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Occasionally, people get me onto a subject about which I am either intimately familiar, or know nothing about -- and yet I'm compelled to rant and rave about the subject for hours at a time. This, then, is my bleeder valve, saving the great majority of my colleagues from Death by Rambling.
Nukes are big, powerful, and very effective at killing lots of people, destroying infrastructures and facilities, and all kinds of other mass destruction. In the future, they may even power star-drives, supply water to space colonies, and lots of other things. For now, they're a wonderful deterant to industrialized nations going to full scale war. Radiation, on the other hand, is our friend. In more ways than one. It cooks our food, heats our homes, lights our streets, keeps smoke detectors going, and allows us to image the inside of the human body, without cutting it open. There are different types of radiation, however. Some of it, often given off by nuclear weapons, radioactive metals, and the very screen your reading from, require up to six feet of lead to be stopped. (Yes, if you're using a cathode ray tube, or CRT monitor, it's giving off X-rays -- if you're using an LCD, or similar flat-screen design, you are free to stare at the print from only millimeters away.) I'm not about to launch into a long speech on educational radiation. I suggest you hear Doctor George Irwin, of Lamar University, give his spiel on 'Common Household Radioactive Products'. Dig out a geiger counter, and you'll be amazed at what sets it off, in your very own household. Oh, yeah. Nature's a whole helluva lot more radioactive than nuclear power plants. Burn a tree, up in Pennsylvania. Preferrably an older one. The ash from that tree is two to one hundred times more radioactive than the stuff power plants are required to bury as radioactive waste. How's that for federal law? So, to all you anti-nuke nuts, I have this to say: Three Mile Island, the greatest nuclear catastrophe in the history of the United States, released 3 millirads of radiation, in a one-second burst. That's it. That's all. Normal background radiation in Colorado is 4 millirads per year. And the incidence of cancer in Colorado is actually a bit less than the national average for the United States. Before you go protesting the building of a nuclear power facility in your area, remember that the burning of fossil fuels releases more radioactive elements into the atmosphere than nuclear power plants generate in their operational life time. Now go hold a rally, and protest something you know something about. Like psychics, or something.
Further complicating the issue is methane. A so-called greenhouse gas, it is a byproduct of a number of human-related industries and agricultures, and is often at the heart of all global warming discussions. There exists, at the bottoms of the oceans, great deposits of methanated hydrates -- ice with methane locked inside. This is ice that burns. You can use it to cook with. The volume of the deposits is unknown, but estimated in the terratonnage range, easily. As ocean currents warm up, they melt vast fields of methanated hydreates; the methane is released, percolates through the oceans to the atmosphere, and heats the atmosphere, warming the oceans further. Ocean currents, solar output (orbital distance), and other factors significantly complicate things. To put it bluntly, there are too many variables to make a scientific analysis. Global warming is currently a field best left to those most qualified to deal with non-scientific analysis: psychics, prophets, and politicians.
The Society's report stated that, based on recent NASA fly-bys of asteroids, and the subsequent gravitational analysis and visual data, that asteroids would be tough buggers to kill with a nuke. One asteroid in particular has a crater larger than the asteroid's greatest diameter; indicating that the asteroid took a big hit, but kept right on going. Asteroids -- or at least some of them -- are not solid rocks, nor are they just conglomerates. They seem to be somewhere inbetween -- like gelatin. You hit it, and it absorbs most of the blow. You nail it with a 200-megaton nuclear weapon, and it smiles at you. You detonate a 300-megaton nuke in its core, and it giggles (ooh, that tickles). Our best weapons would have to go off about twenty years before a strike, for the alteration in course to be strong enough through time, to keep an asteroid from striking earth. Not good. And, of course, there are other ways to end life on earth. Astrophysicists scrambled, recently, to figure out how a massive burst of radiation from near the heart of the galaxy could have happened. The burst shut down two or three sattellites, and was strong enough to ionize the night-side of earth's atmosphere as heavily as earth's sun, during the day. (Note; the heart of our galaxy is some 50,000 light years away) So, they've come up with 'magnetars', or some such; a new class of star that functions as the universe's dynamo. Still a weakling thing compared with quasars, and black holes in the midst of a feeding frenzy, but strong enough. And, if one of our neighboring stars had gone super nova a few centuries ago, the first hint we'd have of impending global radiation dosage would be a bright light in the heavans -- and then all life on earth gets fried. A super nova is like the universe's equivalent of a nuclear weapon -- they don't rate em in gigatonnes of TNT, no; that scale's way too tiny. A nice virus or bacteria could easily end the human species, Witness HIV. Someone had sex with a monkey, contracted a mutant form of SIV (Simian Immunodeficiency Virus), and then HIV spread. That was nature. Man kan make some nastier stuff, but he's limited in imagination. Nature's had a few billion years to play with immune systems, and I'm sure she has nastier punches in store for us. And, of course, there's the wilder hypotheses on the end of life on earth, more commonly thought of as Armageddon. A rogue neutron star could spin through this solar system, and A) knock a few comets out of alignment, and into earth, B) knock a few asteroids out of alignment, and into earth, C) blaze earth with enough X-rays that the survivors would have a few days to lose their hair, before dying, D) hit the earth and destroy all life on it, or E) hit the sun, and cause it to hiccup, killing all life on earth in a solar flare big enough to make Jupiter cringe. That's what one little neutron star could do to earth, just off the top of my head. I'm sure there's worse it could do, given a little thought. Luckily, we're out on the edges of the galaxy, and our local neighborhood isn't that populated. Ta put it bluntly, we need to get all our eggs outta the one basket. Events like asteroids and comets could make earth miserable, indeed, for us. Events like super novas and magnetar outbursts could make the whole solar system miserable. Other events could make the whole of this arm of the galaxy miserable. Life's unpredictable. I'm for leavin the nest, ASAP -- while we still can. Buryin our heads in the sand, hopin that Death won't come for us, is suicidal. Ah, yes; to return to the ole asteroid theory. Several asteroids have an albedo so low that they absorb 99% of the light of the sun. Even if we paid more attention to the night sky, trying to map asteroids that might strike earth -- how do you see a black object against a black background? Simple. You don't -- until it smacks you in the forehead.
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