Global warming and rain.

One day when I was a boy in Hokitika (West Coast, South Island, New Zealand) it was raining when I went to school and it got worse, so I had to walk home through water lying everywhere. The water was up to my ankles everywhere, and deeper in lower lying areas. This did not come from the river, but merely from the rain falling, and in nine hours, from memory there was nine inches of rain (a little under 23 cm). This was regarded as exceptional rain then, a once in a hundred year flood.

Now we have global warming so what do we expect? You hear lots of talk about drought, and yes in some parts of the world there will be drought, but in others there will be more rain. The reason is, if the oceans get warmer more water should go into the air. By itself that may not matter too much if the air gets warmer as well, but problems arise if such warm air meets cooler air. This is the sort of thing that causes rain, but now there is more water in the air.

What happens next depends on exactly how the cause behaved. The obvious thing is the rain falls, but when the humidity collapses into rain drops, its going from the gas phase to liquid releases a lot of energy. If there is enough cold air, it might just heat it, especially if the cold came from mountains forcing the air upwards relatively slowly so that it cools and rains on one side of the mountains. That is what happens around Hokitika. Now the hot air blows a strong warm wind over the land to the east, the so-called föhn wind. If the energy cannot be dissipated that way, then stronger circular winds are generated. The tropical cyclones are examples. There was one recently in Madagascar recently that did extreme damage.

So, how will global warming affect these? The short answer is, there will be a variety of ways. Stronger cyclones, more frequent cyclones (because milder systems that get stronger enter the classification) but the more obvious one is more rain because more water has been evaporated. Which gets me back to Hokitika. They have just had a weather system pass over that lasted about a day and a half of continuous rain, and dumped 800 mm of rain in that period (about 31 ½ inches). That is as much as some places get in a year. A little way inland, in the same period they got 1,082 mm, and that is almost 43 inches.

There has been a variety of flooding around the place. A number of houses were inundated because the storm-water drains could not cope and one woman died. Apparently she was driving; she did not like the speed of the water flowing down the road, so she got out. If when driving you see rapidly flowing water of unknown depth ahead, stop and sit it out, or turn back to higher ground. Do not enter. If you are correct in your fear that a car cannot maintain its grip on the road, you walking would be in a worse position. The force of rapidly flowing water will sweep you off your feet, and if it is deep, you are lighter and therefore have less grip. Your grip depends on your weight.

Probably the most frustrating situation has been for tourists south of the Franz Josef glacier, where they are stranded. To the south, the road is apparently cut off around Haast, and to the north of the Fox Glacier, the Waiho bridge was washed out by a river carrying down quite large boulders. A little earlier there were sightseers walking on the bridge, but fortunately they all got off before the bridge went. To give some idea of the water, here are links to two videos of the bridge going: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ldCjVqfkKFk   and  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wPf49aaomYI The first one also gives a brief example of the New Zealand accent, and the vernacular. Note the bridge was a Bailey bridge and is in principle not expected to be permanent.

Once something like this happens, the blame game starts. One argument was that the river has a history of flooding and of eroding out the land and changing course, so why build a more permanent bridge? Another was the crossing is situated on a major fault and apparently the land is not good for foundations. I suspect that since it is in a very low population area, money is also a relevant issue. Where I live, there are a number of bridges across the Hutt river, and it runs along a major fault line, but being in a major metropolitan area, bridges are built. However, another more pertinent accusation came from a local who had complained a few days before that someone excavating the riverbed a little upstream had created a channel that would direct the heaviest rocks in a flood in the direction of the first supports to give way. Oops! No doubt more will follow.

When I wrote that (yesterday), the weather system was still to the south of here but working its way north. Yesterday we had wind gusts of up to 120 k/h, and while the system was working its way north, apart from some heavy rain last night, it had run out of steam. Today it is quite warm, sunny, no problem.

So is this a sign of climate change? A single incident is not, however I note that the “one in a hundred year rain event” in my youth has happened again now, and apparently in the 1980s. This time it has dumped almost four times the amount of water, and the Tasman Sea is about two Centigrade degrees above average this summer. You form your own opinion.

Processing Minerals in Space

I have seen some recent items on the web that state that asteroids are full of minerals and fortunes await. My warning is, look deeper. The reason is, most asteroids have impact craters, and from basic physics but some rather difficult calculations you can show these were formed from very energetic collisions. That the asteroid did not fly to bits indicates it is a solid with considerable mechanical strength. That implies the original dust either melted to form a solid, or a significant chemical reaction took place. For those who have read my “Planetary Formation and Biogenesis” you will know why they melted, assuming I am right. So what has that got to do with things? Quite simply, leaving aside metals like gold, the metal oxides in molten silica form the olivine or pyroxene families, or aluminosilicates. That is they form rocks. To give an example of the issue, I recently read a paper where various chondrites were analysed, and the method of analysis recorded the elements separately. The authors were making much of the fact that the chondrites contained 19% iron. Yikes! But wait. Fayalite contains almost 55% iron by weight, but it is useless as an ore. The olivine and pyroxene structures have tetrahedral silicon oxides (the pyroxene as a strand polymer) where the other valence of the oxygen is bound to a divalent cation, mostly magnesium because magnesium is the most common divalent element in the supernova dust. What these authors had done was to analyse rock.

If you read my previous post you will see that I have uncovered yet another problem with science: the authors were very specialized but they went outside their sphere of competency, quite accidentally. They cited numbers because so much in science depends on numbers. But it is also imperative to know what the numbers mean.

On Earth, most of the metals we obtain come from ores, which have formed through various forms of geochemical processing. Thus to get iron, we usually process haematite, which is an iron oxide, but the iron almost certainly started as an average piece of basalt that got weathered. It is most unlikely that good deposits of haematite will be found on asteroids, although it is possible on Mars where small amounts have been found. If Mars is to be settled, processing rocks will be mandatory for survival but the problems are different from those of asteroids. For this post, I wish to restrict myself to discussing asteroids as a source of metals. Let us suppose an asteroid is collected and brought to a processing site, the question is, what next?

The first problem is size-reduction, i.e.breaking it down to more manageable pieces. How do you do that? If you hit it with something, you immediately separate, following Newton’s third law. If you want to see the difficulties, stand on a small raft and try to keep on hitting something. Ah, you say, anchor yourself. How? You have to put something like a piton into solid rock, and how do you do that without some sort of impact? Of course it can be done, but it is not easy. Now you start smashing it. What happens next is bits of asteroid fly off into space. Can you collect all of the pieces? If not, you are a menace because the asteroid’s velocity v, which will be in the vicinity of 30 km/s if near Earth, has to be added to whatever is given to the fragments. Worse, they take on the asteroid’s eccentricity ε(how much difference there is between closest and farthest distance from the sun) and whatever eccentricity has been added by the fragmentation. This is important because the relative velocity of impact assuming the target is on a circular orbit is proportional to εv. Getting hit by a rock at these sort of velocities is no joke.

However, suppose you collect all the rock, you have two choices: you can process the rock as is, or you can try to refine it. If you adopt the latter idea, how do you do it? On Earth, such processing arises through millions of years of action with fluids, or through superheated fluids passing through high temperature rock. That does not sound attractive. Now some asteroids are argued to have iron cores so the geochemical processing has been done for you. Of course you still have to work your way through the rock, and then you have to size reduce the iron, which again raises the question, how? There is also a little less good news awaiting you: iron cores are almost certainly not pure iron. The most likely composition is iron with iron silicide, iron phosphide, iron carbide and a lot of iron sulphide. There will also be some nickel, together with corresponding compounds, and (at last joy?) certain high value metals that dissolve in iron. So what do you do with this mess?

Then, supposing you separate out a pure chemical compound, how do you get the metal out? The energy input required can be very large. Currently, there is a lot of effort being put into removing CO2from the atmosphere. The reason we do not pull it apart and dump the carbon is that all the energy liberated from burning it has to be replaced, i.e.a little under 400 kJ/mol. and that is such a lot of energy. Consider that as a reference unit. It takes roughly two such units to get iron from iron oxide, although you do get two iron atoms. It takes about five units to break forsterite into two magnesium atoms and one silicon. It takes ten such units to break down kaolinite to get two aluminium atoms and two silicon atoms. Breaking down rock is very energy intensive.

People say, electrolysis. The problem with electrolysis is the material has to dissolve in some sort of solvent and then be separated into ions. Thus when making aluminium, bauxite, an aluminium oxide is used. Clays, which are aluminosilicates such as kaolinite or montmorillinite, are not used, despite being much cheaper and more easily obtained. In asteroids any aluminium will almost certainly be in far more complicated aluminosilicates. Then there is the problem of finding a solvent for electrolysis. For the least active metals, such as copper, water is fine, but that will not work for the more active ones, such as aluminium. Titanium would be even more difficult to make, as it is made from the reduction of titanium tetrachloride with magnesium. You have to make all the starting materials!

On Earth, many oxides are reduced to metal by heating with carbon (usually very pure coal) and allow the carbon to take the oxygen and disappear as a gas. The problem with that, in space, is there is no readily available source of suitable carbon. Carbonaceous chondrites have quite complicated molecules. The ancients used charcoal, and while this is NOT pure carbon, it is satisfactory because the only other element there in volume tends to be oxygen. (Most charcoal is about 35% oxygen.) The iron in meteors could certainly be useful, but for some other valuable elements, such as platinum, while it may be there as the element, it will probably be scattered through the matrix and be very dilute.

Undoubtedly there will be ways to isolate such elements, but such methods will probably be somewhat different from what we use. In some of my novels I have had fusion power tear the molecules to atoms, ionise them, and separate out the elements in a similar way to how a mass spectrometer works, that is they are accelerated and then bent with powerful electromagnetic fields. The “bend” in the subsequent trajectory depends on the mass of the ions, so each isotope is separated. Yes, that is fiction, but whatever is used would probably seem like fiction now. Care should be taken with any investment!

Repost from Sabine Hossenfelder’s blog “Backreaction”

Two posts this week. The first is more for scientists, but I think it mentions points that people reading about science should recognise as possibly there. Sabine has been somewhat critical of some of modern science, and I feel she has a point. I shall do a post of my own on this topic soon, but it might be of interest to read the post following this to see what sort of things can go wrong.

Both bottom-up and top-down measures are necessary to improve the current situation. This is an interdisciplinary problem whose solution requires input from the sociology of science, philosophy, psychology, and – most importantly – the practicing scientists themselves. Details differ by research area. One size does not fit all. Here is what you can do to help.

As a scientist:

• Learn about social and cognitive biases: Become aware of what they are and under which circumstances they are likely to occur. Tell your colleagues.
• Prevent social and cognitive biases: If you organize conferences, encourage speakers to not only list motivations but also shortcomings. Don’t forget to discuss “known problems.” Invite researchers from competing programs. If you review papers, make sure open questions are adequately mentioned and discussed. Flag marketing as scientifically inadequate. Don’t discount research just because it’s not presented excitingly enough or because few people work on it.
• Beware the influence of media and social networks: What you read and what your friends talk about affects your interests. Be careful what you let into your head. If you consider a topic for future research, factor in that you might have been influenced by how often you have heard others speak about it positively.
• Build a culture of criticism: Ignoring bad ideas doesn’t make them go away, they will still eat up funding. Read other researchers’ work and make your criticism publicly available. Don’t chide colleagues for criticizing others or think of them as unproductive or aggressive. Killing ideas is a necessary part of science. Think of it as community service.
• Say no: If a policy affects your objectivity, for example because it makes continued funding dependent on the popularity of your research results, point out that it interferes with good scientific conduct and should be amended. If your university praises its productivity by paper counts and you feel that this promotes quantity over quality, say that you disapprove of such statements.

As a higher ed administrator, science policy maker, journal editor, representative of funding body:

• Do your own thing: Don’t export decisions to others. Don’t judge scientists by how many grants they won or how popular their research is – these are judgements by others who themselves relied on others. Make up your own mind, carry responsibility. If you must use measures, create your own. Better still, ask scientists to come up with their own measures.
• Use clear guidelines: If you have to rely on external reviewers, formulate recommendations for how to counteract biases to the extent possible. Reviewers should not base their judgment on the popularity of a research area or the person. If a reviewer’s continued funding depends on the well-being of a certain research area, they have a conflict of interest and should not review papers in their own area. That will be a problem because this conflict of interest is presently everywhere. See next 3 points to alleviate it.
• Make commitments: You have to get over the idea that all science can be done by postdocs on 2-year fellowships. Tenure was institutionalized for a reason and that reason is still valid. If that means fewer people, then so be it. You can either produce loads of papers that nobody will care about 10 years from now, or you can be the seed of ideas that will still be talked about in 1000 years. Take your pick. Short-term funding means short-term thinking.
• Encourage a change of field: Scientists have a natural tendency to stick to what they know already. If the promise of a research area declines, they need a way to get out, otherwise you’ll end up investing money into dying fields. Therefore, offer reeducation support, 1-2 year grants that allow scientists to learn the basics of a new field and to establish contacts. During that period they should not be expected to produce papers or give conference talks.
• Hire full-time reviewers: Create safe positions for scientists specialized in providing objective reviews in certain fields. These reviewers should not themselves work in the field and have no personal incentive to take sides. Try to reach agreements with other institutions on the number of such positions.
• Support the publication of criticism and negative results: Criticism of other people’s work or negative results are presently underappreciated. But these contributions are absolutely essential for the scientific method to work. Find ways to encourage the publication of such communication, for example by dedicated special issues.
• Offer courses on social and cognitive biases: This should be mandatory for anybody who works in academic research. We are part of communities and we have to learn about the associated pitfalls. Sit together with people from the social sciences, psychology, and the philosophy of science, and come up with proposals for lectures on the topic.
• Allow a division of labor by specialization in task: Nobody is good at everything, so don’t expect scientists to be. Some are good reviewers, some are good mentors, some are good leaders, and some are skilled at science communication. Allow them to shine in what they’re good at and make best use of it, but don’t require the person who spends their evenings in student Q&A to also bring in loads of grant money. Offer them specific titles, degrees, or honors.

As a science writer or member of the public, ask questions:

• You’re used to asking about conflicts of interest due to funding from industry. But you should also ask about conflicts of interest due to short-term grants or employment. Does the scientists’ future funding depend on producing the results they just told you about?
• Likewise, you should ask if the scientists’ chance of continuing their research depends on their work being popular among their colleagues. Does their present position offer adequate protection from peer pressure?
• And finally, like you are used to scrutinize statistics you should also ask whether the scientists have taken means to address their cognitive biases. Have they provided a balanced account of pros and cons or have they just advertised their own research?

You will find that for almost all research in the foundations of physics the answer to at least one of these questions is no. This means you can’t trust these scientists’ conclusions. Sad but true.

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Reprinted from Lost In Math by Sabine Hossenfelder. Copyright © 2018. Available from Basic Books, an imprint of Perseus Books, a division of PBG Publishing, LLC, a subsidiary of Hachette Book Group, Inc

Space Mining

Most readers will have heard that there are a number of proposals to go mine asteroids, or maybe Mars. The implication is that Earth will become short of resources, so we can mine things in space. However, if we mine there for the benefit here, how would we get such resources here, and in what form. If the resources are refined elsewhere, then there is the “simple” cost of getting them here. If we bring them down in a shuttle, we have to get the shuttle back up there, and the cost is huge. If on the other hand, we drop them (and gravity is cheap) we have to stop whatever we send from burning up in the atmosphere, so to control the system we have to build some sort of spacecraft out there to bring them down. Overall, this is unlikely to be profitable. On the other hand if we build structures in space, such as space stations, or on Mars for settlers, then obviously it is very much cheaper to use local resources, if we can refine them there.

So, what are the local resources? The answer is it depends on the history. All the solid elements are expelled in novae (light elements only) or supernovae (all). The very light elements lithium, beryllium and boron are rather rare because they tend to be destroyed in the star before the explosion. The elements vary in relative amounts made, and basically the heavier the element the less is made, and elements with an even number of protons are more common than elements with odd numbers. Iron, and to some extent nickel, are more common than those around them because the nuclei are particularly stable. The most common elements are magnesium, silicon and with iron about 10% less. Sulphur is about half as common, calcium and aluminium are about 6 – 8% as common as silicon, while the metals such as copper and zinc are about 100,000 times less common than aluminium. The message from all that is that unless there is some process that has sorted the various elements, an object in space is likely to have the composition of dust, which are mainly silicates, i.e. rock. There may well be metal sulphides as well, as there is a lot of sulphur there.

So what sorting could there be? The most obvious is that if the body formed close enough to the star during primary accretion, the heat in the accretion disk could be sufficient to melt the element, if it were there as an element. It appears that iron was, because we get iron meteorites and iron-cored meteorites. The accretion disk, of course, was primarily hydrogen, and at the melting point of iron, hydrogen will reduce iron oxides to iron, also making water. So we could expect asteroids to have iron cores? Well, we are sure most members of the asteroid belt do not, and the reason why not is presumably it did not get hot enough to melt iron where they formed. However, since the regolith (fine “soil”) on the Moon has iron dust in it, perhaps there was iron dust where the asteroids formed. However, the problem is what caused them to solidify. If they melted, steam would be created, and that would oxidise iron dust, so the iron then would be as an oxide, or a silicate.

The ores we have on Earth are there due to geochemical processing. For example, in the mantle, water forms a supercritical fluid that dissolves all sorts of things, including silica and gold. When this comes to the surface, it cools and deposits its solids, which is why gold is found in some quartz veins. The big iron oxide deposits we have were formed through carbon dioxide weathering iron-containing silicates (such as olivine and pyroxene) to make ferrous and magnesium solutions in the oceans. When oxygen came along, the ferrous precipitated to form goethite and haematite, which we now mine. All the ore deposits on Earth are there because of geochemical processing.

There will be limited such processing on Mars, and on the Moon. Thus on the Moon, as it cooled some materials crystallised out before others. The last to crystallise on the Moon was what we call KREEP, which stands for potassium, rare earths and phosphate, which is what it largely comprises. There is also anorthite, a calcium aluminosilicate on the Moon. As for Mars, it seems to be mainly basaltic, which means it is mainly iron magnesium silicate. The other elements will be there, of course, mixed up, but how do you get them out? Then there is the problem of chemical compatibility. Suppose you want rare earths? The rare earths are not that rare, actually, and are about as common as copper. But copper occurs in nice separate ores, at least on Earth, but rare earths have chemical properties somewhat similar to aluminium. For every rare earth atom, there are 100,000 aluminium atoms, all behaving similarly, although not exactly the same. So it is far from easy to separate them from the aluminium, then there is the problem of separating them from each other.

There is what I consider a lot of nonsense spoken about asteroids. Thus one was reported to be “mainly diamond”. On close questioning, it had an infrared signature typical of carbon. That would be typically amorphous graphitic carbon, and no, they did not know specifically it was diamond. Another proposal was to mine asteroids for iron. There may well be some with an iron core, and Vesta probably does have such a core, but most do not. I have heard some say there will be lots of platinum there. Define lots, because unless there has been some form of sorting, it will be there proportionately to its dust concentration, and while there is more than in most bits of basalt, there will still be very little. In my opinion, beware of investment opportunities to get rich quickly through space mining.

Space Law

One of the more notable recent events was the launching of a non-government rocket by a company run by Elon Musk to the International Space Station. Apparently Boeing is going to do something similar in the not too distant future. In some ways this is exciting, because one way or another, human ventures into space will increase markedly. I recall in 1969 sitting in front of a TV one morning (I was in Australia) getting direct feed from Parkes to see the first Moon landing in real time. (OK, there was a slight delay due to the speed of light, and probably more due to feed looping, but you know what I mean.) There was real tension because while everyone was reasonably confident that NASA had selected a good site, it was always possible the ground was not as solid as it might appear and it only needed for the lander to roll over and the ending might have been less than happy. Additionally, the landing was not entirely optimal, and fuel consumption was a little higher than anticipated. This may not seem important, but it did at the time. But all ended well. There were several more Moon landings, and apart from Apollo 13, the program was brilliantly successful. The recovered rocks are still yielding scientific information.

Then the program ended. And nothing more happened. We constructed the International Space Station, with reusable shuttles, but somehow this has had limited value. Certainly, it has permitted the testing of the effects of long periods of weightlessness on people and on other life forms. The best part of this was we got international cooperation. Arguably, humanity was going into space and not just various countries. We have sent a battery rovers and space craft through the solar system, and we genuinely know a lot more about our planetary system. When I was a schoolboy, I believe I knew as much about the planets, other than their orbital details, as anyone. That may sound ridiculous, but I believe it to be true because basically nobody knewvery much at all. They guessed on the basis of their observations, and their guesses were largely wrong. So that part of the space program has been a resounding success, but it brings into question, what is the point of acquiring that information if we do nothing with it? If we do, who does? If different parties go to space, what will be the rules they must follow? Who decides? It is much better if we can get this sorted before various parties get there.

There are two schools of thought. One is, we should stay here and leave the rest of the solar system for careful study, or if we do go somewhere, like Mars, again it should be for study, and we should leave it alone. The other school of thought is the solar system is a resource, and we should be free to tap into it. Which brings up the question, who decides? And what happens if someone does something another group decides should not be done? What happens if one government decides to do something, and a private company decides to do something similar in the same place? How are issues such as these to be resolved?

On Earth, we use the courts to resolve many such issues, although for some issues, governments decide, and of course the split between governments and courts varies from country to country. Worse than that, there is often no real logical reason to prefer one route over another, and the decision is made through politics. Again, different countries have different political systems, so two countries might reach very different decisions based properly on the way they conduct their affairs. Often enough, the various countries find that there is an impasse in finding common ground. What then? Carl von Clausewitz’ “war is a continuation of politics by other means” is not where we want to end up.

There is another problem. For a court to resolve something, there has to be law, and law follows from sovereignty, that is, the right to impose the law, AND the means of enforcing it. So, what happens in space? There is no sovereignty, and suppose there were settlers on Mars, why should they not have their own sovereignty? While they might start off as a colony, through needing a lot of support from people on Earth, their laws should not be imposed by people who have no concept of what life is like there. For example, environmental laws to conserve nature on Earth should not be imposed on Mars, where settlers would struggle just to get what they need to stay alive. Additionally, why would Russian settlers on Mars have to obey American laws, or vice versa? We might argue that the United Nations should set the laws for space, but unless all countries interested in exploring space agreed to them, why should they? Why should countries with no interest in space have standing in setting such laws?

Then there is the question of enforcement. The US is creating a “Space Force” so what happens if they try to stop Russians, say, from doing something in space that the US does not like? Settlements on planets are another matter. There, in my opinion, enforcement will have to fall on settlements, if for no other reason than if a crime is committed on Mars, we cannot have the situation where everyone has to wait for possibly a year and a half to get investigators from Earth. And if anyone thinks there will be no crime, I say, think again. The history of colonization is littered with crime. The US had its “wild west”, Australia its bushrangers, and the history of New Zealand has serious crime, the most spectacular being armed hold-ups of gold during the gold rush days. There will also be other opportunities for crime that are a little more sophisticated, such as in my novel “Red Gold”

But there will also be serious commercial disagreements, particularly if some want to use something and others want to preserve it. I believe everyone has the right to their opinion, but there have to be rules and a means of enforcing them to avoid conflict. This procedure should be fully established beforeit is needed. There is plenty of time to argue now, but not in the middle of a dispute, and it is wrong to impose restrictions on an activity when huge sums of money have already been spent.

Smashwords “Read an Ebook Week”

From Sunday, March 3 to Saturday, March 9, Smashwords is running a sale. The ebooks I have there (https://www.smashwords.com/profile/view/IanMiller) are all discounted. The three fiction books form a series.

 

Puppeteer (https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/69696) is a thriller set  in a future where shortages, government debt, and persistent warfare  are eroding governance. Set in California and Kerguelen, Two pairs of people who are unaware of each others’ existence must combine and succeed in countering a terrorist, or a hundred million people will die and billions of dollars of property will be destroyed.

‘Bot War (https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/677836) In which the problems of Puppeteer have not been addressed. The government is still essentially bankrupt, but Islamic terrorists determined for revenge for what happened in their homeland take control of the latest AI war machines.

Troubles (https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/174203) The world is recovering from a state of anarchy. There is money to be made, and opposition to kill. Law and order is privatized, and those with money have a huge advantage.

Biofuels An Overview (https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/454344) Contrary to what many people say, biofuels could make a serious impact on our carbon dioxide emissions (because while the emissions are the same, the carbon originally came from the atmosphere). There are a number of criticisms, and they are valid for many of the proposals, but that is because the easiest options are the least suitable for various reasons, not the least because there is going to be a major need for food. Find out what the better options are, from someone who has worked on the topic for many years.