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Kwyndig posted:Mine asteroids, ship the finished products back to Earth via safe and effective gravity drop. No sense polluting our planet any more than we need to. Safe isn't really a thing when you're lobbing house-sized chunks of metal at the surface. When you say "gravity drop", what you mean is "re-entry". In order to control where it landed, you need thrusters on the side of it, which become prohibitively expensive when you're talking about the size of the drop. Plus they're moving at speeds of up to 20 times the speed of sound at sea level. And they're not going to be able to be slowed down by aerodynamics like a space shuttle or Apollo capsule. What you're talking about is getting into the size of meteorite that caused the Tunguska event in 1908. WarpedNaba posted:Mine the moon, turn it into the Solar System's biggest factory. Now you're talking. No atmosphere to explode the rocks, much lower gravity means much lower re-entry speeds. Water (and therefore hydrogen/oxygen) available as ice. Plentiful solar power with no atmosphere to attenuate. And no ecosystems to gently caress up with massive influxes of heavy metals. Memento has a new favorite as of 04:37 on Jul 3, 2015 |
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Jul 3, 2015 04:35
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Kwyndig posted:Mine asteroids, ship the finished products back to Earth via safe and effective gravity drop. So my plan, then.
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Jul 3, 2015 04:57
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TerminalSaint posted:Emergency room removal is a concern that has been raised, since they can't be cut off with the standard tools. Techniques and tools have since been developed, including simply cracking it off with vise grips. That channel reads like a terrible guerilla marketing attempt by a gold manufacturer.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yy9R5QHURzw
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Jul 3, 2015 04:58
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Memento posted:Safe isn't really a thing when you're lobbing house-sized chunks of metal at the surface. When you say "gravity drop", what you mean is "re-entry". In order to control where it landed, you need thrusters on the side of it, which become prohibitively expensive when you're talking about the size of the drop. Plus they're moving at speeds of up to 20 times the speed of sound at sea level. And they're not going to be able to be slowed down by aerodynamics like a space shuttle or Apollo capsule. What you're talking about is getting into the size of meteorite that caused the Tunguska event in 1908. I would try to write something out about how asteroid mining is going too be way to expensive and impractical for hundreds of years yet, but the guys over in the spaceflight thread can do it far better than me. Doing anything in space is going to cost millions of times what it costs to do the same thing on Earth. It would many orders of magnitude cheaper and easier to build a manufacturing plant at the bottom of the ocean or beneath an Antarctic glacier than build one in space or on the Moon.
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Jul 3, 2015 05:02
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I'm not entirely sure hyperpressure materials will be feasible (or available in the required quantities) for deep sea mines/factories in the near to mid future, though.
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Jul 3, 2015 05:16
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Deteriorata posted:I would try to write something out about how asteroid mining is going too be way to expensive and impractical for hundreds of years yet, but the guys over in the spaceflight thread can do it far better than me. Doing anything in space is going to cost millions of times what it costs to do the same thing on Earth. Admittedly, if you had orbital manufacturing at the top of the gravity well building orbital manufacturing would be far cheaper.
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Jul 3, 2015 06:11
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WarpedNaba posted:I'm not entirely sure hyperpressure materials will be feasible (or available in the required quantities) for deep sea mines/factories in the near to mid future, though. It's more "imagine having to build and supply a manufacturing plant at the bottom of the ocean, or under and Antarctic glacier. Spend some time on the construction problems you'd encounter, keeping it staffed, and keeping it in repair and productive. Now multiply those costs and difficulties by 10,000,0000 and you'll have a rough idea of how difficult it will be to do in space." Mining asteroids seems really cool until you start getting into what it actually takes to get such an operation running and then keep it running. Are you going to maintain a continuous manned presence? You're going to need crew quarters and resupply and rotation missions to handle them. Are your miners going to be spacemen in suits or robots? How do you transport the ore to the refinery? How do you run the refinery by remote control? How do you handle it when something breaks? Will you need a machine shop, or modular components that will be swapped out and returned to Earth for repairs? And so on. The more questions you start asking about how it's actually going to work, the more difficult and expensive problems you find that all have to be solved successfully in order for it all to work. It certainly could work eventually, but building the entire manufacturing ecosystem so that it can all work together efficiently and effectively is going to take a very long time and a whole lot of momney.
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Jul 3, 2015 06:15
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If you have the capability to perform a controlled drop of a chunk of asteroid into a target on Earth, what's to stop you from targeting a city instead?
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Jul 3, 2015 06:38
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Why do you have to suck all the fun out of space?
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Jul 3, 2015 07:08
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Johnny Aztec posted:Why do you have to suck all the fun out of space? Space is a vacuum. It sucks by itself 
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Jul 3, 2015 07:34
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vOv posted:If you have the capability to perform a controlled drop of a chunk of asteroid into a target on Earth, what's to stop you from targeting a city instead? It would be hard to collect all the valuable asteroid rocks with a city in the way. Also we already have the technology to obliterate cities real good without needing to resort to asteroids.
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Jul 3, 2015 07:43
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vOv posted:If you have the capability to perform a controlled drop of a chunk of asteroid into a target on Earth, what's to stop you from targeting a city instead? Weak troll '14
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Jul 3, 2015 08:12
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Deteriorata posted:It would many orders of magnitude cheaper and easier to build a manufacturing plant at the bottom of the ocean or beneath an Antarctic glacier than build one in space or on the Moon.
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Jul 3, 2015 12:13
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On the other hand, apparently manganese is easy as gently caress to extract from the seabed.
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Jul 3, 2015 12:26
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WarpedNaba posted:On the other hand, apparently manganese is easy as gently caress to extract from the seabed. Heck, in some places you can just go pick it up.
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Jul 3, 2015 15:33
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The BBC has put out a neat CYOA for basic element combinations. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wvblSXIdf3A
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Jul 3, 2015 21:30
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Memento posted:Safe isn't really a thing when you're lobbing house-sized chunks of metal at the surface. When you say "gravity drop", what you mean is "re-entry". In order to control where it landed, you need thrusters on the side of it, which become prohibitively expensive when you're talking about the size of the drop. Plus they're moving at speeds of up to 20 times the speed of sound at sea level. And they're not going to be able to be slowed down by aerodynamics like a space shuttle or Apollo capsule. What you're talking about is getting into the size of meteorite that caused the Tunguska event in 1908. Well I was more talking about using, you know parachutes and those bouncy balloons they use for missions to Mars. Throwing some cables around a block of tungsten and attaching enough parachutes to land it safely wouldn't be a big issue with all the carbon and silicate up there. Hell, if it turns out to be easy to make aerogel in micro G we can just coat the things in the stuff and we could even drop hard into the ocean instead. Note, I do not personally recommend dropping house sized chunks of metal anywhere. I was thinking more car sized.
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Jul 4, 2015 02:30
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Kwyndig posted:Well I was more talking about using, you know parachutes and those bouncy balloons they use for missions to Mars. Throwing some cables around a block of tungsten and attaching enough parachutes to land it safely wouldn't be a big issue with all the carbon and silicate up there. Hell, if it turns out to be easy to make aerogel in micro G we can just coat the things in the stuff and we could even drop hard into the ocean instead.
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Jul 4, 2015 06:59
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bzw posted:The BBC has put out a neat CYOA for basic element combinations. It apparently doesn't believe in sodium hydride.
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Jul 4, 2015 12:11
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It also admits the Haber process is a thing, then promptly doesn't do it. The correct answer is Nitrogen and Iodine to make Nitrogen Triiodide.
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Jul 4, 2015 12:22
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Talibananas posted:It would be hard to collect all the valuable asteroid rocks with a city in the way. Also we already have the technology to obliterate cities real good without needing to resort to asteroids. Yeah but think of the fear you strike into your enemy by summoning Meteor to destroy their great city.
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Jul 6, 2015 06:48
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Hijo Del Helmsley posted:It also admits the Haber process is a thing, then promptly doesn't do it. No. It's nitrogen triiodide that explosively decomposes into nitrogen and iodine. In other words, they take the opposite reaction of what they're asking for in the first vid. I'm a chemist and couldn't find the 'winner' myself without looking at the spoiler because it doesn't make sense to just reverse stuff like this. Bad chemistry. A vid that's made to show pretty explosions and meanwhile confuses the public by giving outright wrong information. Was this made by the same guys that made the fake 'alkali explosions' vid of the British 'Brainiac' tv series?
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Jul 6, 2015 17:12
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Hang on, is that voiceover the guy who did the first series of Look Around You?
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Jul 6, 2015 20:44
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Carbon dioxide posted:No. It's nitrogen triiodide that explosively decomposes into nitrogen and iodine. In other words, they take the opposite reaction of what they're asking for in the first vid. I'm a chemist and couldn't find the 'winner' myself without looking at the spoiler because it doesn't make sense to just reverse stuff like this. Bad chemistry. A vid that's made to show pretty explosions and meanwhile confuses the public by giving outright wrong information. Was this made by the same guys that made the fake 'alkali explosions' vid of the British 'Brainiac' tv series? The problem is when you have a setup like the one they did (8 chemicals, pick 2), you have to stretch the rules to make most of the combinations work at all. In general, isn't any exothermic reaction involving nitrogen generally a result of the nitrogen trying to get away from whatever it was attached to, rather than the reverse? The fact that nitrogen was even an option kind of alludes to that.
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Jul 6, 2015 23:44
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Yeah, you're right. A lot of energy is released when the strong N2 bond can be formed. Also, turning a solid or liquid into a lot of gas causes an additional entropy effect - and a bang. A common exception is NH3, ammonia, which is quite stable. A more surprising exception I ran into while looking up some things is NF3. Apparently the electronegativity of the fluorine atoms makes the nitrogen unavailable, while fluorine/fluoride is happy to take the extra electrons. In NI3, the nitrogen atom is the most electronegative one, while the iodines are δ+. Add to that the fact that big iodines don't want to sit together, and all in all it shouldn't be too surprising that NI3 (which then SHOULD be called triiodine nitride, as the -ide is the negative part; however the official name seems to be the strangely organic name 'triiode amine') is a rather lively compound.
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Jul 7, 2015 08:13
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Slightly odd question incoming: my artist friend has been getting really into metals as substances recently, and has started growing Bismuth crystals at home. I'm a little fuzzy on how it's done but if I remember right it involves application of heat till melting point, and then it forms into those crazy shapes. The point anyway, is that I assume he will be doing this melting process with minimal safety gear and no fume hood because he's a lunatic (I should have mentioned that). How badly is he going to gently caress himself up working without a fume hood?
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Jul 7, 2015 16:41
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darkwasthenight posted:Slightly odd question incoming: my artist friend has been getting really into metals as substances recently, and has started growing Bismuth crystals at home. I'm a little fuzzy on how it's done but if I remember right it involves application of heat till melting point, and then it forms into those crazy shapes. The bismuth itself is probably not a problem. It's fairly low in toxicity, particularly for a heavy metal. People have been ingesting antacids containing bismuth (Pepto-Bismol, for example) for years. There very well may be hazardous fumes from impurities or other stuff associated with it. Most home cooking ranges have exhaust fans, so using those should be adequate unless he's doing something really dumb.
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Jul 7, 2015 16:46
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Making bismuth crystals is like one of those formative hippy things. Unless he's chasing the bismuth in some atypical source like purposefully huffing solder fumes I don't I'd even worry about the hood fan.
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Jul 7, 2015 18:36
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Prenton posted:Hang on, is that voiceover the guy who did the first series of Look Around You? Sounded like it to me!
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Jul 7, 2015 18:44
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Deteriorata posted:The bismuth itself is probably not a problem. It's fairly low in toxicity, particularly for a heavy metal. People have been ingesting antacids containing bismuth (Pepto-Bismol, for example) for years. He's an artist, of course he's doing something really dumb. Thanks anyway. Thread content: for several decades my father was a research chemist for various industrial processes in the UK. Coal, aluminium and finally industrial dyes. He's mentioned a few good stories in the past; I particularly enjoyed the one where the brewery next door held an impromptu new years celebration that rained fireworks and bonfire sparks into his compound full of carefully stored chemicals. Not really in any danger but he claims it took him a week to retrieve his underwear from his ringpiece after he first looked out of the window and saw a 20ft bonfire burning in the yard. My other favourite was Bob the cleaner, who came into my dad's lab one morning to find a hotplate had been left on underneath a large flask, which was now full of rather pretty needlelike crystals. Unfortunately for the cleaner the flask was full of Picric Acid (or 2,4,6-trinitrophenol) contained nice and safely underwater. As the hotplate had been on all night the water had evaporated and the acid formed into lovely TNP crystals. At this point most chemists (or at least non-german ones) would generally back out of the room quickly and quietly and go find someone who was being paid more than them to deal with it. Not having a degree in chemistry, Bob plugged in the industrial vacuum and went to work. Miraculously he did his full sweep of the room without incident, finished his paperwork sat in the lab, walked out of the room and away down the corridor, pulling the door firmly shut behind him with a bang. A bigger one than he expected as it turned out. Luckily he was sheltered by the wall as the disturbed nitro crystals went off and nearly blew the safety door off its hinges. Bob apparently decided his luck had been used up all at once, and resigned that week to do something safer.
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Jul 7, 2015 19:02
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Bertrand Hustle posted:Management would appreciate if you would refrain from thinking such loud thoughts around the hexadecanitrofullerene. Also, please is to be of stopping of the heart being beating so fast and hard.
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Jul 7, 2015 21:09
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Did I math it right, where N60 has an explosive energy of 8kj per gram?
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Jul 7, 2015 21:24
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insta posted:Did I math it right, where N60 has an explosive energy of 8kj per gram? I think you're a little low, considering ethanol is more than 3x that. http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=8kj
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Jul 7, 2015 21:37
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Yeah, but ... it's the speed it happens. TNT is 2kj per gram.
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Jul 7, 2015 21:40
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N60 as an explosive would release 50% more energy than hexanitrohexaazaisowurtzitane. Y'know, the stuff that becomes more stable when you mix it with TNT.
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Jul 7, 2015 21:43
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Energy per mass isn't quite as important a factor as its Velocity of Detonation, basically a figure of how fast the substance can release its energy. TNT has a VoD of 6900m/s. Everyone's favorite tongue twister hexanitrohexaazaisowurtzitane goes boom at 9500m/s. I wasn't able to find any figures for hexadecanitrofullerene, but this interesting poster (!) lists smaller cubic forms of nitrogen as having a VoD between 12000 and 17600m/s. 
Collateral Damage has a new favorite as of 23:34 on Jul 7, 2015 |
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Jul 7, 2015 21:55
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I don't have access to the full paper, but would this be any help in figuring a potential detonation velocity for N60? It isn't what you do with it, it's how quick it's done that counts.
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Jul 7, 2015 23:12
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DigitalRaven posted:
Note that high explosives can be so stable that you can light them on fire and watch them steadily burn. Their energies of combustion are also much higher than their energies of detonation, because they're combining with atmospheric oxygen and reacting more completely than when they detonate and react only with their own built-in oxidizers. So, yeah, it's the speed at which they're turning into hot gas that matters.
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Jul 8, 2015 00:35
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Phanatic posted:Note that high explosives can be so stable that you can light them on fire and watch them steadily burn. Their energies of combustion are also much higher than their energies of detonation, because they're combining with atmospheric oxygen and reacting more completely than when they detonate and react only with their own built-in oxidizers. So, yeah, it's the speed at which they're turning into hot gas that matters. High explosives usually aren't going through an oxidation reaction when they detonate. The nitrogen ones are mostly being broken apart by the shockwave/energy of the primer/rest of the explosive going off, and the formerly stable molecule is now busy trying to form as many N2 molecules as possible while releasing some thermal energy.
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Jul 8, 2015 01:11
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Quoting a post about a chemical associated with danger from SAL's chem thread.contagonist posted:
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Jul 24, 2015 16:56
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