Recent comments in /f/explainlikeimfive

explainlikeimfive-ModTeam t1_j6ebh5s wrote

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GovernorSan t1_j6ebfgn wrote

China has or had a desertification problem because the communist government decided to use cloud seeding to control weather patterns, but they didn't actually know what they were doing, so large areas of the country turned to desert because they were no longer getting their natural amount of rain.

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explainlikeimfive-ModTeam t1_j6ebajp wrote

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breckenridgeback t1_j6eb2n0 wrote

Your blood pressure is higher while you're exercising at first, but it becomes lower on average as a result of exercise (in much the same way that exercise raises your heart rate during exercise, but lowers your average heart rate).

The reason is that exercise:

  • Causes your body to store and carry oxygen more efficiently, by improving oxygen storage in your muscles, increasing the density of of red blood cells in your blood, and increasing the amount of hemoglobin in those red blood cells. This reduces the amount of blood flow required to support your body's operation.

  • Increases the size and strength of your heart, which no longer has to work as hard to pump.

  • Stretches out your blood vessels, making them more flexible to blood flow. The stiffness of blood vessels is a big part of high blood pressure, and contributes to the buildup of deposits on the sides of the blood vessels that contribute to e.g. heart attack or stroke.

When your body is storing oxygen more efficiently, your body doesn't have to "ramp up" to handle everyday tasks. You feel this as being less out of breath from small bits of exercise, like jogging for a moment to catch a bus or climbing a flight of stairs. It can also run quieter when you're stationary, because fewer, gentler heartbeats are needed to sustain your body's background oxygen usage. That reduces the overall stress on your body, and lets your body heal itself under low stress in between bouts of heavy exercise in a way that it can't if it's constantly under stress.

For example, I find about 30 minutes of relatively strenuous exercise a day drops my resting heart rate from ~100 beats per minute to ~60. Even though it spikes up to like 150 bpm during that exercise, that's only for 1/48th of the day, and it's running half as hard for the other 47/48ths. My low-fitness heart has to beat about 144,000 times a day, while my high-fitness heart has to beat 4,500 times during the exercise (using the 150 bpm number) and 84,600 times for the other 23.5 hours of the day, for a total of 89,100 beats - barely half as many.

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c4pta1n1 t1_j6e9gg3 wrote

Ok, but nobody said that all fluids are liquids, they said all liquids are fluids. Regardless of whether you're correct about non-newtonian fluids not being liquids, you haven't shown a liquid that is not a fluid.

Amorphous solids may share some similarities with liquids, but are still amorphous solids, hence solids.

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Any-Broccoli-3911 t1_j6e7eb3 wrote

No.

Here is a map of groundwater.

https://www.livescience.com/52965-groundwater-resources-map.html

For the light blue, there's less than 1 meter worth of water under ground, and it can be 0, so there wouldn't be any water if you dig a well.

You just have to dig as deep as you get to stones you can't dig through or you get to the water line. Typically, you can dig only through sediments, so if you are somewhere will very little sediments like a shield, you wouldn't need to dig a lot to realize you can't dig more and you can't get a well.

Typically someone will try to dig a well first. If it works, other people will dig well nearby. The water line is typically at around the same level in nearby places.

The West of the US has a lot of groundwater as you can see on the map. That's because there's a lot of snow and rain in the water, and most of it get underground rather than in rivers.

Places that don't have groundwater or rivers or lakes have typically no inhabitants.

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druppolo t1_j6e6smj wrote

Matter can be divided in Newtonian:

Solid: can’t flow, can’t be compressed*

Liquid: can flow, can’t be compressed*

Gas: can flow and be compressed.

Fluid is anything that can flow, eg gases and liquids

Non Newtonian materials are generally man made materials that “cheat” and behave in a way not strictly in one of these groups. The most common are for example padding for body protections, a sort of rubber like material that can flex with your body but stiffens when hit. Very handy as it feels like clothing but protects like a solid pad. Another example is wet sand or mud, as a whole, it does not behave like a classic solid or a classic liquid.

*compressed in the sense that if you give infinite room, the gas will take all the room, and if you change the space it is confined, it will evenly be squeezed in it. Non compressible means that if you try compress the material, it will change its volume by very very little and oppose a lot of resistance to it.

These categories are broad and used for broad description. There are applications in which you can force these categories of material to do weird things, in extreme circumstances. For example, air at supersonic speed is not compressible, or better, does not behave like a compressible fluid.

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byfpe t1_j6e6crz wrote

Good answers. But worth highlithing that there is geo engineering or climate engineers that could actually modify some parameters in the environment. As an example, some countries are able to induce rain, by dissipating very fine particles in the sky (please dont think that plane contrails are involved!).
An issue is that we cant really understand full effect of implementing this regularly or at large scale. For example, you could make it rain in some regions, but how would this affect other regions, what damage could it result in in the environment, or how could it backlash. Lots of ethic questions involved.

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breckenridgeback t1_j6e4gxp wrote

The sheer amount of material involved is far, FAR too large for this to be practical.

Let's take a single mountain. I'll use Mount Diablo, a small mountain near my home in the San Francisco Bay Area.


Mount Diablo is roughly a (right circular) cone with a base radius of about 5 kilometers and a height of about 1 kilometer. (It's actually taller than this in terms of height above sea level, but here I'm just going to count its size starting at the surrounding land where the slopes fade into the background.)

The formula for the volume of a cone, then, gives us V = (1/3)Ah, where A is the area of the base and h is the height. That's (1/3)(pi * (5 km)^(2))(1 km) = about 26 cubic kilometers of rock. That's enough to blanket the entire state of California in a few inches of gravel, which should give you an idea of just how much material we're talking about here.

It's made mostly of sandstone, with some inclusions of denser rocks like basalt, so let's estimate a density of about 2.5 grams per cubic centimeter (a bit higher than the density of sandstone). 26 cubic km times 2.5 grams per cm^3 is 6.5 x 10^13 kg.

Okay, that's a big number. How big is that?

Well, it turns out to be approximately a quarter of all Earth moved by all humans worldwide every year. If we combined the entire earthmoving capacity of all of humanity, we could move four Mount Diablos each year, to the exclusion of literally every other construction project ever undertaken by mankind. (We'll set aside the fact that the actual logistics of this would be impossible, since you'd also have to be carting all that rock away, and the fact that we're cutting through hard bedrock and not soft soil.)

And to cut a pass through a mountain range, you need far more than that. A typical mountain range is something like 20 or 30 peaks "thick", and those peaks are typically quite a bit taller than Mount Diablo. Even just building a road through such places is a pretty serious engineering task; destroying the mountains entirely would be the greatest engineering task ever undertaken by mankind by a huge margin.


In general, with questions like this, it's worth just doing some back-of-the-napkin calculations to see roughly how large the thing you're trying to do is. Even if I didn't have all that info available, I could say something like:

  • Mountains are much more than 1 km high.
  • Mountains are much more than 1 km wide.
  • The volume of a thing is roughly length * width * height, so mountains have a volume of at least 1 km^(3), probably much more.
  • Solids typically have densities of at least 1 gram / cm^(3) (that's the density of water, and most solids sink).
  • There are 10^5 cm in 1 km, so there are 10^15 cm^3 in 1 km^3
  • So we're talking about at least 10^15 g or 10^12 kg of rock.
  • A bag of gravel at my local Home Depot probably costs me something like $10 = $10^1 per kilogram.
  • So this is at least $10^13 worth of gravel.
  • $10^13 is 10 trillion dollars, comparable to the entire budget of the United States government.
  • Probably not worth it.
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