The Moon Landing

I would enjoy very much for you to explain what - in the hairy name of balls - I just read. You know, aside from being very entertaining.

I could argue this alien super-intelligence is a placeholder for something more...unknowable, I suppose?

 

Put me the believers column.
We've been there, done that.

 

I really don't know how that's what wobbler got from my contributions, though I did read a lot about the cold war recently. Two superpowers clash, and build nukes as a bluff-but-actually-real-defense strategy. Then they build more nukes than they'd ever need to do shit about anything. It was a waste of resources - one nuke, just one, would be enough to level the enemy and cover everyone around them in fallout, as well as possibly cause a nuclear winter. Take that number, multiply it by 100, then double it, and you still have about half of all of the nukes made during the cold war. Friggin dick measuring contest. And we wonder why the Russians still have the smallpox virus.

 

In order to accomplish the 'mutually assured' part of 'mutually assured destruction', you need more than one bomb. One nuke will generally level one city, and if your enemy considers that an acceptable cost for ensuring your destruction, you have to up the ante. If they know you can level all their cities because you've got hundreds of nukes flying around in airplanes or mounted to ICBM's ready to target them at a moments notice, they'll tend to behave more reasonably. People are quick to denounce nuclear weapons as evil while enjoying the peace they help ensure.

 

I said nuke to generally mean nuclear device - the US developed the hydrogen bomb because the russians were capable of making fission bombs. There's not a ceiling to the destuctive potential of a fusion weapon, and it takes a relatively small amount of hydrogen isotopes to make a bomb hundreds of times more powerful than fat man or little boy, and one could easily be made more powerful than Russia's Tsar Bomba, even though that is the most powerful fusion weapon ever detonated.

A mole of resulting helium from a fusion of tritium and deuterium will have released just over a quarter of the energy that came from the bomb dropped over Hiroshima (63 Terajoules). That's about 4 grams of helium gas. 6.02 * 10^23 neutrons became pure energy, and that's from 5 grams of starting material. Cost vs. destructive potential is actually quite reasonable with a thermonuclear weapon, but cost vs energy output makes fusion energy by current methods out of our reach.

If 6 kilograms of helium could be made in this fusion, the resulting output would be over 243 megatons. The bomb dropped on Hiroshima had an output of 15 kilotons. The bomb I've "created" is powerful enough to cause an earthquake that's 8,8 on the Richter scale. If I dropped that bomb on New York City, the blast radius would go out 110 miles, with the most damage within 21. But hey, if the most powerful weapons we have (100 megatons) only have the most severe damage going out to 15.62 miles, that's not so bad, right? Now, when I say "most severe," everything within 15.62 miles is getting slammed with 1 psi. Say you're 70 inches tall, and your shoulders are a tad over 20 inches wide. If you're standing rigid with your arms to your side, the top half of your body will be hit with 707 pounds of force at 1 psi - every window within this radius will be destroyed. Five miles in, that doubles. It will increase to 15 psi at about 3 miles. Even if you're 82 miles out, you're getting hit with 70.7 pounds of force on your upper body.

On average, it'll be hotter than the surface of the sun. At the center, heat will be in the millions of degrees.

Fallout raining down for days, people dozens of miles away dying of radiation poisoning.

I'm sure you know all of that already, though.

That's just the blast radius. Everyone with a pacemaker for hundreds of miles would die because of an EMP. All electronics, destroyed.

I fear these weapons, I'm not happy they make "peace." One bomb is enough - that single 100 megaton bomb (the original Tsar Bomba design), if detonated in the air, will shower the entire planet with fallout and we'll suffer a nuclear winter. Life's rather fun when you can't drink water without being poisoned by radiation.

 

I think the moon landing was real, I'm just not invested in trying to convince people about it. I think the real conspiracy we should be considering is whether Ilya Ivanovich Ivanov ever succeeded in breeding a Humanzee, and whether the Russians have a score of humanzees ready to take over the world with.

 

That'd be pretty freaky if it happened. I can see it as a possibility, but I wonder how long the infant would survive once it was born, should pregnancy occur.

Though asiatic and african elephants don't interbreed in the wild, an asiatic elephant had actually been impregnated by an african elephant and gave birth to a hybrid with a healthy summary of african and asian elephant traits. Unfortunately, the infant died of an infection 10 days after it was born, so it's not certain how an adult would behave at all.

I think the largest concern would be the missing chromosome. Chimps are smart enough to get things right without trial and error, and are known to use tools. Would the humanzee be an average of relative human and chimp intelligence? Would it have the same manual dexterity we do? How well would it be able to talk? Chimps do have the FOXP2 gene, which is linked to speech cognition and development, but also have anatomical differences preventing them from speaking as we do in the first place. Though, human babies start out the same way any other mammal does, with separate wind pipes and esophagi, which is precisely how babies can swallow food and breathe at the same time. The crossover of the two channels is more dangerous, but it's what forms our larynx. I'd be curious to find out how that would happen in the humanzee, should relevant genetic traits be passed down.

I mean, a lot of humans alive today are already part neanderthal. Long face? Large nose? Prominent brow? Strong cheekbones? Low forehead? Weak chin? A bump at the base of your skull?

All neanderthal characteristics not characteristic of cro-magnon man.

This might not happen with the humanzee, though, but it could given a proper mutation.

Is anyone else sick of reading cut and paste crap in articles on wikipedia? Sometimes I see the same paragraph two paragraphs down from where I first read it.

 

"The Davis Loser"?

That was unnecessary, wobbler.

 

I do what I must, because I can.

Also, for the sake of it, I believe that the moon landing was real.

 

The moon landing? Why are you bringing that into a discussion about nuclear weapons?

 

I guess you could call me an agnostic rather than dogmatic amoonlandingist.

I certainly don't take either side's claims as gospel, be it the tin-foil-hat brigade, the cold-war press-releases or the sterling scholarship of wikipedia.

I simply think that human nature + the laws of physics = probably just a trick.

 

The laws of physics AND human nature? No, see, that's a major clue that you have no substantial argument against the moon landings. One of my favourite aphorisms is - If ever someone gives you more than one reason for something, then none of them are the real reason. It applies well here - if you had a proper piece of evidence, you would just present that. Job done.

So, either pick a single physical factor - e.g. "The radiation in deep space would kill any human within an hour", or a piece of historical evidence - e.g. "Over 50% of the people who worked on the moon missions have since admitted that they were paid hush money by NASA" and then we can argue that one point.

One single irrefutable point is all you need. If you can't find one, then you have nothing.

 

Gotta delete 'em quicker next time ytzk.

 

Really? If I'm weighing up more than one factor then I have no reason to conclude anything?

I think you're just being obstreperous because you miss Xyle. Okay, I'll bite...

I pick human nature as my one reason for not buying it. It smells fishy. It stinks of politics and mythology. As with any other incongruous miracle, all you have to do is repeat it and then it's a fact.

All this talk of safety standards and cost-prohibitive and lost technology sounds a lot like a sermon about why God doesn't perform miracles in the modern age.

You, sir, show a lot of faith.

P.s. Nice catch, constipation.

 

Didn't we have a real clever guy here on the forum before? Like Philes or rroyo, I think one of them were quite smart.

Also, for the record, I think FBI/CIA killed Kennedy.

 

No you don't.

I don't quite understand that. They repeated it five more times, and that makes you more suspicious?

 

Yeah, right, and Moses repeated the magic plagues n more times, case closed.

 

We don't have film of Moses' alleged feats.

 

Say mah name! SAY MAH NAME!

 

Someone just got insulted.