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Thanks for the response. Getting the vaccine doesn't bother me, I just didn't know if it was still a concern without having had chicken pox proper. That age isn't far off, so it's information I'll need.

Thank you. I was prompted by reading about 20,000 year old cave writing. Here's a link. I'd just never thought about it but it's reasonable to think some aspects have come down from 10s of thousands of years ago. . Thanks!

https://www.discovermagazine.com/the-sciences/ancient-humans-first-written-words-are-20-000-years-old

A lunar space elevator is possible, but would be quite different than one that could be built on Earth. But the moon's lower gravity makes a lot of the benefit of a space elevator moot. A lack of atmosphere on the moon also makes some sort of railgun launch possible and economical, at least for cargo.

check out the diagram on pg 8: https://www.snclavalin.com/~/media/Files/S/SNC-Lavalin/documents/enhanced-candu-6-technical-summary-en.pdf

The condensers are massive. Many times larger than the turbines themselves. The water in the bottom is quickly pumped out maintaining low pressure. Steam is 1600 times more volume than the same amount of water. All this keeps the turbines from feeling any back pressure.

Thank you. Interesting to hear. The female testosterone levels vary too? Or is that on an individual basis, ie. it's constant, but one woman might have more testosteron than the other?

And follow-up: HRT basically just shifts the balance, right?

I see, but then the coolers after the turbines Create a vacuum Effect so as to not let the turbines stagnate.

I was thinking that there had to be less pressure after the turbines for it to circulate.

Thanks 🙏

That’s not entirely true. The body does learn to protect itself and it does mount an antibody response and does attack HIV infected cells.

But HIV is one of only three retroviruses that we know about that infect humans and cause disease. The body can’t fully clear any of them. Retroviruses aren’t the only viruses our bodies can’t clear, but the mechanism for why is different from other acute viral infections that hijack your cellular machinery to rapidly print out millions of copies of themselves, killing the host cell in the process. Retroviruses write themselves right in to your DNA and can leave zero trace of themselves on the surface of the cell they’ve infected for weeks, months, or years. Until your own DNA starts transcribing those viral proteins, it’s virtually invisible to your immune system. Once you’re systemically infected with any of the three human retroviruses, some (large) number of cells somewhere in your body will have the instructions to make more of that virus baked in to their biological operating system for the rest of your life. It’s why vaccines don’t work (at least on HIV). Vaccines don’t stop cells from becoming infected. They help your body kill off the infected cells before the infection gets out of control. But with HIV, really any level of active viral replication is “out of control” because it goes straight to places your immune system will never be able to see and immediately hides in cells you will have for the rest of your life.

It sets up a war of attrition that the body has no mechanism to win. With HIV that war involves the very cells the body needs to fight off viral infections, so over time the immune system slowly fails. With the other two retroviruses we can get, they can eventually cause lymphoma.

That said, the medications for HIV are incredibly effective both as a treatment and as a preventative. They completely shut down viral replication. There’s ones that stop HIV from entering a cell at all, one’s that stop it from transcribing itself from RNA in to DNA, one’s that stop it from integrating with your DNA, and ones that stop it from assembling new, functional viral particles. They can’t write it out of the DNA of already infected cells - again, some of which you’ll have for the rest of your life - but they can stop any new cells from becoming infected and keep viable viral particles out of the blood and sexual fluids.

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Nice, I'll use that when I want to outnerd somebody. (Said in an affectionate way, I like outnerding people!)

The turbines don't vent unless they are throttling down or in an emergency shutdown and would never do it if the system uses water that came from the reactor. They run closed loop systems where the reactor heat transport fluid (d2o in the candu reactors I work on. But can be regular water) this system circulates between the reactor and a heat exchanger. The heat exchanger passes the thermal energy into regular water (unless it is the type that feeds direct to the turbine but I have no experience with that type) regular water is then turned to steam and heads to the turbines. There is normally a high pressure turbine which is the smallest, after the steam passes through that there is still lots of energy in the steam so it is sent to a drying system (I have never worked on that so I don't know exactly what it does) and then the steam comes back into the low pressure turbines. The ones I work on have 1 hp and 3 lp turbines. The 2 steam pipes feeding into the hp are about 2.5ft in diameter and carry a total of about 1.6 million hp of energy. From the low pressure turbines the steam goes to a condenser. It is just another heat exchanger where they pump cold water through tubes surrounded by the steam. The steam condenses and drops to the bottom where it cycles back via pumps to the first heat exchanger to be turned back to steam in a closed loop. The cooling water gets warm from the exchange and gets pumped into cooling ponds were it can be released back into the lake once it reaches a certain temperature. If you see a cooling tower like in the Simpsons. That is like having an air cooled car vs a water cooled car. The steam goes to the inside of the tower in tubes. It stays in its closed loop but warms the air up. The warm air rises causing cooler air to be sucked in the bottom. The steam you see rising is not the steam from the turbines, it is from the air changing temperature.

Why did I never get in the middle and jump up and down?

It can also serve as an affiliative signal when done in a certain way. You might benefit from giving it a try.

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Even the highly filtered lake water has enough particulate to build up calcium and sludge inside the boilers after only 2 or so years. I have been on a few water lancing jobs where we install and operate remote tooling to reach between the hundreds of boiler tubes and use a 9000psi water jet to break all the sludge and calcium up.

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Awesome response. Thanks!

Yeah, the issue isn't accuracy. It wouldn't be that difficult to hit the ISS. The solution space for a rendezvous with near-zero relative velocity is rather more restrictive.

For Earth, there's vast areas suitable as landing locations, where it doesn't really matter what direction we approach them from. We just need atmospheric entry to happen at a reasonable angle and velocity.

Space is big, so a probe needs to go pretty fast to get anywhere in years instead of decades. Plus, a returning probe picks up a lot of kinetic energy falling back into Earth's gravity well. Carrying a heat shield and carefully smacking into the Earth's atmosphere is way more doable than carrying all the fuel it wound need to decelerate enough to park in low earth orbit. That fuel would need to be added to the payload at launch and be carried along for every maneuver, which means you'd need more fuel to move that fuel, then more fuel to move that fuel (the so-called tyranny of the rocket equation) Not to mention having to come in aligned with the ISS's orbit, or even worse having to do a plane change maneuver on top of decelerating, all of which would need fuel.

It's not a matter of it being hard to calculate, it's a matter of the solar system not being physically arranged to conveniently allow it.

A minimum-energy transit will come at Earth roughly aligned with its orbital motion. To match planes with the ISS, the return must happen at one of the two times a year where the ISS orbit is also aligned with that motion, which means the trip must have started on the opposite side of the sun from that point, half a transfer orbit earlier. But we don't control where other solar system objects are or what their motions are. Windows to/from Mars occur every 26 months. If by chance things are properly aligned one year, it will be 60 degrees off the next time, and most Earth-Mars windows will be unusable: it will be 3 launch windows, 6.5 years, before they align again. And they in reality don't line up in such nice whole numbers, so in reality you're going to have a substantial plane correction to make on arrival, even with such limited windows.

Aight, new question. Would the space elevator concept be viable on the moon? Like we'd have a moon base, an elevator, and then a station in orbit connected.