Nut Nut's Attempt At A Book About Politics & Society

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orbit_of_V...

Venus has an orbital eccentricity of 0.007, virtually a perfect circle. The lowest of all the planets.

How does it happen that a nearly perfect circular orbit arises ? Even more circular than Earth which is pretty damn circular ?

Because Venus is farther away from the gravitational pull of Saturn and Jupiter than Earth.

I have to learn to stop feeding the trolls :-(

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triton_(mo...)

Triton is a moon of the planet Neptune, It's eccentricity is 0.000016. It's about as close to a perfect circle as can be measured.

Perhaps ecreature d'infantile can explain how that is possible in a world in which he ignorantly claims orbital dynamics as being naturally elliptical according to Kepler (who said nothing of the sort).

Well if it's close then....

Every source i can find says that orbits are elliptical because of initial conditions and the gravitational pull of other bodies, which seems consistent with what eda is saying.

Now .... let's get back on track to where we were before some folks decided to engage in an intellectual faceplant.

During these regular oscillations between ices and interglacials, Earth's temperature oscillated by ~ 5C while the CO2 and methane equivalent oscillated between 11 and 16 Mt Everest (MTE) equivalents.

Today we are at 29 MTE

11 is an ice age
16 is an interglacial
29 - what does that mean ?

Not to mention .... we are adding roughly 0.2MTE each year and the amount we add is growing over time, not shrinking.

Lucifer says ... let's invest in carbon capture research. But let's understand that what he is hoping for is something equivalent to synthetic photosynthesis in which atmospheric CO2 is sequestered in something other than a plant as it is in natural photosynthesis. He's counting on human ingenuity to makes an artificial version of nature and he doesn't question the possibility that we can not.

It's an attitude which suggests that humans are some sort of omnipotent Gods.

Then what ?

I have been stating from the get go that the dominant cause of elliptical orbits is the gravitational pull of other bodies. Eda completely disputed that.

So you have an issue with your reading comprehension if you believe that what you are reading is consistent with what eda is saying.

As far as "initial conditions" are concerned, what initial conditions are you referring. Please try not to be completely vague.

Mass and velocity?

I have been stating from the get go that the dominant cause [of the variance] of elliptical orbits is the gravitational pull of other bodies.

That works.

This.
No one argued about it btw.

I didn't read it like this.

To sum it up , earth would have an elliptical orbit even if it was the only two bodies in the universe.
I don't think there are exemples of natural perfect circular orbits, maybe with AI we will find one one day.

We already have technology that sequesters CO2 far better than plants do (better for us, in a way that doesn't give the CO2 back to the atmosphere for millennia or more). We can make construction material with the carbon, or store it underground.

What we don't have is a way to do so at scale and at low enough costs. Funnily enough, the major cost component is energy, which in some sense circles us back to "if we find cheap and clean immense sources of energy we solved basically everything", which should convince people to invest in nuclear a lot, and then ofc in fission.

But even without solving energy production (ie even without a 100x multiplier in our energy availability) i am confident in R&D being able to vastly reduce costs of manufacturing, because... it happened for everything especially at scale lol.

Yes we are godlike compared to all other living forms.

Anyway for carbon capture keep in mind i haven't listed it as the only solution. It was just a part of a list of things we can pursue to delay global warming without changing our lifestyles.

But you don't seem interested in even entertaining the idea that we could fix global warming (or mitigate it enough) without changing our lifestyles meaningfully in the first world. You actually seem to happy at the idea of violently forcing people in the first world to live worse, "because humanity is one big thing" or something.

There is a lot of empirical evidence that our solar system is relatively unique in that the major planets’ orbits are close to perfectly circular. Hypotheses as to why exist but we really aren’t sure.

What we are sure of is it’s not because Newton and Kepler are completely wrong about orbits being elliptical by default and the primary determinant of orbit is initial velocities of the masses that make up the planetary body.

Btw Kepler thought orbits would be circular too but, being a natural philosopher (precursor to scientist), he saw empirical data suggesting otherwise and changed his viewsz

There are explanations as to why satellites tend to have more circular orbits as observed, most of which boil down to some forces that are minor (negligible even) on a solar system scale (in distance and time and relative mass) are more important on planet/satellite scale and the formation processes of planets.

This is all stuff you’d understand with physics 101 and even a tiny dose of curiosity to pursue the truth (you know, to seek knowledge, to do science) and not just look up random snippets and anecdotal evidence that confirm your pre-existing beliefs.

I admire your youthful enthusiasm but you need to exercise a bit of humility and spend more time:

1. Actually understanding the science
2. Think about how to affect change, you know, how to do politics.

What you have proposed and the content you have typed out so far amount to unhinged ramblings in all likelihood and a manifest at the best.

True but that other apex predators couldn't adapt is a problem. Take sharks. Somewhat counter-intuitively if they go extinct there won't be more fish; there will be no fish in the sea as the lower predators the sharks keep at bay feast their way into extinction.

Nut Nut isn't youthful. He said that he is older than almost everyone here.

Well then.

If the powers-that-be truly believed we were facing imminent, catastrophic ecological collapse, we’d be throwing everything at solar shielding.

The powers that be became the powers that be as a result of environmental exploitation.

They aren't going to give up their power orgy.

That's our Achilles Heel. Our ego. The belief that we are invulnerable.

Meanwhile, there are other critters who have been around > 100x longer than us.

Bacteria have been around > 1,000,000x longer than us.

The intuitive way to sort of see the non general nature of circular orbits is that when a planet orbits a star in a circle way both the gravitational potential energy and the kinetic energy of the orbiting body are individually conserved, not just their total. But in real life every time you drop something you see gravitational potential energy converted into kinetic energy. Newton's insight was seeing orbital motion and falling objects as due toy the same underlying principle.

There is no reduction in the "power orgy" if we use a ton of sulfur to deflect

Basic math ? LOL. That's all advanced calculus which no one here grasps.

I think the case of Neptune's star Triton confirms the default of a circular orbit.

Triton's unusual dynamics result in a planet with virtually zero orbital kinetic energy. That's why the orbit is a virtually perfect circle with eccentricity value of 0.00007. Venus is also very close to a perfectly circular orbit.

Eccentricity is a function of orbital kinetic energy and it doesn't exist by default. Earth has a very low orbital kinetic energy and is very close to circular and the major deviations from circular are associated with gravitational pull from Jupiter and Saturn.

That's a Faustian Bargain ..... we would just have to live with the lung diseases associated with breathing in sulfur dioxide.

https://www.lung.org/clean-air/outdoors/what-makes-air-unhealthy/sulfur-dioxide

lung

Sulfur Dioxide

The best solution is to simply use less energy.

What's better ? A lower quality of life or no life at all ?