Jupiter turning into a sun? Interesting shit

I studied the Plutonium battery in college, NASA/JPL has a very good reason to use it, simply, a PU battery is *vastly* more efficient than even the best solar array at that distance, and thats very true of the older panels that would have been used in Voyager or Galileo.

PU in that battery is not used as what we would consider a normal nuclear reactor, Plutonium gives off heat naturally as it decays, enough heat to generate electricity from a Thermocouple. A Thermocouple is a device which uses 2 different metals (NiChrome and Nickle/Aluminum for example), when you put a temperature difference across the 2, you get electricity.

The generators that deep space probes carry are relativly low power, typical is about 75-225 watts if I remember right.

As for the generator going supercritical and fissioning? I honestly think that the Plutonium will melt or burn long before it does that. Why? because the generator uses it in the form of a ring, not a sphere, which is how a Plutonium based nuclear weapon works, even pressure on a spherical shape.

As for that black spot, no idea there, but the weather on Jupiter is quite violent to say the least, could be a number of things.

Also, they kind of took Clarke out of context, the Monolith in 2010 copied itself hundreds of times to add mass to Jupiter...
Carl Sagan, well.. famous yes, but I honestly think that he wasn't the most credible of scientists.

Ilene wrote:

Carl Sagan, well.. famous yes, but I honestly think that he wasn't the most credible of scientists.

Are you kidding or just really don't know much about Sagan?

Dunn wrote:

Ilene wrote: Carl Sagan, well.. famous yes, but I honestly think that he wasn't the most credible of scientists. Are you kidding or just really don't know much about Sagan?

yeah no shit.

Carl Sagan IS astronomy.

compusmack wrote:

Dunn wrote: Ilene wrote: Carl Sagan, well.. famous yes, but I honestly think that he wasn't the most credible of scientists. Are you kidding or just really don't know much about Sagan? yeah no shit. Carl Sagan IS astronomy.

Word

compusmack wrote:

Dunn wrote: Ilene wrote: Carl Sagan, well.. famous yes, but I honestly think that he wasn't the most credible of scientists. Are you kidding or just really don't know much about Sagan? yeah no shit. Carl Sagan IS astronomy.

I think Ilenes point is that Sagan worked more in the wonders an marvel of the science of astronomy dealing with theory and in some cases science fiction as opposed to dealing with the actual science part.

Theory is valuable though too, it helps to construct probable future models in the absence of established fact. Both have their place.

somebody needs to call up will smith and/or tommy lee jones and get some answers.

On a side note. As I was driving my friend to the Airport this morning. The auroras were quite nice and bright. Little brighter than normal. Lots of colors too

sornlia wrote:

never.

Do I rate a hug?

Okay, I'll kinda recant and say Carl Sagan was credible for the most part, but he was wrong about a couple topics that he sensationalized.

1: Nuclear Winter, he theorized that there would be so much smoke and dust in the air that the whole planet would be covered in a cloud.
Tests conducted later (before he died) proved that there isn't enough matter to burn on the surface to do this.
It WOULD cool the earth, just not to the extremes that he thought.
I think he said this and maybe overstated it on purpose, to help highlight the insanity of Mutual Assured Destruction.

2: Evolution, he sided with the religious in a way when he said that the odds of evolution happening were like a windstorm in a junkyard creating a perfectly airworthy Boeing 747.
Now we are proving every day that evolution is happening, and has happened, slowly but surely in many different ways, but thats another topic.

Sagan does have some very interesing points, the theory of millions of worlds being in this galaxy alone is slowly but surely being confirmed.
We will be able to observe this first hand soon, once NASA develops the telescope to be able to view distant worlds.
Thats much better than what we are doing now, which is observing star "wobble" generated when very massive planets orbit around a star.

Just imagine, 20 years from now, we peer into this new telescope and see a planet with lit cities.

I can't wait for that.

Dunn wrote:

Ya, a catalyst doesn't need to be "huge." Just look at nuclear weapons. Binary solar system. That would be weird as shit. Consider we would have lived in a time before the binary solar system - and no time after it, ever, would humans on earth live in a single-sun system again. WEIRD MAN, WEIRD!

woas man

pass the bong

Nuclear Winter is most certainly a valid concept - unless of course you don't believe in that big comet that hit our planet and blacked shit out. That didn't have anything to do with the burnable amount of material on our surface.

Mt. St. Helens did what?

Last edited by Occulis on 10/29/03 - 15:19; edited 1 time in total

Blew it's top and spouted some dust for a little bit, nothing major.

If he was such a brilliant scientist how come he couldn't invent a real haircut?

I bet his haircut looked great from above!

Spitulski wrote:

Nuclear Winter is most certainly a valid concept - unless of course you don't believe in that big comet that hit our planet and blacked shit out. That didn't have anything to do with the burnable amount of material on our surface.

you are equating nuclear war with a big comet hitting the earth

at this point, your brain should be recalculating where it went wrong and sending signals to your nerve endings to be mildly embarassed.

Carl Sagan equated it, he said that nuclear winter would be mass extinction, not I.

Its obvious that a comet would do that.

That was very witty, but I still stand by my point.

Nuclear Winter has nothing to do with the burnable/atomizable content on the Earth's surface, no more than a comet hitting the surface did.

Dig a deep enough crater with a massive f*****g nuclear explosion and you have a TON of matter on your hands that goes below the surface.

So it's obvious that a big rock hitting our planet would cause mass extinction, but the detonation of hundreds of millions explosive tonnage would not?

I don't meant to be insulting in any way, but...isn't that a little rediculous to say?

A comet isn't a big rock, its a mass of ice and dust.

Okay, the point is that the dust and gas created by nuclear explosions would not be enough to fully blot out the sun, like a large comet impact would.

Of course unrestriced nuclear war would cause mass extinction, but in and of itself, "Nuclear Winter" would not be the cause.