A strange world full of odd facts

[VMA131Marine]

11 minutes ago, LostCosmonauts said:

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

Also:

 

https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/earth-and-planetary-sciences/biomarker

[Bigdave22014]

8 hours ago, Rob G said:

 

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.)

And if the wheel has a flange (such as on a railway vehicle) then when the flange is below the rail head, a part of it actually travels backwards briefly.

[Kiwidave4]

If we are going to consider the vagaries of motion/physics/rotating parts in machinery its worth pondering the reciprocating internal combustion engine in which the rising piston(s) will always travel at a different speed to the descending piston(s).

[Beardie]

@LostCosmonauts Can I ask, do you know if the sums add up well? That is, does the percentage of biological matter that would be subject to the necessary conditions to be turned into kerogen and from there into oil, bitumen, coal etc. over the estimated period during which the Earth has had biological activity match with the overall estimates of oil, gas and coal deposits?

 

I note with interest that, at the bottom of the Wiki article on Kerogens it states that carbonaceous chondrite meteorites, similar to the material which the planet is thought to have been created from, have been found to contain Kerogen-like materials and also that Curiosity has found what appear to be Kerogen-like deposits in mudstone in the Gale crater on Mars. Does this suggest that, while oil on Earth may well be created from biological matter, it is possible that it can be created without biology or does it point more to the possibility that biological life is living and dying elsewhere in our solar system and beyond?

 

I must say that I am glad that I started this thread as I love to find new things to be nosy about!

[qn30jEkPz7]

I’ll have to check back on that - I’m sure I did that calculation some time back on the rate of oil formation per day from biological activity and I know I’ve used the % of light striking the Earth, photosynthetic efficiency and biomass cover in a talk I did years back before but I’m not sure if I still have them. Might need to dig out an old backup drive

 

There has been life around for a very very long time so even slow bio accumulation adds up. Look at the amount of limestone that wears its fossil source proudly and the fact that our atmosphere contains oxygen at all (when cyanobacteria first evolved photosynthesis and started kicking waste oxygen out that would otherwise have poisoned their cells they changed the atmosphere of the whole planet, the weather, rewrote the geology and rendered the surface of the planet poisonous to more than 3/4 of the families of life (the survivors of that cling on as archea and extremophiles)) ~ if you are interested in the geological history of life there was a very good “In our time” on extremophiles 4 years back https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b05zl3v2

[qn30jEkPz7]

As an interim guesstimate as I’m on a train and can’t rummage my files...

 

Life has been around for ~ 4 billion years and if we say it took a 2 billion years to get to current levels of biomass volume but has stayed constant since (that’s very rough as we’ve had high oxygen jungle Earth and snowball almost dead Earth but it’ll do for the purposes of an estimate). So roughly speaking we’ve had 3 billion years equivalent of current biomass which according to https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/humans-make-110000th-earths-biomass-180969141/ is a bit more than 550gigatons

 

3billion times 550gigatons = 3 000 000 000 x 550 000 000 000T = 1.65 x 10^21 T of possible biomass years. If 1/10th of the biomass dies in any given year that is 1.65 x 10^20 T of potential dead biomass to turn to kerogen. There is “only” 10^16 T of Kerogen so that would only require less than 1% of total biomass carbon ever were trapped in some kind of fossil form to reach those numbers

[qn30jEkPz7]

Re: kerogen like organics on Mars. It’s certainly suggestive that there might have been life once  

 

Sidenote: interesting to note that evolution also has a part to play in what fossil fuels are formed. If I remember rightly the coal deposits are thought to have formed because in that carboniferous period bark and lignin had evolved in plants but as few organisms could break down and digest them (still tricky) the dead ferns etc. lay unrotted in the swampy river deltas where they grew and died and became the coal beds that you don’t see any later as afterwards white rot and other fungi had adapted to better make use of woody plants 

[Beardie]

So, in general terms, the figures are easily compatible with the real world 'fossil fuel' resources, past and present and even have a possibility of being on the conservative side? In that case it seems that any argument that it is of a non-biological origin is, essentially, pointless as where it came from doesn't really matter unless it was to counter an argument that the resource was running out and I suspect that it will be 'off the menu' long before we were at risk of it running out.

[qn30jEkPz7]

1 hour ago, Beardie said:

So, in general terms, the figures are easily compatible with the real world 'fossil fuel' resources, past and present and even have a possibility of being on the conservative side? In that case it seems that any argument that it is of a non-biological origin is, essentially, pointless as where it came from doesn't really matter unless it was to counter an argument that the resource was running out and I suspect that it will be 'off the menu' long before we were at risk of it running out.

Good summary - your grandkids could probably have a career in oil and derivatives but at some point we’ll have to start paying more for it. Amazes me that oil or petrol is so energy dense, chemically useful and found and extracted from some of the most difficult environments on Earth and despite taxes is still cheaper per litre than milk.  

[Black Knight]

16 hours ago, LostCosmonauts said:

Good summary - your grandkids could probably have a career in oil and derivatives but at some point we’ll have to start paying more for it. Amazes me that oil or petrol is so energy dense, chemically useful and found and extracted from some of the most difficult environments on Earth and despite taxes is still cheaper per litre than milk.  

You must be paying some real high price for milk!

Here milk is under 50p per litre, petrol is £1.26 and diesel is £1.24 per litre, home heating oil starts at 52p litre

[qn30jEkPz7]

True @Black Knight, I was thinking inconsistently and had been wandering along comparing crude oil versus milk (you can tell I was walking home from Tesco while I was mulling on this) - crude oil at $60/barrel is about $0.40 per L and I'd just bought 2 pints of whole milk (80p) which worked out at about 71p per L

[Vince1159]

Blimey,milk over here's £1.70 a litre and 88p for half a litre.....

 

[BIG X]

On ‎13‎/‎11‎/‎2019 at 20:31, Rob G said:

...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...

I loved Spirograph as a kid...

 

[Black Knight]

3 hours ago, Vince1159 said:

Blimey,milk over here's £1.70 a litre and 88p for half a litre.....

 

Thats cos youse gots the tomatoes and Jersey has the cows, innit like

 

3 hours ago, LostCosmonauts said:

True @Black Knight, I was thinking inconsistently and had been wandering along comparing crude oil versus milk (you can tell I was walking home from Tesco while I was mulling on this) - crude oil at $60/barrel is about $0.40 per L and I'd just bought 2 pints of whole milk (80p) which worked out at about 71p per L

If we go crude for crude; raw milk is under 30p a litre from the dairy farmer to the consumer milk producer.

[Vince1159]

2 minutes ago, Black Knight said:

Thats cos youse gots the tomatoes and Jersey has the cows, innit like

Not really,tomatoes are virtually non existant over here now except for hedge veg,the dairy's owned by the states and imported milk's a nono so we have to pay whatever they feel like charging....

[PhoenixII]

1 hour ago, Vince1159 said:

Not really,tomatoes are virtually non existant over here now except for hedge veg,the dairy's owned by the states and imported milk's a nono so we have to pay whatever they feel like charging....

SIMPLES! Vince, buy yersen a cow

[Pete in Lincs]

And a greenhouse.

[Vince1159]

44 minutes ago, PhoenixII said:

SIMPLES! Vince, buy yersen a cow

No point really it'd end up as steaks...

 

10 minutes ago, Pete in Lincs said:

And a greenhouse.

The depressing thing Pete is that most have been left to fall down and the one's that haven't now have houses on the sites...

[dogsbody]

Hey, gasoline up here is $1.12 CDN per litre while 300 miles ( 450km. ) south in Edmonton, it's $.87 per litre. We mine the stuff just up the road from here, yet we have some of the highest gas prices in the province. That is just screwed up!

 

 

Chris

[busnproplinerfan]

5 minutes ago, dogsbody said:

Hey, gasoline up here is $1.12 CDN per litre while 300 miles ( 450km. ) south in Edmonton, it's $.87 per litre. We mine the stuff just up the road from here, yet we have some of the highest gas prices in the province. That is just screwed up!

 

 

Chris

Yeah, figure that one out. Don't think the tank yankers get paid 25 cents per litre of fuel they haul.

[Max Headroom]

The last prisoners interred in the Tower of London were the Kray twins.

 

And who later in life were the models for Doug and Dinsdale  Pirhana of Monty Python fame.

 

Which at one time was nearly called ‘Owl Stretching Time’.

 

Trevor

 

 

[Vince1159]

On 11/15/2019 at 6:15 PM, dogsbody said:

Hey, gasoline up here is $1.12 CDN per litre while 300 miles ( 450km. ) south in Edmonton, it's $.87 per litre. We mine the stuff just up the road from here, yet we have some of the highest gas prices in the province. That is just screwed up!

 

 

Chris

I don't know what the exchange rate is but a litre of unleaded over here's cheaper than a litre of milk and morons are willing to pay nearly £1.50 for a litre of bottled water!....The mind boggles....

[Mick4350]

23 minutes ago, Vince1159 said:

I don't know what the exchange rate is but a litre of unleaded over here's cheaper than a litre of milk and morons are willing to pay nearly £1.50 for a litre of bottled water!....The mind boggles....

Still cheaper than ink for inkjet printers.

[JohnT]

On 15/11/2019 at 16:24, PhoenixII said:

SIMPLES! Vince, buy yersen a cow

 

On 15/11/2019 at 16:59, Pete in Lincs said:

And a greenhouse.

You are both daft beggars. He can’t do that. He’s going to have a lot of glass to replace when the cow kicks off inside the greenhouse and the milk will go off for being too warm. The cow needs to go inside a fridge dunnit?  Jeez modellers these days

[Vince1159]

4 minutes ago, JohnT said:

 

You are both daft beggars. He can’t do that hat. He’s going to have a lot of glass to replace when the cow kicks off inside the greenhouse and the milk will go off for being too warm. The cow needs to go inside a fridge dunnit?  Jeez modellers these days

You ever heard of 'ealth n safety....