I think if you want to make Earth similar to Mars all you have to do is remove the magnetosphere. It wouldn’t take long (geologically) for solar winds to rip away the atmosphere and radiation to sterilize the surface. Perhaps a necessary first step to colonization is a foolproof synthetic magnetosphere. How else do you shield an entire planet/moon?

If I recall, the biggest failure of biosphere2 was, with all that money, planning, and brain power they forgot to factor in the oxygen the bacteria in the soil would use and factor in the formation of calcium carbonate on the exposed concrete and had to (secretly) add pure oxygen to the system at least once.

Also contributing to the failure, Steve Bannon was put in charge (despite major objections by the team) and immediately the project fell apart among allegations of abuse and safety concerns he admitted in court… “ He also testified that when the woman submitted a five-page complaint outlining safety problems at the site, he promised to shove the complaint "down her throat".”…the crew sued over this and won $600000 in compensation!

Is he sure it wasn’t poor shielding against Mars’s high radiation levels?
(Yes, I’m a terrible person.)


Scary to think a surgery caused this growth. I wonder if he’s secretly pissed at his parents that they tried to remove the small lump triggering this.

Hate to see the oil burning.
Love to see Russia get a little blowback.
I fully support expanding Ukraine’s border 100 miles into Russia to create the kind of “buffer zone” Russia tried to turn Ukraine into. 100 miles of no man’s land, all Russians must move. Ukrainians may settle there. Turnabout is fair play, and they deserve every inch of lost territory.
Then they should retake Crimea.

In a second story today, Russian troops are evacuating the Chernobyl area after poisoning themselves with radiation sickness by digging trenches, driving tanks, and generally disturbing the highly radioactive soil there. Those soldiers are in for a gruesome death, Russia can’t afford to treat thousands of cases of acute radiation poisoning.

In a third report, Putin’s ploy to demand rubles for Russian oil has already fallen apart on day one. They continue to accept euros…euros they can’t transfer to Russia because of banking sanctions!

I know I'm a Negative Nancy, but I wonder how much radiation he was exposed to.

Wait.. this is silly.
Quantum sociology is silly.

Nice word soup and pictures but really just background radiation.

"Demand for change" is not a program. Freedoms for all species is silly. I dont want amoebas to be free in drinking water to eat my brain, yet that is what both they and apparently Bill Gates want to do.

without doubt, the garbage that was tested is worthless - but the testing presented was a bit naive. Alpha particles do have a very short path-length - the alpha radiation that he was detecting (while the emitter was covered) may well have been from radon gas that is being produced by the the thorium in these devices. The threat from skin exposure to directly generated alphas is likely negligible - but the threat from ingestion of the thorium oxide coming off these dangerous trinkets is likely much greater than he recognized. A significant fraction of lung cancer deaths are from inhaled radon daughter products that occur naturally - all these products are part of the decay series for thorium...

Safest...of those we discussed, maybe. It's certainly not safer than well designed solar, wind, micro hydro, wave/tidal, etc.

Some in Fukushima have seriously elevated risk for cancers, but no one died of radiation poisoning that I've heard of (but many still can't go home). Not true in Chernobyl. I've not seen claims of thousands dead since the very early days, but a short investigation shows estimates vary widely, from 4000-60000 early deaths from radiation related cancers, and even the lowest estimates are unacceptable. Direct radiation related deaths seem to be around 100 there.

It does seem that today the evacuations cause more deaths, likely because of safety measures required after Chernobyl and the fact that most are only exposed for extremely short times because they evacuated and are not allowed to return until exposure levels are low.

There are real, honest health concerns involved, including indirect impact caused by evacuations or shelter in place stress. That said, there's plenty of exaggerated fear mongering too.

Statistically nuclear is by far the safest means of energy production, even when it goes wrong the main impact is people panicking. No one died from radiation in Fukushima and there isn't expected to be any statistically detectable radiation health effect.

The figures that say Chernobyl killed thousands are extrapolations based on the LNT model, which assumes cells are unable to repair DNA damage. In fact the cell DNA repair mechanisms are a well established fact these days. Yet we still use LNT as a model, even though at low doses there has never been any real world data to support it.

Deliberate scaremongering is basically what it is.

The 1mSv per year is the max the employees at the dump/recycling plant can be exposed to, so leeching more than that into public water systems seems impossible unless I'm missing something. This comes mainly from solid scale deposits removed from the closed loop systems.
Average employees in German plants seemed to get around 3 mSv/yr on their table.

At Fukushima, According to TEPCO records, the average workers’ effective dose over the first 19 months after the accident was about 12 mSv. About 35% of the workforce received total doses of more than 10 mSv over that period, while 0.7% of the workforce received doses of more than 100 mSv.
The 10mSv was the estimated average exposure for those who evacuated immediately, not the area. Because iodine 131 has a half life of 8 days, the local exposure levels dropped rapidly, but because caesium-137 has a half life of 30 years, contaminated areas will be "hot" for quite a while, and are still off limits as I understand it.

Sort of...., most of the area surrounding Chernobyl is just above background levels after major decontamination including removal of all soil, but many areas closer to the plant are still being measured at well above safe levels to this day, and unapproachable, while others may be visited only with monitoring equipment, dose meters, and only for short times. It's not back to background levels everywhere, with measurements up to 336uSv/hr recorded in enclosed areas and abandoned recovery equipment (the claw used to dig at the reactor for instance)....no where near that low at the plant itself. Places like the nearby cemetery which couldn't have the contamination removed still measure higher than maximum occupational limits for adults working with radioactive material. The radiation levels in the worst-hit areas of the reactor building, including the control room, have been estimated at 300Sv/hr, (300,000mSv/hr) providing a fatal dose in just over a minute.
http://www.chernobylgallery.com/chernobyl-disaster/radiation-levels/

Don't get me wrong, I support nuclear power. I just don't believe in pretending it's "safe". That's how Chernobyl happened....overconfidence and irresponsibility. If we consider it unacceptably disastrous if it goes wrong, we might design plants that can't go wrong...The tech exists.

You'd be surprised.

Geothermal try to keep public exposure to less than 1 mSv per year.

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/283106142_Natural_radionuclides_in_deep_geothermal_heat_and_power_plants_of_Germany

Living near a Nuclear Power station will get you about 0.00009 mSv/year.

Living in Fukushima will get you about 10 mSv in a lifetime, with life expectancy there at about 84 years that is 0.177 mSv/year.

https://www.who.int/ionizing_radiation/a_e/fukushima/faqs-fukushima/en/

Even Chernobyl is almost entirely background radiation now. Radiation is all scaremongering and misinformation these days, so people freak out about it but it really isn't that dangerous. It takes about 100 mSv a year to have even the slightest statistically detectable health effect and far more than that to actually kill someone.

Please site your sources for this information.
I'm assuming they mean the estimated radiation from a properly functioning nuclear power plant and not the average actual radiation, which includes meltdowns, leaks, transportation accidents, etc. I can't imagine any geothermal plant ever contaminating like Chernobyl or Fukushima did.

It bears noting that coal ash is apparently 3-6 more radioactive than properly functioning nuclear power plants emit for the same energy generation, and it gets absorbed both directly from particles and indirectly in food and water.

Don't tell the environmentalists how much radiation geothermal releases. It is many orders of magnitude more than a nuclear power station and if they were held to the same standard they would never be built.

*quality

As someone who watches a LOT of kid's movies with my daughter, I notice an alarming regularity of torture in children's media.

You like Pixar movies, right? Pick a Pixar film, ALL of them have a torture scene. It's bizarre.

It's late, so I'll be succinct about these, but let's define torture as follows:
Torture - noun - the act of deliberately inflicting severe physical or psychological suffering on someone by another as a punishment or in order to fulfill some desire of the torturer or force some action from the victim

Fair?

This is a short list I can think of off the top of my head

Toy Story
Sid tortures Woody "Where are your rebel friends NOW?" as he burns his forehead

Toy Story 2
Stinky Pete tortures Woody "You can go to Japan together or in pieces. Now GET IN THE BOX!"

Toy Story 3
Buzz gets put in the "time-out chair" with a burlap bag put over his head and is forced to turn on his friends

Monster's Inc.
Mike is put in the "scream extractor" and is interrogated "Where's the kid?" as the extractor inches towards his face.

Wreck it Ralph
Ralph asks "What's going on in this candy coated Heart of Darkness?" Sour Bill tries to run away but Ralph picks him up and threatens to lick him. "I'll take it to my grave" "Fair enough" and Ralph pops Sour Bill in his mouth "Had enough?" "OKAY OKAY I'LL TALK!"

Cars 2
The green-gasoline in his tank, the spy car is put in front of the radiation shooting camera and is interrogated about who the other spy is and who has the information about the green gas he recovered that could unravel their plan to get revenge for being discriminated against for being "lemons." His engine explodes (he's killed?) in spite of giving up the information.

The Incredibles
Mr. Incredible is restrained via some black goop and asked about his family's whereabouts on the island.

Finding Nemo
Near the end of the film when Dory finds Nemo but Marlin has wandered off thinking Nemo was dead, they need to know which way Marlin went and come across the little crabs sitting on the pipe "heyyyyyyyyheyyyyyyyyyyheyyyyyyyy" "Yeah I saw where he went, but I'm not telling you, and there's no way you're gonna make me." Dory lifts him up and threatens to feed him to the seagulls sitting on a small rock until he starts screaming "OKAY ILL TALK ILL TALK HE WENT TO THE FISHING GROUNDS!!!"

I could go on, but I hope to make this simple point:
These films do NOT have to include a torture scene. It's simply odd to me that it appears so often, instilling the idea early on that torture works for getting information or cooperation out of people.

Finally, I point to one of many pieces of research on the matter https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5325643/

Yeah, any type of cherry picking in studies irks me badly. For instance, I recently got into an internet argument with one of the people who try to claim we didn't land on the moon.

They were using the results of a single study that tentatively said the Van Allen radiation outside of LEO possibly causes higher rates of cardio-vascular disease in astronauts. I then read the study and found out they picked 7 out of the 13 deceased astronauts vs a sample of 100 LEO astronauts, plus the general public's rates of CVD. That set off my alarm bells, so I then looked at the ages the people died at and their actual cause of death on the internet.

Three of the astronauts died at 56, 61, and 61. So basically about a decade early. The other 4 died in their 80's, basically a decade later than average. Out of those 4, they were suffering other conditions and illnesses that might have influenced the final cardiac failure. Sadly no one in the scientific community seems willing to challenge the study, so it stays valid, and the news media posted great big headlines about it when it came out.

Like I told the person I was arguing with, the median age of death of lunar astronauts is 87, even including the three that died early. Even if Van Allen radiation increases CVD likelihood, living to 80 something is pretty damn spectacular, so it really doesn't matter if you die from CVD, cancer, or a stroke.

Ok, statistics class was 28 years ago....and I was pretty high by midnight. We both made mistakes...i still say that blaze chart is bullshit and intentionally misleading in multiple ways.

How many years before a 50% chance of cancer...heart disease, death by stairs...etc. We don't assess things that way, so it's just a nice big number to trot out and pretend it's meaningful.

Statistics can be used to prove anything, forfty percent of all people know that.

What if you put them all together, including suicide and accident, instead of starting by dividing into various gun death categories then choosing the least probable category to extrapolate? Now compare them to other dangers we strongly regulate against with evolving regulations, like automobile accidents. That's how these stats are properly used. Dangers aren't radiation, you don't look at the half life to comprehend them.