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[Dorsidwarf]

Its not at the North Pole, the article both says and shows with a labelled map that it's in Spitzbergen.

[Starver]

See the map in the article. It's in a mountain on an island in the arctic circle.  It has covering snow and (usually) permafrost, but it's otherwise solid ground.  You don't have solid ground at any of the North Poles you might deem worthy of the name.

And Scott-Amundsen base sits above land that is ~135m above sea-level. But between that land and the base is a further 2.7km of ice-sheet (vertically!).  Imagine the problems with that. Especially as the ice moves. Perhaps one of the ice-free (desert) parts of Antarctica would be a better place to dig down, away from meltwater threat, but digging into the treaty-protected landmass is discouraged.

Instead, they dug into (and significantly upwardsly, which mitigates the problems of meltwater) a hillside in the Arctic, expecting some meltwater effects from the bits of the tunnel punching through the surface layer, but not with this worrying (for climate, not necessarily for the vault) amount of leakage.  Very dwarfish.

Given the designed-in ability to be left unmaintained as a passive repository, I'd be surprised if this kind of problem is any more than an issue for access (and power/ventilation) for the benefit of staff, but if they leave it alone it'll just sit there with an initial sump of water or ice as it awaits future visitors rediscovering its existence and ensuring their own access is sufficiently possible to see what there is of the  legacy material carefullly preserved inside.


(That said, the plan is not to just file away and forget. They bring seeds out and put seeds in all the time, AIUI, so that the best and most viable stock is ensured at the moment the unspecifiable impending doom ends the process, so that any futuristic Lara Croft-wannabees might have a better chance of finding something worthwhile disinterring from the facility.)

[ChairmanPoo]

Ice to see everything was chill in the end, though.

[Starver]

Hey! There snow joking allowed!

[inteuniso]

I don't see any rime or reason to these puns.

On the planetary/spacecraft shield front, THz transmitters are less than five years away. They would DEFINITELY be a much stronger shield than radio waves.

I'll keep working on bringing the raw materials into existence required for said transmitters. (Going to try to make a glass fun in a few months, should be fun)

[martinuzz]

In his own words, to 'troll back the trolls', American proferssor in biology Dustin Rubenstein of COlombia University, New York, has founded a new science magazine.

The magazine, ASSHOLE, or 'Adaptation, Sexual Selection and Harmony of the Oceans and Living Earth', is a parody on the many specialist journals that exist in the scientific community. With his magazine, he wants to show that it currently is way too easy for anyone to found a new so called specialist journal.
The umpteenth spam mail of yet another unknown specialist magazine offering subscription prompted him to take action.
Apparently specialist magazines have become the Nigerian prince of the academic society.

tl;dr subscribe to ASSHOLE now

http://www.volkskrant.nl/wetenschap/tijdschrift-asshole-toont-aan-een-vakblad-oprichten-is-veel-te-makkelijk~a4496220/

[Akura]

and hey if you're in a panic over CO2 you should be freaking about the CH4 which cows blast out of their asses all day, right?

Mouth, not ass. About 90% of the methane cows produce is burped out as food ferments in its stomach.

[Max™]

Thank you for clarifying that... I only know horses are gasblasting machines, never was around cows too much, but had two stallions for a while, farty bastards.

[Rusty Shackleford]

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marine_Corps_Prepositioning_Program-Norway

Reminds me of this huge stock of military vehicles in caves also located Norway. Seems the ideal place for a post-apocalyptic warlord to restart civilization after all the cows ruin the planet. Probably coincidence.

Underground structures are hard to keep dry, especially if you intend to just abandon them and its in a place covered with water. I would think a place like Yucca Mountain would probably work better?

[Starver]

I read that as "propositioning". (Especially meaning 2.2, those GIs being traditionally overpaid, oversexed and over here... )

[Reelya]

On the CH4 from cows thing, they found a solution to that:
http://www.abc.net.au/news/rural/2017-04-21/seaweed-fed-cows-could-solve-livestock-methane-problems/8460512

Research last year showed that in a laboratory setting, adding dried seaweed to a cow's diet could reduce the amount of methane it produced by up to 99 per cent.

...

This trial is based on similar research with sheep which showed impressive methane reductions after the animals were fed algae. That trial showed a 60 per cent reduction in methane emissions, even though some sheep in the trial only had 1 per cent of their diet as seaweed.

"There was a 60 per cent methane reduction for a 1 per cent diet of seaweed, but a 2 per cent seaweed diet caused a 70 per cent reduction, and a 3 per cent diet caused an 80 per cent reduction," Dr Kinley said

...

"What we are really interested in is what the effects are of seaweed on performance, because if less methane is being produced, that energy can go into live weight gains," he said.

[sluissa]

Heh interesting. I wonder if that could be downsized to space ship size, and used to keep the radiation out.

One thing someone on Reddit was asking is if that could be used to help shield Mars from radiation. It wouldn't be as effective as a functional core, but anything that helps would be good.

Slightly old old news at this point, but I just wanted to state, I think people are overstating the power of this factor. VLF transmissions are *POSSIBLY* affecting the distance at which the van allen belt occurs around the earth.

Even if this were proven to be the case and we have control over it, it's not a producible shield, it's simply a way to manipulate a natural and with our current abilities, unreproducable feature.

To use a very crude analogy. You have a pond and the shore of that pond and the trash that washes up on the shore of that pond. Think of the van allen belt like that line of trash that forms from the relatively constant wind blowing things onto it and it getting stuck there. It sounds like what we've realized is that maybe we can make waves big enough to wash things a little further up onto the shore. That's not to say we've figured out how to make the pond itself. That's beyond our abilities. But we can maybe, just maybe, play around with what already exists.

I wouldn't hold out hope for Mars it's core is solid and stationary. With no magnetic field, it has no pond to play in, just an empty pit where water once might have been ... but something that's exciting maybe is the gas giants and their moons. Jupiter and Saturn both have extremely powerful magnetic fields. And Jupiter's moon Io, at the very least, seems to have a molten iron core and could be generating it's own magnetic field. So far, aside from the distance, the radiation considerations of the gas giants has been one of the major concerns of sending humans there. If we could manipulate their magnetic fields to provide humans with safe(r) zones to live in, that's an exciting prospect. But that's also way down the line... a couple of decades on SpaceX's timeline... which in real time would mean I MIGHT see it before I die... but probably not.

[Max™]

Yeah, worst case, we get a way to keep humans alive in the GODDAMN EXPOSED NUCLEAR REACTOR CORE ENVIRONMENT that is Jovian space, which is so lethal that the best we could do with Juno was build it where it can keep falling back to different systems and different components of said systems as they get blasted by the fucking absurdly lethal presence of Jupiter being nearby.

Best case, we figure out how to turn Jupiter into a railgun or something, PEW PEW PEW, TO THE STARS BITCHES!

[martinuzz]

New Zealand has joined the club of nations capable of launching spacecraft, with the succesful launch of Rocket Lab's Electron rocket.

The Electron Rocket is innovative in more than one way.
For one, it's motor's turbopumps are driven by electric motors, making them cheaper and more reliable than combustion engines.
Also, parts of the engine are made by 3D printing, further reducing costs.

But what's really special about the rocket is it's size. It's only 17 meters high, and 1m in diameter, much much smaller than the giants used by NASA, ESA, United Launch Alliance and SpaceX.

For comparison, NASA's current rocket in development, the SLS, which is supposed to be capable of bringing astronauts to Mars, is 64 meters high.

The big downside of large size, is cost. Telecommunications sattelites orbiting at 36000 km above the earth are big, and heavy. They need big and heavy rockets to bring them up to their orbit, with enormous launch costs. The expected cost of launching an SLS is one billion dollars, and even the 'cheap' commercial SpaceX charges 100 million for a single journey to geostationary orbit.

Electron will be able to bring sattelites up for a mere 5 million, albeit it smaller satellites, and in a lower orbit.
Improvements in electonic miniaturization enables those lower orbt satellites to do much of the tasks the old high orbit satellites can do.
This is one of the reasons that Facebook, OneWeb, SpaceX and others have shown interest in using them to create a worldwide wireless network. A few hundred would be needed to provide global coverage.
Now a few hundred SpaceX rockets are just plain unaffordable. A few hundred rockets like Electron however, and things become feasible.

Rocket Lab has high ambition. They want to start launching 100 rockets per year, one every 3 days. They claim their flights have been already booked full until the end of next year.

http://www.volkskrant.nl/wetenschap/succesvolle-eerste-lancering-van-deels-3d-geprinte-raket-vanuit-nieuw-zeeland~a4497002/
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/business/news/article.cfm?c_id=3&objectid=11862250

[inteuniso]

Wow. Go kiwis!