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vansig wrote: miller-urey experiment however did not include anything close to a complete list of elements. conspicuously missing are phosphorus, magnesium, calcium, and many others.

Well, yeah, and examinations of the results have suggested that the mixtures they used were probably a bit rich, and since follow-up experiments take decades, it’ll be a while before we can get things precisely estimated. So I don’t mean to over-assert the value of that particular experiment, just that “primordial ooze is undefinable” is a thing a crazy(or uninformed) person would say.

edit: off topic, but I really must know what the spectrograph you’ve got there is sampled from.

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Patientman wrote: Define: Primordial ooze.

Is it similar to something else that is undefinable? Like Dark Matter and shouldn’t Dark Matter and Primordial ooze be listed as a “Theories.”

A solution of water, hydrogen, methane, and ammonia in a lifeless environment at temperatures where liquid water and water vapor both form. Details of likely concentrations were determined with the miller-urey experiment, and some basic examination of carbon, nitrogen, hydrogen and oxgen levels on modern earth.

Secondarily, I don’t think you know what a scientific theory is. A theory is the highest level of acceptance an idea in the scientific method can have. A theory is a fundamental tool of interpretation backed with several well-validated hypotheses.

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Breakable wrote: Deuterium.
The proton boron I don’t think is feasible with their current budget.

It’s certainly not the fuel that’s expensive(at least not comparatively). What needs to change that costs so much?

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Somehow this feels like we got to talking about alchemy. I mean, I know nuclear reactions fit the definition of alchemy but it still feels weird when someone is talking about turning quicksilver into gold.

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zapkitty wrote:

http://www.theengineer.co.uk/sectors/aerospace/news/solid-hydrogen-fuel-could-help-shield-satellites-from-radiation/1015613.article

Well, aneutronic reactions such as pB11 need relatively little neutron shielding so this wouldn’t be much of a game changer for FF units.

If FF works then the shielding needed would be about a meter thickness of water or polyethylene backed by a few centimeters of lead. This type of shielding would be quite cheap and could fit in power stations, mobile generators, ships, subs, trains, larger ground transports and larger subsonic air transports.

So the cost of a new type of hydrogen-based shielding even if it was, say, 40% more efficient would only be justified if it allowed FF units to fit into some application they could not otherwise fit into.

It looks like the benefit here for this new tech is entirely in mass reduction anyways, so it’s really only beneficial for satellites.

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My work blocks anything like videos or animated gifs(WHY???), so that limits my ability to provide feedback. When it comes down to it, the energy flow diagram you guys created is probably the one that reflects best to me that the project is going well.

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Patientman wrote: You may be better off with Crowd Sourcing. A petition is pretty limited. The word of this project just isn’t getting out on the street, yet…

Crowd-funding is tricky. You tend to need a very concrete funding goal and attached project result. The most successful crowd-funded projects also have some way of distributing their resulting product to supporters. None of that is really applicable here. The best you could do is promise some t-shirts, and get another year or two of development with a successful campaign.

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Lerner wrote: Well, the Big Bangers response to this is:
“This is an anomaly, but since BB gets everything else right it must be true.”
Then observers find out another prediction that is wrong and BBers respond:
“This is an anomaly, but since BB gets everything else right it must be true.”
Repeat ad absurdum.
Until the little boy says ”but the cosmologists are naked!” then everyone starts laughing. This has not happened yet, but it will at one point.

Not to be obnoxious, but if big bang cosmology is incorrect, then why do so many stars fall inside the expected age range? I mean, if a greater than 5% proportion of stars fell outside the expected age range as determined by an error prone metric, it would be a dramatic invalidation of a long-standing hypothesis, but cherry-picking data like that is hardly the correct approach to science, when there are known assumptions. Let me make it clear I don’t disagree with plasma cosmology: as a layman, it’s out of my expertise.

I just don’t understand why this single data point is relevant, given the understood problems in the method of interpretation. Is there some mechanic of the method that creates a hard limit to the observational error?

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AaronB wrote: http://rt.com/news/oldest-star-universe-discovery-889/

“Bond and his team calculated that the star is 13.9 billion years old. This actually places it beyond the time that the universe exists. The current estimate is that the Big Bang happened some 13.77 billion years ago. This is explained by an experimental error, which may be as large as 700 million years. So the star is at least 13.2 billion years old and may be several hundred million years older than that.”

It’s interesting that the calculated age of the star is older than the universe itself, and they adjust the margin of error to barely fit within the BB model.

That’s a bit misrepresentative of what the article says. If a method really has a 700 million year window, you’d expect 5% of cases to have even more error than that. I don’t think I need to point out just how many stars there are.

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Dumb idea: what about filling the chamber with cold gas and using infrared cameras to spot the leak? Is that too much risk to the system?

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Joeviocoe wrote: What would you estimate as the consumption of helium for a large hospital MRI (per year)? And how much, in comparison, should a 5MW DPF consume?

That’s pretty hard to estimate, because the helium is retained essentially indefinitely. The primary coolants like helium, nitrogen, or Freon are kept in a closed system and only secondary coolants like water and air are released into the environment. Essentially, the helium shortage is caused by demand for new devices with helium cooling.

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vansig wrote: presently as far as i know, Helium is seldom recycled.

it’s just too precious to let go.

can we scoop it from earth’s upper atmosphere?

No. Helium floats above hydrogen, because hydrogen reacts with oxygen and makes water before it escapes. Helium gets outside the magnetosphere and blows away in solar wind. If it’s gone, it’s gone.

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benf wrote: It sounds like we better get cracking on the development of Fo-Fu-1 as a fast rocket propulsion system, so we can begin mining Helium from Jupiter!:)

Could a FoFu 1 generate enough power to reach escape velocity from Jupiter’s gravity well? I know conventional rockets wouldn’t be able to manage the lift.

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asymmetric_implosion wrote: Hmmmm. Lets do the math.

PF reactor will produce a net of 66 kJ per shot according to Sankey diagram on LPP website. With 8.7 MeV/reaction, that requires, 4.75E16 reactions per shot to produce the fusion energy. Each reaction produces 3 helium atoms so 1.4E17 atoms per shot. You fire 200 shots per second giving you 2.8E19 atoms per second. For reference, your average helium tank in party store for balloons holds 300 cubic feet or 8.5 cubic meters of helium at standard pressure and temperature. The standard pressure and temperature density of helium is 2.7E25 atoms/m^3. The total number of atoms to fill the bottle is 2.3E26 atoms. Using the production rate, it will take more than 90 days to fill a single bottle from a 5 MW PF reactor as proposed by LPP. I can’t speak for anyone else but we use a helium bottle every month and we are a very small lab. You would probably be able to produce the world’s total electricity needs many times over before you could produce enough helium to sustain the current demand.

Yeah, without having done the math myself, I ballparked this problem this way. Nuclear reactions are just beyond our natural comprehension directly in the ratio of mass to energy. That leaves the question: where CAN we get helium? It seems like prices are naturally going to drive birthday balloons out of business in a few decades, and recycling refrigerants is a natural choice. What else can we do?

Fracking solved the natural gas problem for a few decades, but I believe fracking doesn’t get much helium like traditional natural gas wells do. What can we actually do about one of the least renewable elements on earth?

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That’s a neat idea, and some of the details go a bit above my head. I hope you have a better venue than a forum for sharing that idea.

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