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@ianmiller42
Belated Success?
When I started my investigation into the mechanism of planetary formation, everybody believed that Mars started out with an oxidized atmosphere, that is the volcanoes that emitted the atmosphere emitted carbon dioxide, as most Earth volcanoes do today. I disagreed, for two main reasons. The first was it was difficult to see how carbon dioxide could be accreted underground, and the second was it…
Why Did Tiny Dinosaurs Evolve to Predominate?
Anyone ever puzzled as to why the dinosaurs became prominent? And how could we work it out? The answer published recently in Nature (doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-024-03889-y) is that scientists have studied what they ate, by looking at fossilized poo and fossilized vomit, the fossils being called bromlites. Apparently there are hundreds of potential samples that have been collected. What…
Guidance Waves
And now for something different from usual: theoretical physics. If that turns you off, so be it, but the reason I am excited is I have now published my ebook “Guidance Waves 2nd Edition”, which I claim is an alternative theory for quantum mechanics. Which raises the question, what does it need to do to be an alternative theory? First, before everyone turns off completely, the main equation is…
How Hot Will it Get?
There is another climate conference, this time in in Baku, with much hand-wringing, pleas to do more, everyone will talk, and then go home and continue doing what they are doing. We are frogs in the pot. Further, with Donald Trump as President we can assume the US will do more drilling. It has yet to register with the environmentalists the sun does not always shine and the wind does not always…
Could There Be Life on Tidally Locked Planets?
A tidally locked planet is one that is so close to the star that the angular momentum of the spin of the planet, if it had any, gets transferred by tidal interactions with the fluid surface of the star. The net result is that, like our moon, it always points one face at the star. There is no possibility of a place on the surface having a day and a night. That will mean all places have a uniform…
Antibiotic Resistance
There was a reminder in a recent edition of Nature (Dance, vol 632, 494) that pointed out that the current crisis with antibiotics leads to the requirement familiar to those who follow Lewis Carol – we have to run increasingly fast just to stay in the same place. There is plenty of blame to go around for why we are in this predicament, but that is pointless. We are here: live with it. It is…
Geoengineering and Climate Change
In the previous post I suggested that we might be forced to consider geoengineering as a means of dealing with climate change. This came up in a recent article in Science (doi: 10.1126/science.z016868) and the article was less than keen on the idea. A summary of the arguments is as follows. A study in Geophysical Research Letters proposed that the best way to reflect radiation was to put 5…
More Bad News on the Climate
“We are on the brink of an irreversible climate disaster.” Thus starteth “The 2024 state of the climate report: Perilous times on planet Earth” Ripple et al., Bioscience https://doi.org/10.1093/biosci/biae087. We have predicted what would happen, they state, but “we are still moving in the wrong direction; fossil fuel emissions have increased to an all-time high, the 3 hottest days ever occurred…
Why Does the Earth Alone Have Continents and Oceans?
In the previous post I stated that once we have worked out what the ancient atmospheres were, we can see why Earth has continents and oceans. The question then is, why is this not obvious and commonly found in the text books? The answer is sad. Geologists, working on oxidation equilibria, argued that since ancient basalts are similar to modern basalts, so too would the gases emitted by volcanoes…
Ebook Discount
From October 17 – 24, Reviviscence will be on discount US 99c, including all countries and most platforms. Intended as standalone, it is also a sequel to Spoliation. Jonas Stryker is given command of a fleet to end a space rebellion, but when he encounters one rebel ship, half his fleet turn on the other half then flee. While the remaining Space Corps’ ships are being repaired, those on Earth who…
How to Form a Theory, in this case, Why Does Earth Have Continents?
As a response to a previous post that mentioned continent formation, I said I should do a post on continent formation. But there is an interesting issue relating to how to form a theory, and it is, if you want to go from A to B, in this case going from a non-descript planet to one with continents and oceans, sometimes it is helpful to start by focussing on C. When I wrote my “Planetary Formation…
Gallium For Cancer
There are a few problems in this world that affect humanity. Disease comes to mind. Cancer is one of those diseases you don’t want, but there are new treatments that appear to offer promise. One nasty version of cancer is osteosarcoma, the most common form of bone cancer. The nastiness comes from the fact it tends to strike young people. Modern treatment is unpleasant but if it has not spread, a…
Multicellular Life
Many people think alien life is very unlikely because it is so improbable, as evidenced by the long time it took to happen on Earth. I disagree. I think the problem was there were too many things that had to be done first. In the previous post I mentioned that multicellular life emerged about 1.5 billion years ago. I recall seeing a paper while visiting a museum that indicated a fossil had been…
More on Where Are The Aliens
Patrice Ayme wrote a very long comment in response to my post “Where are the Aliens?” so this post responds to some of the points made. I shall leave the first until last. The first question is what is the probability of getting multi-cellular animals? Whether the point that it took four billion years to get to animals is important depends on what happened during that four billion years, and how…
Rocky Planet Magnetism
In the previous post, I asked, “Where are the aliens?” Technological aliens have to come from a rocky planet, and Earth is the only rocky planet in this solar system with magnetism. That raises the question, is a magnetic field necessary for life to evolve? To understand why only Earth has such a field, we have to better understand how it is generated. We believe it is due to the behaviour of…
Where Are The Aliens?
It would seem most likely that our fascination with exoplanets includes our desire to see if we are alone in the Universe. Aliens will live on planets, at least when not travelling or occupying space stations, and space ships and space stations will be impossible to locate unless they broadcast signals that happen to come to us. Such signals will be highly directional to prevent attenuation over…
Why Is Earth The Only Planet with Plate Tectonics?
When, and how, did plate tectonics start? First, as we all know, plate tectonics involves large slabs of mass moving around on the surface of then Earth, and the concept was first proposed by Alfred Wegener, who noted that if you moved South America across to West Africa, the land masses fitted remarkably well. At the time this was generally regarded as an accidental coincidence, and the rest of…