A strange world full of odd facts

[Kiwidave4]

1 hour ago, Beardie said:

OK interesting fact for today :-

 

When your hippy types say 'we are all beings of light' they aren't actually wrong. We shooman beans and all other warm blooded animals actually 'glow' all the time as we lose energy ( radiate body heat). It's just that our eyes aren't able to see it. A thermal camera will show you how we are all constantly radiating light in the infra red spectrum.

 

 

As light travels faster than sound is this also why some people seem quite bright till they open their mouths?

 

Recall once seeing something somewhere, (oh to have a functioning memory again), where a thermal camera was pointed at a seat where a female of the species had been sitting - won't go into details but it  did sort of reinforce your point!

Edited November 13, 2019 by Kiwidave4

[spaddad]

12 hours ago, Beardie said:

@spaddad. These things can wipe out any planetary atmosphere/life present in an entire galaxy using nothing but pure light energy.

Good to know.

[dogsbody]

15 hours ago, Beardie said:

OK interesting fact for today :-

On another note @spaddad you asked me a while back what the blast radius of a massive super nova would likely be. I have since done a little research and the generally accepted estimate for a superluminous super nova is a 'kill radius' of around a thousand light years (The distance travelled by light in a thousand years at 300,000 kilometres per second)  based on the brightest one yet observed which is aptly named ASASSN(assassin)-15LH. These things can wipe out any planetary atmosphere/life present in an entire galaxy using nothing but pure light energy.

 

Not quite. Our galaxy is about 100,000 light years across and where we are, it's about 3000 light years thick.

 

 

Chris

[Beardie]

Ah yes, our galaxy is but there are Galaxies that are quite a bit smaller and, if they harbour a star that is going superluminous supernova, they are likely to go bye bye. I don't think that we are at risk of a superluminous supernova. We certainly wouldn't know until it hit as it would be travelling at the speed of light. If I recall correctly Asassn-12LH actually took out a couple of our satellites and ripped a chunk of our atmosphere away even at the extreme distance it is away from us so, even being outwith that 1000 light year radius where you would be guaranteed a quick death like an ant under a magnifying glass, it still would pose more than a little of a threat. I think that the general consensus at the moment is that the nearest star that will be going pop at some point is the red giant Betelgeuse which is believed will go pop some time between now and a million years from now and probably won't go with a big enough bang to do any significant damage to Earth.

[Pete in Lincs]

So, in conclusion, the shiny gold we find underground is the product of shiny stars going bang and when it fell to earth it squished the forests into oil?

Or was I reading all of the above wrong?

[Beardie]

Not too far off Pete. That Superluminous Supernova I mentioned for example is believed to have produced a mass in gold alone of many times the mass of the Earth.

As to that being responsible for the end of the dinosaurs and other extinction events, well asteroids and comets are generally believed to have been the cause now and then amongst other things. As to that creating the oil there are now questions in some quarters as to whether oil is actually a 'fossil fuel' or not. We have discovered complex hydrocarbons during research of moons, planets, comets and asteroids in our solar system where, as far as we know, there isn't and has never been life and it may be that oil is created by some other chemical process that we don't currently know of but we might be getting into 'conspiracy theory' territory there. 

[Vince1159]

5 minutes ago, Beardie said:

hydrocarbons

Is that the basis for diamonds?....

[bentwaters81tfw]

If oil came from decomposing forests, it would be vegetable based, and seeing it's mineral oil, it is generated in the rocks of the mantle. If it came from old cabbages, the wells would not be refilling from below.

[spruecutter96]

On 11/11/2019 at 1:08 PM, VMA131Marine said:

Conversely, the track returning to the front of the vehicle (assuming forward motion) moves twice as fast as the vehicle itself. 

 

This is is also true for simple wheels.

I have a real problem with both of these statements. With both of these means of propulsion, the track and wheels are attached to objects that are travelling forward, we can assume. How can either be truly stationary?

 

 Chris. 

[Beardie]

@bentwaters81tfw I have to say that I am in agreement with you on the oil. I think it is the result of some chemical process which we don't yet understand but that is not a message the world wants to hear right now.

[Rob G]

15 minutes ago, spruecutter96 said:

I have a real problem with both of these statements. With both of these means of propulsion, the track and wheels are attached to objects that are travelling forward, we can assume. How can either be truly stationary?

 

 Chris. 

 

Watch a video of a tank (or bulldozer) in motion. The track pads in contact with the ground are stationary in relation to the ground, while the wheels roll along above them. When the last wheel rolls off any one pad, that pad is lifted and accelerated until it's travelling at twice the velocity of the tank in relation to the ground. It then begins to be lowered and decelerates until it contacts the ground, whereupon it stops moving.

 

The same thing happens with wheels. Attach a pen to the rim of a bicycle wheel and run it along a wall; what pattern will you get? Right at the bottom, there's a dead spot, where the pen line goes from moving down and backwards to moving up and forwards. At that point, that point on the rim of the wheel is stationary in relation to the ground.

 

If tracks and wheels didn't stop moving, there'd be no traction, and we'd still be walking.  Physics can really do your head in.

 

(Don't even start looking at the velocities and forces acting on simple universal joints, it'll scare you silly.)

[qn30jEkPz7]

2 hours ago, Beardie said:

@bentwaters81tfw I have to say that I am in agreement with you on the oil. I think it is the result of some chemical process which we don't yet understand but that is not a message the world wants to hear right now.

Man, I really hope you’re wrong on that. Otherwise I spent a lot of time hoodwinked into working on a Potemkin career doing pointless projects as a cover for a conspiracy. It’d be like telling an aeronautical engineer that planes are really held up by invisible strings and that Bernoulli was a CIA plant 

[qn30jEkPz7]

3 hours ago, Beardie said:

Not too far off Pete. That Superluminous Supernova I mentioned for example is believed to have produced a mass in gold alone of many times the mass of the Earth.

As to that being responsible for the end of the dinosaurs and other extinction events, well asteroids and comets are generally believed to have been the cause now and then amongst other things. As to that creating the oil there are now questions in some quarters as to whether oil is actually a 'fossil fuel' or not. We have discovered complex hydrocarbons during research of moons, planets, comets and asteroids in our solar system where, as far as we know, there isn't and has never been life and it may be that oil is created by some other chemical process that we don't currently know of but we might be getting into 'conspiracy theory' territory there. 

Complex hydrocarbons depends a bit on who you talk to - methane, ammonia and smaller hydrocarbons and some exotics  are present in space but I’m not aware of anything that looks chemically like the lipids, proteins, carbohydrates and other biomolecule breakdown products in kerogen and oil formations that then as the rocks get older and more cooked/squeezed get less and less detectable as the everything gets more broken down. 

[Beardie]

Well I very much doubt you have wasted your time on your career and I have little to no expertise in oil, it's origins etc. and solely base my 'guesses' on gut feelings and a very little knowledge which they do say can be a dangerous thing. Of course, as in all things it may be entirely possible that all that oil on Earth is indeed the result of decaying animal and plant matter or created by chemical processes without it making any difference to the process of figuring out where to find it,  how to extract it, best practice in it's use etc. etc. No matter where it came from where it ends up is at the same destination. I have never spoken to anyone who is actually directly involved with the oil industry. Would you @LostCosmonauts personally rule out any possibility of oil being created by anything other than decay of formerly living organisms?

Back in 2012 scientists at the Max Planck institute claimed that there were massive oil deposits in the Horsehead Nebula (rather far away from us to be any use though) which they believed were the result of "fragmentation of giant carbonaceous molecules called poly cyclic aromatic hydrocarbons which are a waste product of dying stars' and I seem to recall claims that there was a massive oil and gas field on Titan.

 

Is it possible that both processes could be involved?

[Kiwidave4]

4 hours ago, spruecutter96 said:

I have a real problem with both of these statements. With both of these means of propulsion, the track and wheels are attached to objects that are travelling forward, we can assume. How can either be truly stationary?

 

 Chris. 

Stationary as in relative to the ground it is in contact with.

 

As a boring old fart I must point out that this is another example of the 'evolution' of the language, which I prefer to call dumbing down.

 

I am unfortunately old enough to remember when it was not uncommon to hear tracked vehicles referred to as 'track laying vehicles', which if you watch one in action is exactly what it does. The track gets laid in front of the road wheels, run over, and then lifted up and transported to the front of the vehicle to be re-used.

 

 

 

[Admiral Puff]

3 hours ago, LostCosmonauts said:

It’d be like telling an aeronautical engineer that planes are really held up by invisible strings ...

Well, helicopters only stay airborne because gravity repels them - does that count?

[VMA131Marine]

6 hours ago, bentwaters81tfw said:

If oil came from decomposing forests, it would be vegetable based, and seeing it's mineral oil, it is generated in the rocks of the mantle. If it came from old cabbages, the wells would not be refilling from below.

In general, oil wells do not refill from below. There have been a couple of cases were a higher reservoir has been connected to and refilled from a deeper one. Moreover, oil contains biological markers that are unique enough you can tell what reservoir a sample came from by testing for them. Oil was not formed from dead forests, but from an ocean phytoplankton bloom that occurred millions of years ago due to a spike in atmospheric CO2. This is further confirmed because oil and natural gas are found in sedimentary rock. The abiogenesis oil hypothesis is mostly attributed to Thomas Gold and has been thoroughly discredited.

[VMA131Marine]

2 hours ago, Beardie said:

d I seem to recall claims that there was a massive oil and gas field on Titan.

Nobody knows enough about Titan to be able to credibly make this claim.

[VMA131Marine]

6 hours ago, Beardie said:

@bentwaters81tfw I have to say that I am in agreement with you on the oil. I think it is the result of some chemical process which we don't yet understand but that is not a message the world wants to hear right now.

Oil formation is incredibly well understood; that’s why we’ve found so much of it. We use knowledge of how it was formed to predict the best places to look. No oil company prospects for oil using anything but the theory of biological origin (theory in this case being the correct scientific usage).

[Beardie]

I bow to your superior knowledge on this subject as I must admit that I have never paid any more than cursory attention to oil in any form although I will now make some attempt to educate myself a little. I do have to clarify that, when I said 'I think it is the result of some chemical process which we don't yet understand but that is not a message the world wants to hear right now.' what I meant is that the world in general now seems to consider oil a dirty word and any idea that we have more to use wouldn't go down well. 

 

As to the Titan's moon oil it was the Nasa Cassini probe that provided the data and, although the title of this article that NASA published starts with 'oil' the body of the article only seems to mention Ethane and Methane at a glance. https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/cassini/media/cassini-20080213.html

[qn30jEkPz7]

You’re right @Beardie that there is thought to be a hell of a lot of hydrocarbons on Titan but it is different in composition and formation to the oil and gas on Earth. We’ve been able to look at spectroscopic analysis and believe that the surface of Titan is covered with substantial liquid methane and ethane (on Earth they’d be natural gas) lakes and that by inferring from the heights of the solid terrain poking above the lakes they’ve calculated a volume which is is more than the oil and gas in Earth’s fields (we’ve got lots and lots more carbon but different composition and chemistry so ours is often in things like carbonate minerals and polystyrene model kits. 

 

There are more complex hydrocarbons and carbon backbones in space - everything from aromatic rings to Buckminsterfullerenes which people are (I think) still trying to get to the bottom of how they form. If I remember right one theory is that sooty carbon deposits form graphite, graphenes and bucky balls and tubes (these are all detectable in Earth bound soots) and that in sooty orbiting bodies like comets they are ablated by solar wind and hydrogen atoms as they move through space and chunks of the aromatic carbon get removed and end up as aromatic hydrocarbon debris in the comet tail

[qn30jEkPz7]

39 minutes ago, VMA131Marine said:

Moreover, oil contains biological markers that are unique enough you can tell what reservoir a sample came from by testing for them. 

When I first learned that in the lab I idly remarked “So in theory if you were responsible for an oil spill you could spike the spill with synthetic biomarkers to skew analysis and/or point the finger at someone else?” which my then boss suggested marked me as being a dangerously devious first comment to come up with

Edited November 14, 2019 by LostCosmonauts

[Beardie]

Here I am in the dark again as I know nothing about biological markers so please forgive me if this is a daft question - How can you be certain that those biological markers aren't due to the intermingling of oil with biological material in the ground rather than being actually from the oil itself? 

[qn30jEkPz7]

@Beardie a good place to start would be https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kerogen

[qn30jEkPz7]

15 minutes ago, Beardie said:

Here I am in the dark again as I know nothing about biological markers so please forgive me if this is a daft question - How can you be certain that those biological markers aren't due to the intermingling of oil with biological material in the ground rather than being actually from the oil itself? 

You’re in Scotland and the Central Belt? Have a look at the career of James ‘paraffin’ Young and the shale oil industry that grew up roughly a century ago around Bathgate. In a circular way to come back to the first post in this thread a great deal of the geology and chemistry of this topic was the result of a person that is laid to rest in a seaside town pretty local to you 

Edited November 14, 2019 by LostCosmonauts
Got it the wrong way round. Born Glasgow, died in a seaside town