you laugh but i've always thought it would be great to carry a kilo of pure hydrogen in my backpack - just burn it to obtain like 5 litres of water ... I mean why are we carrying all that oxygen in our backpacks when he atmosphere has a plentiful supply of it...
Maybe we need mini packblimps that can not only carry fuel, but part of the pack, the dog, the kid, etc. It could have AI assisted propeller machetes to hack away at wayward branches, geofenced to protect endangered flora of course.
Then if you add some condensing coils and a transparent roof, you could also just leave the backpacking food in there and it'll slowly get moist and solar cook. After a twelve hour hike you'd get lukewarm edible mud, mmm.
Explosions are a minor risk, but if you can make water out of the hydrogen anyway, surely you can put out any resultant wildfires.
Guess we have to get rid of the props and just tether it to the pack like a balloon.
Seriously though, I've often wondered if a weather balloon style lifter tethered to a backpack could help it be lighter. Probably with a less flammable gas, and only in sparsely forested areas.
Less flammable would be Helium. It just so happens that the US is looking to sell the strategic helium reserve. So you just need to find a VC and you can get your backpacker's assistant idea off the ground. hehe
as far as helium balloon, it would have to be a balloon of such enormous size to be of any benefit. To launch a couple pounds of payload to 90k feet required a balloon 8' in diameter on the ground.
Great, so if I have a 25kg sack, a 1 meter sphere being trailed above is only going to make it 24kg. Like I originally stated, a few pounds required an 8' diameter balloon, so 2.5m balloon. That's friggin huge. FYI, at 90k' altitude, the balloon expanded to about 40' before reaching it's burst limit allowing for a return of the payload.
Have you ever actually seen a canister of hydrogen? Specifically, have you ever felt the weight of that canister? I'd rather just carry the 8lbs of a gallon of water. At least it gets lighter as the water is depleted
Well, the same amount of hydrogen (as in 1kg of water) in the form of methane only weighs ~450g though. And methane, conveniently, turns into H2O when burned.
So in principle you could carry a bottle of methane and burn that to get water. ;-)
roughly half the weight, plus the weight of the burner equipment. again, that weight still remains even after the supply of fuel to make water is depleted. a just of water gets lighter. by the end of the hike, this is very much a nice quality
What do you expect to do, open the valve, flick a Bic, and the water is going to start flowing? Come on. This was a fun nonsensical thread, and you're now trying to turn it into a magic trick rather than goofy science. You have to capture the flame's exhaust, pressurize it, and whatever other sciencey stuff to get the waste into a liquid
I mean, it's completely outside of viability, but it's not breaking ground science. You could do it perfectly well in a lab (if you had any reason to).
There's a lot of things that can be done in a lab, but bringing it to the real world is totally different. Nevermind fitting this in the original concept of backpacking
You can turn methane into water in theory. And you can technically do it in a lab (even though the easiest way by far to do it uses a lot of water). You can't do it on your backpack.
The way I was picturing it, you light the balloon and, besides some burn marks and a boom heard miles away, water appears in its place and falls into a bucket you placed below.
Not like I know how this stuff works. Someone says methane turns into water when burned, I imagine based on farts that it floats like in a nice balloon or Hindenburg, I figure this do be how this was intended ¯\_(:))_/¯
Carbon is lighter than oxygen, so their plan would work if they brought fully saturated hydrocarbons including ones so long-chain that they were solid at room temperature.
You just described coal. So, you're suggesting taking coal on a backpacking trip along with a very heavy canister of hydrogen. To make water? Anything else you want to do to help destroy the environment you're backpacking through?
You realize this whole thread started with the concept of dehydrated water, right?
Just need a longer string for the balloon and it'll be ok. And hike in places with less trees (although, after a few mishaps, the trails you frequent will have less trees, too).
Do you mean that if I had invented a "machine for airborne transportation", such as, say, a hot-air balloon, I could collect royalties on jet airplanes?
If your claims were sufficiently written and not obvious in light of the prior art, yes. In this case, your claims would have to contend with literally millennia of prior art up to the story of Icarus, and including the drawings of Leonardo Da Vinci.
This kind of super-broad patent enforcement happened with 3D printing, and is still happening with e-ink technology. In both cases, the patents didn't have centuries of prior art covering what would otherwise have been entire industries, and could protect their monopolies for 20 years.
Another claim seems to be that a collection of unread books serves as a personal reminder of ignorance, that the un-known always exceeds the known, a kind of "memento ignorantiae" that gives us the humility and motivation to always seek to learn more rather than remain complacently content with the knowledge we have already acquired.
And possibly the physicality of a dead-tree library carries this effect more forcibly than an online shopping list.
Should be "sensors" (used correctly a few sentences later). Is this a text-to-speech thing, or written by a non-native speaker, or just appalling editing?
> Once I realized that we found an object from a technological origin that was produced elsewhere.
Just curious, Australia being mostly desert, if the rest of the planet became similarly barren, would it still work out? I don't know how food-independent Australia is...
With a maximum estimated population of a few millions living on 7 million square kilometers, that's not really a great path to follow for Earth's current 8 billion inhabitants sharing about 150 million square kilometers.
Feels funny to read this. Always thought that Pascha was a Jewish holiday, which was later eclipsed by Easter (The Last Supper that Jesus had with his disciples was them celebrating the Pascha)
Both terms are used with identical meaning referring to shared leave pool instead of separate vacation and sick leave (“annual leave” is sometimes used for this purpose, but sometimes, e.g. federal service, equivalent to “vacation”); IME (which may not be representative) paid is somewhat more common than personal for the shared leave pool.
Confusingly, paid time off (with the same abbreviation) is also sometimes used in the more obvious sense encompassing all or most paid leave (including some or all of things like bereavement, company/public holidays, paid time for administrative shutdowns, etc.)
Citing Wikipedia doesn't negate the fact that my company calls it "Personal." And since I wrote the original comment, I'm probably more familiar with my company's terminology than Wikipedia.
I read that as "period". My female coworkers always have to make excuses when they're having cramps - outright saying "i have period cramps" is still a little awkward when you're talking to a male manager
Theoretically at some point in the step-by-step process, the computers will be able to clear their own roadblocks by themselves, and faster than we can. And who knows what happens then. Maybe "singularity" isn't a great word, dunno if there's a better one...
If on Firefox, do you need to add the optional search bar (with the magnifying glass) in order to access "Change Search Settings"? Because I'm not finding it anywhere.
