I’m pretty sure their concern is their own birth rate dropping, actually. Have you seen the demographics graph for Russia? They’re facing a complete collapse of their working-age population in a decade or two

No, it would have been detected by various systems pretty much immediately. Those systems are military though, and probably wouldn’t tell the general public about the movement of military satellites

It’s also conceivable that it was detected in that orbit but not recognised, so it was treated as a mystery object

They will have some kind of pressure relief valve, to let steam out and prevent an explosion. They only become dangerous if that valve isn’t working (assuming that whatever keeps the lid on is intact and still strong).

Look for damage around the seal between the pot and the lid, and look for damage to the clamp or latch which holds the lid down against that seal.

Then look at the valve. It’ll probably be a heavy object (such as a lump of metal) which sits on top of a hole of some sort, or it could possibly be something spring loaded. Either way, check that it moves freely.

After that the only additional thing you could do is a pressure test, where you basically deliberately overpressurise it and see if it explodes, but if you had the means to do that safely then you wouldn’t be asking for advice here so I don’t recommend it.

Their point still works though, just reword it for less unnecessary baggage if you prefer.

Do you press the button which saves some random human somewhere in the world, or the button which saves some random cow? I’m pretty sure most people choose the human

It is guaranteed, actually. US law imposes requirements on telecoms providers to support wire taps

You don’t need a force to prevent collapse if there’s no drag force to slow things down. It would actually be almost impossible for a cloud of dark matter to collapse since any individual particle has momentum and no way to slow down, so they’ll all be in some sort of mutual orbit

You’re mistaken. Dark matter, whatever it is, isn’t affected by anything except gravity. It interacts with gravity just like “normal” matter.

The evidence is also significantly better than you’re describing

By that logic, you should object to cheese being labelled as “cheddar” cheese, because that’s a place too and you’ve almost certainly never seen cheese which came from there.

It’s a stupid rule

People down voting you for bringing up Kessler syndrome were correct to do so. It’s a complete non-issue for starlink-sized objects at that altitude.

Light pollution is a more reasonable objection, and the effects on the upper atmosphere of all those satellites burning up would be as well, but not Kessler syndrome

Then you’d be defeating the careful planning which went into making sure the satellites don’t become a long term problem, by raising them out of the orbits which decay in just a few years and into orbits which never decay.

For an emergency ascent, they’d probably have dropped more than two. They also probably wouldn’t have taken the time to type a message to the surface if it were going wrong that quickly.

It seems more likely to me that they were controlling their rare of descent. I’d expect them to lose a little buoyancy as the vessel compresses, so it seems reasonable that they’d drop the occasional weight as they descend.

Actually, I suspect he’s implying that nobody’s trying to assassinate Harris because all the democracy-hating assassins are on her side, or she’s the one setting them up, or something to that effect.

It’s still the sort of slander which in a reasonable world he’d be called on, but that seems unlikely

That’s going to be a problem whatever solution you come up with, because of the federated nature of the lemmy system.

There’s no central authority to hand out usernames, so if two people sign up to different instances with the same username, any design which didn’t attach instance name to each username would fail. The only way around it would be for each instance to contact every other instance which exists, including the ones which haven’t federated yet, and negotiate ownership of the new username, and that’s just not possible

It’s amazing that people seem to be taking this comment literally

Can anyone explain to me what the exemption actually is? The article keeps mentioning “minimum steering angle”, but I’m not sure what that means. Is it as simple as saying the steering wheel must have at least some particular range of travel?

They should last indefinitely so long as the process of accretion which created these nodules keeps going. A battery becomes drained when the chemical interaction between the two metals uses up all the available metal, which happens quite fast in our modern batteries because we’ve designed them that way.

We’ve made them powerful and cheap by using relatively small amounts of each metal, spread thin and sandwiched together. The downside is that those things films of metal get used up fast.

These nodules, meanwhile, are lumps of metal. They won’t produce lots of power all at once, but they can generate small amounts for ages, and so long as they grow faster than the metal gets used up (it doesn’t actually go anywhere, it just changes chemically) they’ll keep going

I know that for two reasons: first, we already know that oxygen concentration in the deep ocean is generally pretty low compared to the surface, and second we can already account for the general composition of our atmosphere. There just isn’t a big chunk of mystery oxygen who’s source we can’t identify.

While it’s not impossible that we’re mistaken and a bunch of it is coming from somewhere other than where we expect, it’s sufficiently unlikely that I’m comfortable making such statements I told and unless presented with evidence to the contrary.

The article is being pretty hyperbolic. There’s no mystery here, this is just something which happens if you put two different metals together. It’s nothing more or less than a crude battery, just like the ancestors of the AA battery the article kept harping on about.

This discovery could be important for people studying the climate on very early Earth, people studying early life, and the ecology of the deep sea today.

That last one is particularly troubling, though. If this is widespread, then this might be a major source of what little oxygen is down there. If so, then taking those nodules away (like a lot of people are keen to do, since some of the metals they’re made of are valuable) could destroy an entire ecosystem.

More research is required

We can, it’s just electrolysis. All you need is electricity, and these nodules are simply batteries.

We’re not short of oxygen up here though, so it’s not terribly useful. We could get hydrogen that way, which would be greener than the way we get it at industrial scale now, but it would be way more expensive

They haven’t hijacked that, it’s their turn to chair it. The core members of that council take turns to do that.

You do realise that the key reason for that council to exist is so that nuclear armed powers talk to each other, right? However much we may disapprove of Russia’s wartime policies, the council is doing its job so long as there’s neutral ground where everyone else can talk to them about it rather than getting itchy trigger fingers