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Science

Wave/Sea Power - What Are the Dangers? 212

Posted by Cliff from the those-are-some-big-dangers dept.
worldwide_ants writes: "My main worry about power generation from waves, is that we would put the earth in danger by accellerating the descent of the moon into the earth, since the moon would have to expend more energy in generating tides, and thus lose it's kinetic energy. How serious a problem is this? What are the solutions? Could we send a rocket up to give the moon a 'kick' once in a while?" This reminds me of an Isaac Asimov novel I once read ...
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Wave/Sea Power - What Are the Dangers? More

Wave/Sea Power - What Are the Dangers?

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  • Re:yes, and earth's rotation will stop too (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Actually earth's rotational deceleration is due to tidal braking [navy.mil] and has nothing whatsoever to do with humans.

    Also the fact that we add leap seconds does not mean that the earth's rotation is slowing, it means that it is slower than the definition of one second according to atomic clocks. The existance of leap seconds does not mean the earth is still decelerating; a change in the frequency of leap second insertion would indicate the earth was slowing down.

    Now, it so happens that, yes, the earth's rotation does appear to be decelerating by 1.79 milliseconds per day per century, i.e., 100 years from now a day will be 1.79ms longer than today is. Earth rotation time and the SI second matched up around 1820, which means that in another 180 years leap seconds will be twice as frequent as they are today.

  • Th danger is not in harvesting the tides for power. The very existance of tides is alreday slowing down the earth. Stopping the tides would be a GOOD THING. But that's not gonna happen. No. What we need to do is make the tides cause less friction, so they don't slow the earth so much. We can do this by pumping billions of barrels of oil per second into the oceans of the world. This would greatly reduce friction with the land and ensure that our grand children will have a moon to look at.
  • Dubya's Oil buddies won't be pleased.

    Alex
  • Several years (maybe 20?) I read a book with the premise that all of the oil we're taking out of the ground has caused the earth to start wobbling. The solution, I think, was to anchor a bunch of oil tankers in the right places around the oceans. It was a good read. The preface to this book stated "If you think about it....don't."
  • I just learned about this thing called plate tectonics, and boy am I worried that someday the North American shelf might collide with China.
    STOP PLATE TECTONICS NOW!
    Good greaf... gimme a break. Oh, let's see... it would be what... a few hundred thousand years before that happens. We'll either 1) have the technology to prevent it 2) be using antimatter for power so we won't even need to get power from waves, or 3) will have already killed ourselves off. hhmmm... considering that I would say this is a STUPID F**KING TOPIC.
    Alright guys... what did you do with the real Slashdot?!?!?
  • Do you honestly believe this or are you just spouting some rhetoric from the soap box? Simple disproofs of your statment are:

    If you are ruled to be in the gullible simpletons segment, you couldn't espouse that view and thus also couldn't vote on the passage of such legislation.

    Or, correctness and wrongness are also a function of time. Me saying your a big fat doo-doo head is only correct during a certain period of time. Assuming you wash your hair and loose weight, this would invalidate my previous correct statement. Since statements cannot be unsaid, ruling that wrong statements cannot be said is logically incorrect since a vast usefully majority of correct statements are eventually or previously wrong.

    If you were going merely going for the rhetoric angle, how bout I use the human body metaphor: I num your right arm (cuz it's wrong) and you opperate a metal press for 8 hours. (Which really sucks). Lets see how long you believe having any part of a whole not speak to its fullest then.


  • I'm breaking the chain. Yes I am. I am.
  • Actually it makes the majority of Americans fools. Sounds about right to me.
  • What happened to the really funny Slashdot stuff, like when Rob said that he had been getting a lot of mail that Slashdot was way too narrow, and made all of the tables about 800 characters wide.

    Now *that* was funny, especially all of the apoplectic responders.

  • Although I think this is a relatively lame Slashdot 4/1 (compared to other years), this particular entry is the best I've seen all day.


    ---

  • And that they take off vertically rather than horizontally.

    They might look vertical to us, but they're actually moving pretty quickly horizontally, and they also push east to get into orbit, with the reaction mass knocking against the atmosphere to earth back a bit.

    Of course, for the ones that come back down (e.g. the Space Shuttle, Mir, etc) we get the momentum back when they return from orbit.


    ---

  • AF (Score:1)

    by dosowski ( 15924 )
    Sure. The moon is moving away from the Earth, not toward it. Bad joke, try again.

    So is there any actual news today?
  • My understanding of this is that it has to do with the fact that the moon rotates the same direction that it revolves around Earth. In cases where a moon revolves and rotates in opposite directions, it gets closer. Of course, I don't know why. It's just what I heard about it.

  • Did any of you people ever take a physics course?

    Yes, in fact I've taken enough physics courses to know that very often there's often more at play than just what they teach you in a high school physics class. I'm sure most high school physics classes don't take air resistance into account for newtonian physics calculations (mine didn't), but it most certainly does have a measurable impact in real life. It isn't discussed because it adds a whole new layer of complexity.

    I've taken enough physics to know that there is alot that I don't know about physics (and for good reason, too), and to realize that the spin of large bodies very well may have an effect on their relative movement, but the topic was not discussed to eliminate the extra layer of complexity that is unnecessary for non-physics majors. In fact, other forces could also be at play here (contrary to what you say). One I can think of now is magnetic fields. But I make no claims about that. Just showing that other forces can indeed affect something like this.

  • Oh, yeah... You're right. I'm an idiot because I know something you don't know, I come to a news site expecting to find a hint of news, I show a slight bit more of an attempt at being polite and providing useful information than half the other slashdot posters, and I don't hide behind anonymity to insult someone I know nothing about. I apologize for my inexcusable behavior. It won't happen again.
  • Want to know who is in control of /. today? It isn't Hemos or CmdrTaco, they must have been locked in a closet somewhere. Why else would they not have posted yet?

    CmdrTaco and Hemos, if you are out there: All of today's news are belong to JonKatz, Cliff, timothy, michael, jamie, and pudge. OK, the April Fools joke is old now, cut the crap and get back to real news.
  • Since this moon is moving farther away all the time, this shouldn't be a problem.

  • Re:Um (Score:1)

    by maxume ( 22995 )
    right, but forces acting on it(like gravity) affect its inertia.
  • someone should give Cliff a kick in the full moon! This story is Hall of Lame material.


    Next!

  • No, because I'm not counting 1 April.

  • Actually we are slowing down the earth in another way too. The power generated by damns is collecting energy from the earth's spin. Fortunately, this is happening at such a low rate that the Sun will supernova first, and probably enough other annoying events our children wont wake up to have the atmosphere disappear because we.. stopped.

    Are we there yet? No.
    Are we there yet? No.
    Are we there yet? No.


    -----------------------------------------
  • just a moment...

    Aren't they right? Really, The communists and the environmentalists are right about coal power plants. Nuclear power is less immediatly damaging, and many environmenatlists do not protest them. (the problem with nuclear power is mainly one of public oppinion, not of "environmentalist" concerns).

    Secondly:

    Really? Just because Americans are too PROFIT oriented to make any real attempts to work on/fund projects to find alternative sources of energy, does not mean that they do not exist. Look around at the research being done in Germany. If people were willing to take the long road, and make a couple of sacrifices now, it is possible to develop the technology, as it exists, into a viable source of energy.

    Also, back on the topic. Tidal energy plants would also change the general tidal levels, which is yet another problem with them...

    just my $.022
  • This sounds to be "technically correct" to me. By putting satellites into orbit, we are effectively increasing the radius of the Earth around its axis of rotation, and the rotation should slow down in the same way that figure skaters spin slower by extending their arms. Mind you, this effect is probably on the order of 1e-30 percent.
  • The sun will go red giant when it expends most of it's fuel. The corona will expand out to about where Earth's orbit is now. The damn hippies will roast along with everybody else.
  • http://www.rinkworks.com/dialect/dialectp.cgi?dial ect=hckr&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.microsoft.com%2Finde x.html [rinkworks.com] Ms seems to have left a loophole (minor) if they did this intentionally. =-D
  • A gravity sensor? You mean a scale?
  • I could never be a Christian. I want my dieties to be more sane than I am.

    Whatever you do, don't become a scientologist. Xenu's not sane in the least. I mean, this crazy space alien dude killed all the humans with a giant volcano. WTF!?!

  • Correct, but you forgot that by the time all of this happens, California will have sunk into the Pacific Ocean. End of story.
  • Ok, you say that the full moon can't turn people into raging lunatics... Look at the word lunatic. You see it's base word? Yes... That would be *lunar*, ie relating to the moon. So if a full moon, arguably the most visible lunar event, cannot turn people into lunatics, I suggest that the word lunatic is contains an internal contradiction, and thus should be banned from use.

    BTW, I am a lunatic. Raging, that is...

  • I always go the wrong way around the turnstile things at the entrances of office buildings and the like in an attempt to correct the negative force on earth's spin imparted by those less-enlightened individuals that go around the "correct" way. It really sucks when I try to do this with one of those one-way turnstile things -- ouch, but at least it's for the good of humanity.
  • Uhhh, no!

    Trust me, its moving away, the tides act to slow the earth's rotation, because its transfers the rotational energy to the moon, which causes it to gain momentum, hence, it is slowly escaping the earth's gravitational feild. Jesus, learn something other than watching that bullshit they show on tv for once....

    and no duh its april first, this was a lame attempt at some bad april fool's day comedy, its lame, I'm just intolerant of people being outright dumb.
  • Look, if your gonna say something this lame to get your ass on slashdot you might as well get your facts straight. The moon is moving AWAY from the earth!!!!! NOT CLOSER! Are you mental or have you never taken an intro to astro class ever?!?!?!
  • aren't we all? sorry, I can get pretty nasty sometimes.
  • For example, on Fjear-Nation [fjear-nation.net], comedy is pretty much all we do, so we had to do something drastic for april fool's day... we put the OSDN bar on our pages and pretended to sell out to VA Linux... Slashdot should do something like that, it'd be really funny, slashdot selling out to a media conglomerate like that!
  • No, scam to get april fools laughs... so who's the clueless PHB now?
  • when everyone's expecting something to happen and nothing happens that's when it's funny.
  • would be the one where April Fool's is completly ignored.
  • getting sick of these April fools posts?

  • the fact that you actually took the time to bitch about something so trivial as someone bitching about someone bitching about the quality of jokes for one day on /. speaks volumes more about how much of a no-life looser you are than it does about slashdots comedic abilities...

    but at least you knew that already.

    (sorry)

  • Actually, you are precisely correct. The waves or tides would pull "exactly" the same energy from the moon as they do now, we'd just be redirecting it into our power grid. The problem would be finding coastal areas where there are just rocks and no rare species of life that would be displaced from their ecological niches.
  • I finally laughed out loud. I think it's funny because the constant stream of April Fool's jokes has succeeded in wearing me down. It's like Chinese water torture. A few more postings today and I'll admit to anything. I was the second man on the grassy knoll.

    By the way, I feel it is important to point out that the Parrot programming language, as currently documented, infringes on several of my regular expression indentation patents.

    Memorization is copying; copying is theft! Seeing is recording; recording is theft! Learning is downloading; downloading is theft!

  • You know to me it is quite a commentary in regards to the general quality of /. that so many people are taking these stories seriously. Does anyone else remember nano-pants [slashdot.org]?

    I love the lengthy treatises being written by some people to discredit these stories. Even more frightening are the people who appear to feel the stories actually have merit ("Good heavens, where will the moon hit? I must buy property on the other side of the Earth.")

    Instead of buying property on the other side of the Earth, I suggest you simply look up the next time it rains hard and inhale deeply for several minutes -- or do the same in the shower. I hear a good inflow of water cleans out the sinus passages.

    As a courtesy to humanity please do this before you reproduce. :)

    Thank you.

  • You *almost* got this completely right. The tides continuously slow the Earth's rotation, most of the the energy so extracted is transfered to the moon, forcing it further out. The rest of the energy extracted is lost to friction (heat generation). Most likely, our puny efforts to tap into the tides will end up making use of the rotational energy that would have been converted to heat anyway.
  • I dunno it's alright. Just pretend it's a sneak peek into what this site will be like every day in a couple years.
  • Ahhh, but it's gravity is caused by it's inertia. It's inertial mass anyway.

    This whole April 1st thing would be much funnier if there was one or two stupid stories mixed in with the others. Much subtler, but as soon as anything becomes big and run by people who are making too much money, subtelty goes out the window. Witness holywood movies.

    And it's April 2nd where I am.
  • The little elf on the other side of my mirror told me so.

    He always told me "I'm going over to my other place", but he would never reveal were it was. Now I know...
  • (I know this was a lame joke and should be funny and that...)
    It comes from the earth's rotation. The same energy that pushes the moon`s orbit higher and higher (as someone else already mentioned) until earth's rotation is coupled to the moon's revolution around the earth as Pluto's is to Charon's.

    (I know this story was a lame joke and should be funny and that... but... err, forget it.)

  • Speaking of Australians, our toilets up here in fat ass North America flush clockwise. So, in what direction does fat ass Southern hemisphere toilets flush?

    Don't tell me they flush them clockwise too, that imbalance would make this world go down under quicker than I thought.
  • Oh, there was rioting by advocates [one.net] this archived article reports.
  • None of this stuff is funny.

    Whoever's at the controls of /. today: Take the hint & cut the crap. It's not clever, it's not interesting, it's not not worth a damn. If you honestly can't find anything that belongs under the "News for Nerds. Stuff that matters" banner then just go silent.

    Posting stupid article after stupid article is NOT getting you folks any favor-points.

    What if /. were hijacked by script-kiddies? Could we tell today?

  • Apparently whatever code hands out moderator privileges has a branch for April 1st that invokes the "clueless moderator database".

    The oil won't lubricate the earth-water interface because the oil will spread out on top of the water into a thin enough film that it'll float instead of sinking down to the ocean floor.

  • Just wanted to applaud the subtlety of your wit, anticipating that not only would Slashdot make the mistake of saying "different than" instead of "different from", but that they would also make the mistake of using "then" rather than "than".
  • Well, somebody moderated the post that suggested pouring oil into troubled waters as "insightful", so apparently there's a least one person out there who needs to have the flaws in that plan pointed out to them.

    Recognizing that someone else didn't get a joke is not the same as not getting it yourself.

    As far as social situations are concerned I'm sure I handle them as least as well as someone so easily provoked as you seem to be to an entirely disproportionate amount of anger over trivial matters .

  • Oh man, that 2 directions bit almost made me squirt coffee out of my nose. heheheh

  • It turns out, of course, that if the earth slows its rotation due to tidal drag (increased infinitesimally by tidal power stations) then the moon will move further out to preserve angular momentum.

    Interestingly, we have slowed the rate of decrease of the earth's rotation measurably from hydropower. Hydropower dams are typically at reasonably high latitudes, and a lot of water has been stored there; closer to the axis of the earth than it would have been otherwise. Some calculations show that we'd have had dozens of more leap-seconds had this not been happening.

    Global warming, though, will throw this all for a serious loop. If the icecaps continue to shrink and the sea level rises a few to ten meters; truly massive amounts of water will move further from the axis, slowing the earth by many seconds/year. I have no idea what the effect of this might be.

    thad

  • While I don't agree with the assertion that there would be a problem with using the tides to generate power, it is known that the tidal bulge on the oceans actually leads the moon and the gravitational effect of this bulge actually is pushing the moon away from us... Since they're talking about harnessing the tides at the shore line, one can imagine that the effect of harnessing that power on the orbit of the moon will be negligible.



    Surfing the net and other cliches...
  • Either you're pulling a lame April fool's or you don't know physics. Either way dude...

  • Um (Score:2)

    by Lord Kano ( 13027 )
    Expend it's energy? Gravity does NOT get expended. The moon's gravity causes the tides, not its inertia.

    Thank God April 1st is almost over this is getting pretty fucking annoying.

    LK
  • Its gravity comes from it's mass.
  • California's plate is moving North, not down jackhole.
  • Mass is mass. The lithosphere accounts for a fairly small percentage of the Earth's mass. If all the water on the surface froze solid in the next couple weeks the magma underneath it would keep moving like it already does. The adjustment of the Earth's rotation and wobble and whatnot from no more moving water would be hardly measurable.
  • ...is that when you are GMT-10 (or whatever we are in Melbourne now that daylight savings have finally finished), all of the slashdot April fools jokes are posted on April 2nd. When none of them are even remotely funny, you just end up confused. I think we need an agreed timezone for April fools jokes (AFAIK, people have always maintained that if you do your joke after April 1st, you are the fool - where does that leave slashdot?).
  • Well, the thing with the moon is kinda true. Heard a serious physicist say that the moon will crash into the earth in about 100 billion years (I made up that number don't remember what exactly it was) and that our sucking energy from its rotation through tidal dams will reduce that by a few hundred years.
  • Ok so I made up the 100 billion, I can never remember numbers but it was something along those lines maby it was 100 million but that sounds too short, shrugs.
  • As I stated last year, if the Slashdot editors want to indulge themselves in this puerile and mastubatory activity, who are we to complain? For 36[45] days out of the year they give us an interesting forum and plenty of news for nerds, most of which matters. It bugs me as much as the next guy when they do this, but I'm not going to lose sleep over 1 fewer day a year of good Slashdot content.

  • at something like a inch a year. A long time ago the moon appeared to be far far bigger than it is now.
  • The moon's mass is about 7.4 * 10^22 kg. The earth's mass is about 6.0 * 10^24 kg. The moon is about 3.8 * 10^5 km away. This works out to 7.6 * 10^28 joules of gravitational energy. Assume that the earth draws 10 terawatts of power from waves. (Our getting so much is a very dubious assumption, but it's fine for the sake of making estimates). This means that we can draw power at this rate for on the order of 7.6 * 10^15 sec before a macroscopic change in the moon's position would result; this time intervals which works out to about 240 million years. I would suspect that before a quarter of a billion years passes someone will have figured out how to solve the problem.

    Who knows, perhaps we'll want to keep the moon closer to Earth for power generation purposes--the lunar tides would be alot stronger then, and ostensibly the energy-from-tides mechanism would be more efficient.
  • Hey -- he's right. The only danger I see here -- in "wave power" or anything else -- is that my eyes are going to stab my brain to death.

    - - - - -
  • TheVoiceOfReason writes: "My main worry about "ask slashdot", is that we would put the earth in danger by accellerating the descent of human evolution by opening the forum to morons and their silly questions, since the readers would have to expend more energy in generating filters, and thus lose their will to live. How serious a problem is this? What are the solutions? Could we send a rocket up to give the editors a 'kick' once in a while?"

    Happy April 1, kids.

  • Well, I did want to mention this in my original post, that yes the earth is slowing down, but by far the greatest factor has to do with the very slow cooling of the earth's mantle and core. Not anything that mankind could do without some tremendous source of energy as of yet undiscovered.

    I remember reading about it in geology class, but the exact reason escapes me. My memory is a bit hazy these days, you see.

  • Um, maybe you're correct, but I've always understood inertia to mean objects resting, moving, or traveling in a straight line and all that jazz. Whereas momentum had to do with the amount of force behind whatever is moving. Ah, whatever.
  • I meant to say "momentum" in place of "inertia" up there. Danged physics definitions.
  • Fine. Then you can have your money back.
  • None of this stuff is funny. Whoever's at the controls of /. today: Take the hint & cut the crap. It's not clever, it's not interesting, it's not not worth a damn. If you honestly can't find anything that belongs under the "News for Nerds. Stuff that matters" banner then just go silent.

    If you want to see how slash would look like in haxor speak - click here [rinkworks.com] (courtesy of this web tool [rinkworks.com])

    I am shocked.

    Are you suggesting that Slashdot should censor the authors of this stuff, no matter how awful it is?

    Let's face it, this is Open Source Literature at its' best.

    or maybe not.

    Check out the Vinny the Vampire [eplugz.com] comic strip


  • Aren't they right? Really, The communists and the environmentalists are right about coal power plants. Nuclear power is less immediatly damaging, and many environmenatlists do not protest them.

    I never argued that fossil fuel power wasn't evil. It's necessary, because it's pretty damned hard to build a nuclear plant with today's public outcry and the usual not-in-my-backyard syndrome.

    Those same individuals who are picketing coal power plants for emissions reasons are also helping to prevent the construction of new nuclear plants through any number of activist means.

    Many of which are advertised on websites.

    Now, I find it interesting that they have no banner ads up begging for volunteers to pedal the stationary generating bicycles that power their servers. Ergo, I must conclude that their servers are powered by one of the coal or nuclear power plants they despise so much.

    Hypocrisy is part and parcel of environmentalism.

    (the problem with nuclear power is mainly one of public oppinion, not of "environmentalist" concerns).

    A measurable percentage of the North American population thinks Elvis Presley is still alive. Another measurable percentage thinks they've been on an alien craft. 20% think that the moon landings never happened. Every shopping mall has a lottery kiosk, and every newspaper has an astrology column.

    So, you tell me if public opinion should be relevant.

    Therein lies the failure of democracy.

    Just because Americans are too PROFIT oriented to make any real attempts to work on/fund projects to find alternative sources of energy, does not mean that they do not exist

    Alas, there are too many CEOs and CFOs who don't look beyond the next quarter's results. So? They will fail. They will not profit as handsomely as those companies who take the risk and push the edges. Eventually, they are doomed to fail through their own apathy, ineptitude and sluggishness, as they're forced to play R&D catchup or pay huge licensing costs for the new technologies developed by teir competition.

    Examples? Look at Intel.

    There is plenty of alternative energy research going on. Come on. Big Oil may be afraid of the huge infrastructure costs of moving over to some other primary energy source, but the stakes are so high that you'd better believe that they're going to try their best to maintain their current position. Esso/Exxon stations pumping vegetable oil instead of diesel fuel can still be profitable, they know that.

    Besides, no transition of this magnitude can be done overnight, either. If the average car lasts ten years, then full capacity in the new fuel won't be needed for ten years. The transition would actually be spread over several decades.


  • Ok, I gota bitch about the Nuclear power plants NOT being a problem thing. Shit, where the hell have you been?? Ever heard of the Columbia river? That large one on the west coast, Lewis and Clark, all that?

    Turns out it is now polluted by nuclear waste, not very nice. In another few years Hanfords storage bins are gona be leaking even more into it, what did the goverment say? Nothing, reported it, issue dropped.

    Sure. And Three Mile Island blew up, also through mismanagement, and Chernobyl too, therefore, nuclear power will always be leaking stuff or blowing up plants and killing people.

    Windows 2000 gave me a blue screen. Therefore, there's no way that computers can ever be stable, so we shouldn't use them.

    Heh, nice to know.

    Yup. Nice to know.

    You see, nuclear power plants create waste. ALOT of waste in fact, a whole lot of very DANGERIOUS waste.

    One pellet of U-238 dioxide, a cylinder of black ceramic 1 centimeter in diameter by 1 centimeter long, over the year it stays in a CANDU nuclear reactor, will produce more energy than burning a ton of coal.

    Shit, coal, hell, say inside, where a gas mask, you can DO something about air pollution, or at least you can avoid it.

    Sure. You can stop breathing. Because as you burn that ton of coal, it combines with several tons of the gasses that make up air.

    One ton of coal leaves the chimney as several tons of sulphur dioxide and carbon dioxide. Not to mention the soot. Ever been downwind of a coal plant?

    But that little pellet is never more than the little pellet.

    Heh, Lead Clothing is about the only way to escape from radiation.

    Or keeping the radioactive material far away from human contact. Maybe lead clothing for the radioactive materials? Stopping breathing air and drinking water are the only ways you'll be able to avoid the SO2, CO2 and soot from a coal plant.

    Any better ideas there, sport?

    Thrall me with your oh-so-evident acumen.


  • As he was trying to explain this apparent trajedy to me, he got pretty pissed because I had fallen off my chair laughing. Oh, where would we be today without people like this to provide us with this sort of knee-slapping hilarity...

    Alas, voting is a right bestowed on the gullible simpletons, too. The only failure of democracy is that everyone gets a chance to be heard, even if they're simply wrong.

  • Some of it sucks, some of it doesn't - just like Slashdot on any other day. Jeez.

  • If the moon descends to the point that it crashed into the sea, then a gigantic tidal wave would cause an enormous power surge in all the sea- and wave-powered electricity grids.

    But things would settle down after that.

  • What would actually happen if we increased tidal drag would be that the moon would spiral out faster. For the last 3.5bY or so the Earth and Moon have been trading Earth's rotational energy for the Moon's revolutional energy; had the Moon been ejected in an orbit in the opposite direction, the reverse would be true and the Moon would have crashed back into the Earth very early in the pair's history.

    Eventually the Earth will be tidally locked to the Moon as the Moon already is to Earth. At this point IIRC the Moon will be about 350,000 miles out (rather than the 250,000 it is now). Isaac Asimov ran all this out in an essay in A Choice of Catastrophes.

  • the fact that you actually took the time to bitch about something so trivial as someone bitching about the quality of jokes for one day on /. speaks volumes more about how much of a no-life looser you are than it does about slashdots comedic abilities... oh wait, now what does that say about me?
    ---
  • however lame the april fools joke was, i was still interested and looked around a little. here is a link to an article by msnbc:
    http://www.msnbc.com/news/493172.asp?cp1=1

    overall i think it was pretty good for the mildly curious
  • So much ignorance, so little time...

    The long and the short of it is:

    1. The Moon is moving away from the Earth. This has been known from first principles for centuries and has been measured directly by laser ranging ever since Apollo 11 placed retroreflectors on the surface.
    2. The cause has nothing to do with any change in gravity. The gravitational pull between Earth and Moon is decreasing because of the increase in Earth-Moon distance.
    3. The reason the Earth-Moon distance is increasing is because the Earth's spin is being transferred to the Moon via tidal forces.
      1. The faster-spinning object (Earth around its own axis) is slowed down,
      2. the slower-spinning object (Moon around Earth) is accelerated, and
      3. the acceleration raises the Moon into a higher and slower orbit.
    4. There is plenty of historical evidence for the slowing of the Earth's rotation; there are fossils showing daily and annual cycles from a few billion years ago, and at least one of these shows a 400-day year; Earth was spinning about 11% faster in those days.
    I hope that clears up a few things.
    --
    Give a man a fish and he eats for a day.
  • Let's generate power from goat sex!

    You know it's been a boring day on slashdot when that gets moderated "Interesting."

    Not "Funny", no, no, that's "Interesting."

    Yowch.
  • I remember /. on April 1st for the past several years or so was great. There were stories posted for April Fools that were just hystical (like the Seattle riots with the guy shouting "Death to all GUI's!!" as he was being dragged off by police). This is just getting out of control. The whole point of an April Fools joke is that it's not evident until *after* the fact (basically, you fooled someone into believing something false). This stuff is pitifully obvious. So stop. Please. Yes, the All Your Base thing was funny because it was blown out of proportion. It is NOT likewise for /.
  • The real problem is the damage we're going to cause with the slingshot effect. Sure, it sounds like a good idea, stealing momentum from a planet to send our satellites to others...

    But every action has an equal and opposite reaction: we're sending planets hurtling back the way the satellites came!
    --
  • I'm sorry, but damning water is insignificant compared to the millions of holiday travelers distributing their fat mass South every winter and moving right back North to their summer homes *every* year.

    This is going to swing the earth's seasons off balance and this planet is going to be spinning in two directions.

  • More worrysome (Score:3)

    by "Zow" ( 6449 ) on Sunday April 01, 2001 @04:35PM (#322063) Homepage

    Being here in California where we're more reliant on wind power than tidal power (and we've all seen how reliable that is recently), I'm more worried about the proliferation of wind farms around here. I mean, what happens when we've farmed all the wind? Most of the weather patterns for the entire United States start in the Pacific and travel via the wind eastward over the country. If we use all the wind here in California for power, suddenly all those clouds and the jetstream and stuff will stop here, the rest of the country will get sucked into a terible drought and pilots won't be able to make up for the late departure from SFO to JFK!

    Think about it, the US will be devistated, the dot-com stocks will crash taking the economy with it, the country will go into uncontrolled recession, the free world will fall and the commies will take over. At least if the moon were to fall, NASA could send it into some uninhabited part of the Pacific Ocean, just like they did with MIR.

  • Re:Enough already! (Score:3)

    by mwalker ( 66677 ) on Sunday April 01, 2001 @04:23PM (#322064) Homepage
    None of this stuff is funny.

    I disagree. You're funny. All the fucking losers who like you who bitch about /. are funny. This is slashdot's day to troll all the whining, bitching, can't-code IE5'ers who hang around here and play "devil's advocate" all day long. And boy have you boys come through.

    The articles today weren't supposed to be amusing. The comments were. And you, my friend, in true Casey fashion, have stepped up to the tee and taken a mighty swing with your whiffle ball bat. I laughed at your post so hard I coughed soda through my nose.

    I salute you.

  • It's not supposed to be (Score:3)

    by lemox ( 126382 ) on Sunday April 01, 2001 @03:37PM (#322065)
    I always figured that the April 1 stories are nothing but an excuse for the editors to get back at people like you. Frankly, I'm amazed that there are so many people reliant upon slashdot. You might want to think about all the other days you're dissing the regualr stuff before bitching that you want it back now.

  • Re:Enough already! (Score:3)

    by deglr6328 ( 150198 ) on Sunday April 01, 2001 @03:31PM (#322066)
    the fact that you actually took the time to bitch about something so trivial as the quality of jokes for one day on /., speaks volumes more about how much of a no-life looser you are than it does about slashdots comedic abilities.

    /. kicks ass; who cares if one day out of the year they stop normal reporting.

  • Now THAT is class. Someone who takes April 1 so seriously that they even redo their banner ads.

    Funniest stuff I've seen or heard all day.

  • Moon goes the other way (Score:4)

    by techmuse ( 160085 ) on Sunday April 01, 2001 @03:16PM (#322068)
    The moon is spiraling away from the earth, not towards that. The little elf on the other side of my mirror told me so.
  • This question belongs in April 1, methinks.

    The Moon is receding from Earth, and doing so rapidly enough that that their surfaces would have been touching about a billion years ago [boltpages.com]. The infinitesimal amount of wave and tide energy that we can extract, even if we work on every section of coastline, woun't even slow this recession down noticeably. Plain, ordinary vannilla-flavoured physics is slowing the recession several orders of magnitude faster than we eevr could.

    BTW, lightning damage (like Schroter's Valley [nasa.gov]) and other more or less Transient Lunar Phenomena [geocities.com] hint that dear old Luna isn't as inactive as has previously been thought.
  • Maybe the catch is still to come tomorrow or so, A poll with the questions

    o one of the stories posted on april 1st was serious?

    o one of the stories was remotely funny

    o I submited all stories posted april 1st

    o Huh? Did they post anything different then usual?

    Must admit, im gonna have trouble picking my vote :)

    -- Chris Chabot
    "I dont suffer from insanity, i enjoy every minute of it!"

  • yes, and earth's rotation will stop too (Score:5)

    by Eil ( 82413 ) on Sunday April 01, 2001 @03:13PM (#322071) Homepage Journal
    This reminds me of something funny I once heard a few years back. I was talking to one of my dad's friends who was postively convinced (and just a little drunk) that mankind was slowing down the rotation of the earth by launching lots of rockets and space shuttles from it.

    I shit you not.

    Nevermind that a rocket's thrust is completely insignificant in any timeframe compared to the inertia of the earth. And that they take off vertically rather than horizontally.

    As he was trying to explain this apparent trajedy to me, he got pretty pissed because I had fallen off my chair laughing. Oh, where would we be today without people like this to provide us with this sort of knee-slapping hilarity...

  • Only the tip of the iceberg. (Score:5)

    by Da Penguin ( 122065 ) on Sunday April 01, 2001 @03:12PM (#322072)
    Using solar energy means that the sun will have to generate more, thus making it burn out and making us all perish.

    Sitting is making the laws of gravity work harder, so they will have to stop soon sending us all out into outer space except for those who grab onto something who will have the joy of plumetting into the sun as the orbits misalign spelling death for everything.

  • Today is Apr 1, but... (Score:5)

    by tetrad ( 131849 ) on Sunday April 01, 2001 @03:11PM (#322073)
    You know, the really sad thing is, tomorrow's stories won't be much different.

  • This had better be April Fools joke (Score:5)

    by tulare ( 244053 ) on Sunday April 01, 2001 @03:12PM (#322074) Journal
    Or else I'm going to seriously gripe about my article on "the courtship and mating dances of orange and black umbrellas" not getting posted.

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