jupiter, "Earth has blocked me from receiving sunlight again by 0.00000001%." Future times: "Oh no," says Jupiter, "Earth and Earth 2 have blocked me from receiving sunlight by 0.00000002%."
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Old 04-12-2015, 03:24 PM   #118
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Your arguments against solar apply 100% identically to wind, I should think. If a mountain stops a 100-mph gale, the other side of the mountain sees zero wind. If you're going to argue "collecting 100% of sunlight hurts," you're going to have to play fair and argue that collecting 100% of wind hurts too. The thing is, we don't yet live in a world that is anything at all like one where humanity is capable of collecting 100% of the wind -- and that goes tenfold for sunlight. I'm pretty sure that if we collect, with 100% efficiency, every drop of sunlight that hit precisely 0.5% of the Earth's surface, we could more than provide for the current energy demands of the planet. It's worth investigating what the negative side-effects of this could be, but I severely doubt that they'd be as ruinous as a runaway greenhouse effect.
Wind has a technical limit on the environmental impact it can generate because turbines are large, have to be strategically placed and can't be too close to one another. Solar panels are far more flexible and far less space intensive, promising greater return on energy per unit of space but also raising the bar for how much damage it could do. Additionally, since wind is impacted by temperature gradients due to solar heating, you'd affect wind power by constructing something like a Dyson Sphere.

That said, I can believe what you say about there being an end to human desire for energy consumption. But, that doesn't take into account future technologies, such as space travel, which would demand magnitudes more energy to transport humans to distant places.

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As for extraterrestrial solar energy harvesting, a true Dyson sphere (one with functionally zero gaps) built around either the Sun or the Earth would be stupid. What would be significantly less stupid -- brilliant, even -- would be stationing solar collection grids in a perihelion orbit slightly wider than or slightly narrower than Earth's and offset to the side of the planet (so as to not be blocked by nor block the planet's reception of sunlight). Would this have negative consequences for other recipients of the Sun's light, e.g. Jupiter? Yes. Would they be significant? I very much doubt it. We were just saying that 0.5% of Earth's surface area would probably be sufficient to meet the demands of modern humankind; if you were to take the entirety of Earth's surface area and call it x, I can only imagine that the number of x's which lie in Earth's orbit around the Sun would be in the thousands to tens of thousands. In other words, the consequences for building an Earth-sized solar collection grid (LOL! WAY FAR OFF!) and having it orbit the Sun alongside us would be precisely 2x the damage that just plain ol' Earth causes. Modern times: "Oh no," says Jupiter, "Earth has blocked me from receiving sunlight again by 0.00000001%." Future times: "Oh no," says Jupiter, "Earth and Earth 2 have blocked me from receiving sunlight by 0.00000002%."
I'd say just strap panels onto Mercury. Mercury rotates once every 176 Earth days so you could periodically send ships packed with the gathered energy from the planet to Earth when it's facing away from the sun. Build the energy station beneath the planet's surface to avoid the solar winds, plasma and other nasties that hang around up there.
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Old 04-12-2015, 04:32 PM   #119
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A perihelion orbiting station (or rather series of such stations) would work better than a constant stream of trips to and from any other planet in our solar system. Why? Well think about it this way:

Mercury et al: you have to spend the energy that it takes to make the round trip to Mercury and back. You also have to account for the very real time that the trip takes (something on the order of years, even unmanned) and the fact that anything could happen during that time. (A mechanical part wears out or misfires ... the ship is struck by a certain physical or electrochemical hazard that wrecks a ship component ... the ship's software irretrievably crashes and places the ship on a course that won't ever intercept Earth ...) Finally, to offset the very real problem of that time delay, you have to build a fleet of such ships. For instance, if the time to complete a trip takes 5 years to Mercury and back home again, and if you want a ship arriving once every 30 days with new energy for the planet, then you'd require a fleet of sixty such spaceships. Kinda crazy expensive, Doppel, even if it is for the sake of the planet's energy needs.

Perihelion orbiter(s) close to Earth's orbit: with this plan, you can artificially place a series of energy-harvesting stations in an orbit around the Sun whose perigeal distance from Earth is, say, 9x to 10x lunar apogees. (Value arbitrarily selected to ensure no risk of the stations crashing into the Moon. Real value to be determined by NASA officials, etc.) What this then means is:
1. You only have to make the linear trip from Earth to 9x-10x the Moon. Which is on the order of days (in the future) or weeks, not years. That's much less fuel -- and thus much less energy -- spent on the energy-harvesting trips. You can afford to do this because Earth does the job of the orbital/perihelion trip for you. If Earth orbits the Sun at a rate of ~365 days per year whereas the stations orbit the Sun at a rate of (say) 300 days per year, Earth will consistently catch up with stations one after another and the stations can be interacted with at these perigeal times. (Well, "catch up with" is relative. I guess to be truly "catching up with" them I'd have to arbitrarily pick an orbital cycle greater than 365, not less than it. But it's the same idea either way.)

2. Since your energy-harvesting ships spend much less time in space, it also means that they are much less disposed to fail. Less exposure to harsh extraterrestrial agents, much less statistical risk of a parts failure while in space, etc.

3. You can afford to either make more frequent trips with a fleet the same size (e.g. the sixty ships from before could now arrive every twelve hours instead of every month; any one ship might not leave any sooner than once every month, but the net departure time for the fleet taken as a whole would be one ship every 12 hours) or else you can afford to cut down on the size of the fleet while keeping the frequency the same as before (e.g. the ships still arrive once every month but now we'd only need four or five ships, say, instead of sixty).

4. If something has to be repaired on the energy-harvesting station, the station can be reached within days to weeks instead of within years. A massive meteor that collided with the surface of Mercury and wiped out our energy-harvesting station could fuck us over for a 5-year cycle, but the same thing happening to a single station in orbit would only fuck us over for at worst one year while we built and launched the next mega-expensive station to replace it.
[/armchair astronomy thoughts]
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Old 10-31-2016, 04:05 PM   #120
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=90CkXVF-Q8M

The new NatGeo documentary "Before the Flood" that follows Leonardo DiCaprio's journey in discovering Climate Change from a layman's perspective is on YouTube in its entirety, and was fairly informative and an interesting watch. I'd recommend it to anyone who has the time and/or likes documentaries. It was quite something.
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Old 10-31-2016, 09:57 PM   #121
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Does Leo still use private jets? I remember him getting a lot of shit for that
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Old 10-31-2016, 11:04 PM   #122
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Mozz View Post
Does Leo still use private jets? I remember him getting a lot of shit for that
He actually touched on that in the documentary.
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Old 03-29-2017, 04:13 PM   #123
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The same day Trump drops EPA regulations, Al Gore drops An Inconvenient Sequel
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Old 03-29-2017, 09:22 PM   #124
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Oh my god I can't believe there was a time where I answered Option 2
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Old 03-30-2017, 08:55 AM   #125
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Don't beat yourself up over it, I chose 6 -__-
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