Settled Science, Hardly

How is it "dumb" Anna? Because from what I've read

perhaps he can become a teacher.................

Of course not. I just wanted you to admit you were Making Shit Up. Thank you.

It's called an opinion.

And a baseless one at that.

A baseless opinion takes it too seriously. It was an insult, and a silly, childish insult at that. You see, right-wing science-denial types like to ascribe to everyone their way of thinking, so if people believe in science it must be because they see scientists as All-Knowing Authorities Who Must Never Be Questioned Under Any Circumstances.

No. It will always cost more energy to create the antimatter than will be liberated by its annihilation. It's an energy storage medium, just like oil, but without the natural processes that create it in the first place. Antimatter reactors would be great if we had antimatter mines, some ready store of it, but we don't. Just like oil would never have become an energy source if we'd had to synthesize it from CO2 to begin with.

It'd be nice and efficient for spacecraft operating where photovoltaics and RTGs and fusion reactors are insufficient, but it'll be only at a net cost of energy on Earth.

Straw man. The actual narrative is that a cabal of hippie pinko scientists, in an attempt to hobble and/or destroy energy companies because they view consumerism as bad and the best way to wreck consumerism is to get people to use less energy to lower their standards of living, and the best way to do that is to make energy more expensive by regulating all the cheap energy sources out of existence, *deep breath* invented global warming to stop coal and oil use. You can see it continue with the other hippies who go on about bird deaths from wind farms, fish stock depletion from dams, the anti-nuclear power people, pollution from battery manufacture and disposal, ecosystem changes from solar farms, etc.

You're free to poke holes in that narrative, but at least poke holes in the right narrative. It's not nearly so inconsistent as you present.

Chik-Fil-A has some of the best waffle fries ever, and I'm liberal as hell.

COOOOBRAAAA!!!!!!


Really, you should have left it at "reasons", that's even more batshit.

So where does it fall down? Surely you're not going to deny that people with those hyper-environmentalist sentiments exist, and can be found in the scientific community?

I mean, look, advertising grates at my last nerve, and I'm as cynical about the gaudy bacchanalia of Christmas-time as any other curmudgeon, but I just can't get into the head-space of wanting to fight it with a global worldwide conspiracy.
It's too much work and risk for so little gain, and so little assurance of that gain.
You're better off doing good science, and proving your claims with objective truth.
If you're confident in that truth, the evidence will bear out.

But then, religious assholes have no problem lying for Jesus, oblivious to that it proves they have no belief if they think they have to lie.
So, people can be hypocrites, and damaging to their own cause.

But then we come back around to scale.
Everyone would have to be in on it, and you can't get 5 people in a room to agree 100% on anything.
And if you want to keep a secret among 5 people, kill the other 4.

Same math that knocks down the Kennedy assassination conspiracy theories.

Several thousand square miles of solar arrays on the surface of Mercury.

Why not just beam it back as microwaves?

In other words, the same kind of magical thinking that powers conservative economics.

They keep trying to convince us that "all we have to do is keep cutting taxes and help the rich as much as we can, and then when the rich have gotten as rich as humanly possible, everything will be hunky-dory." Then they cut cut cut, and they run up huge deficits secure in their faith that the magical Laffer Curve will sort it all out, and eventually they create a huge mess that the next Democrat has to clean up.

"We don't have to worry about burning through our non-renewable resources because we'll invent a Wonderful New Technology before its too late" isn't a plan. It's a fantasy.

What's wrong with using existing resources while we work on making green energy more affordable and practical? The usage of oil, natural gas and coal isn't going away any time soon.

Nobody's saying we should stop using them. Let's just try some other things besides recklessly burning through them with the blithe faith that some silver bullet will come along to save us.

I'm fine with that, but green companies need to compete.

Yep, I am seeing lots of responses explaining why this is yet more made up bull shit by the usual suspects.

Pretty simple. Conservatives distrust government and the government funded scientists who have manufactured and manipulated climate data. Most conservatives are for sensible measures to protect the environment. They are not for government imposing undue regulations and massive taxes.

On the left, liberals believe government is best able to manage peoples lives so they have no issue with the above. Liberal government completely supports this as well and this is just another means to an end.

various technical and orbital mechanics objections.

Since when is technological advancement "magical thinking"?

That aren't overwhelmed by the sun's gravity well? I think not.

What are you talking about?

To get the antimatter back to Earth.

launch it by mass driver. though you wouldn't launch it directly at the Earth. And we're talking about microscopic amounts each time.

12.93km/s is the ∆v required to get from Mercury to Earth capture. There's a 12.61 km/s gravity well from Earth which adds up to 25.54km/s, all of which needs to be shed for a soft landing, not all of which can be shed with aerobraking. And none of the equipment sent to Mercury -- big, heavy equipment, mind you, with loads of heat and radiation shielding -- will get any atmospheric assistance to slow down. And that's assuming you use chemical rockets. Low power ion rockets will need a delta-v of ~1.5x that.

By my calculations, and assuming perfect efficiency and durability of all parts involved, just to make up the energy spending to launch 100,000 tons of equipment to mercury would take shipments back to earth of over 362,384 kg of antimatter. That doesn't count the return rocket/mass driver energy budget, incidentally. You know how many solar panels we can build with that kind of energy? Hell, solar panels in space at the lagrange points beaming microwave energy back to Earth? I don't, but I'm certain it's a lot.

Antimatter will not be powering our terrestrial future.

Well I tried.

Robert L. Forward's book "Mirror Matter" would seem to disagree though.

In it he suggests using antimatter in everything from industrial applications to cancer treatment to oil well drilling to submarine propulsion to college level physics research.

Except that this is exactly what has happened. A lot of the supporters of it favor the expansion of the government the proposals to somehow fix it represent, not to mention the sense of control it gives them. Punishing corporations, rubbing the faces of those ignorant hicks in it, and promoting collectivism? Hell, how could it not get politicized?

Tell that to the people pushing the man-made climate change agenda. It's their go-to "argument."

And I, as a scientist (unless you don't think engineers count, in which case you better stop calling Bill Nye a science guy), have looked at the "proof" and found it lacking and hardly definitive. This coupled with the manipulation and how the issue has been politicized from the start makes me pretty skeptical humans are in any significant way altering the climate, and that the climate change we are seeing does not simply represent the planet's normal cyclical changes in climate, which have been going on since long before humans even existed, let alone the industrial revolution got started. Hell, there's evidence that some of the drastic changes in climate that this planet has already seen was due to shifting magnetic poles, and there's evidence of that happening today (magnetic north has shifted steadily south over the last century, for example). Am I saying that's what's going on? No, I'm simply pointing out that there's far more at work here, and that the political nature of this "debate" has reduced an incredibly complex system we don't fully understand to "carbon dioxide bad!"

While the book is not available online for free, the index and TOC is, and you can search inside it at Amazon.

Page 147-148:

Yeah, he goes on to talk about niche uses (though remarkably, he goes on for pages about antimatter submarines without noting a single advantage over nuclear fission submarines besides mass). But even he recognizes that there is no large-scale antimatter power future. All those niche applications certainly don't warrant a solar-powered antimatter plant on Mercury!

They lie about proven facts in order to make profit from the suffering of hundreds of millions of people. I don't need to call them villains; I'll just point to that description and let you draw conclusions.