Flat earthers are crazy

:-)

And that covers only the case where the tekkie has been involved in a sales meeting, only after the goal already has been set. I consider that quite early in the process, they usually are involved only after the contract has been made and signed. :-)

John Larkin thinks that he is a tekkie. In fact he is sales and marketing and the tekkies have to talk him out of his sillier ideas.

Actually in the early days we were not that good at it. The early lunar landers had microbes on their surfaces. ISTR Apollo brought some back and the Apollo astronauts must have shed plenty of bacteria too.

We will try a lot harder when sending probes to Enceladus and Europa not to contaminate the pristine environment with terrestrial microbes just in case there is independent evolution of life on those planets.

Incredibly implausible given the scale of interstellar distances. It is just about plausible that life first evolved on Mars and was transferred to Earth by meteorites. Mars was ahead of the Earth in cooling down, having oceans and then losing its atmosphere when its core froze.

He knows what he believes and nature must do what he says or else.

That isn't quite true. High mass stars can form elements heavier than iron in their cores by slow neutron capture later in their giant phase but they are no use to life as a dense hot plasma inside a star (at least not to any life as we know it).

The supernova explosion makes more of the heavy elements and puts them back out into the interstellar medium where the second or third time around they can condense to form planets around the next generation stars. Immediately after the Big Bang the primordial composition of the universe would have been almost entirely H, He with minute traces of Li, Be & B which help to allow lower mass stars to ignite more easily.

It has no redeeming features. It explains nothing and just pushes the initial formation of life back to a different time and place.

The crux is that for now we want to investigage IF there is or has been life on those moons and planets. We do not want to contaminate them with our own life and then detect that as possible life on that planet.

Presumably, once that phase is passed and the outcome is "no life", we would want to distribute our lifeforms to there to see if they blossom.

Internally on our own world the situation is a bit different, as introducing life forms from other places often disturbs the delicate balance in which the local life forms can survive. However, in today's society of travel and goods transport it appears to be fruitless to try to prevent it.

Is gold produced in supernova, or does it require collision of neutron stars?

ars?

This is English-language science journalism. Gold might well be produced wh en neutron stars merge, but is would almost certainly stay put in the core of the new neutron star, where it would be decidedly inaccessible.

The gold that we dig up from time to time is more likely to have come from a supernova, which not only produces all the element heavier than iron, but also blows a lot of them out of the core of the star that went supernova a nd into the space between the stars, from which it can get into planets (li ke ours).

All some distant philanthropist would need is 0.25c propulsion and some self-repairing, self-reproducing robots with good biochemistry labs on board. If it took them a few million years between galaxies, no big deal. Our own galaxy is only about 100K LY across. It is not incredibly implausible unless you actively fight considering the concept.

Fighting against considering novel concepts is a good way to design boring (and low-priced) electronics. Anybody can do that.

We need a new group, sci.electronics.routine.

It is

Your closed-mindedness is impressive. I take business away from people like you, so I guess I shouldn't complain.

In a few hundred years, we may be able to design life that would survive different temperatures and chemistries.

Moving living things around, and building un-crossable freeways, and shooting things like wolves, and other mechanical things are changing the planet. We're part of nature too, I guess.

What impresses me is not so much that gold exists, but that some processes managed to dump pure nuggets of the stuff in streams, for us to just pick up. If it was distributed uniformly in the magma of the planet, we wouldn't have much of it.

Ditto iron, copper, tin, aluminum, uranium, all the rest... nicely separated for us near the surface.

Like this?

I've forgotten :)

And, on principle, I shall avoid committing that image to medium term memory.

As I understand it, a black hole light enough to be captured by a black hole would have a radius smaller than a neutron, and be incapable of acquiring matter from the star:

Most of these had to be deposited later, after the molten earth had cooled. Otherwise they would sink to the core.

So how were they deposited? By meteorites? If so, for example, how do solid iron meteorites form in the vacuum of space?? They exist. And why are there not any gold, platinum or tungsten meteorites?

In some places, uranium concentations were high enough to sustain nuclear fission:

This could not have come from a meteorite, since it would have already gone through fission in space and there would be none left when it hit the earth.

So what's the story. How did this all happen?

I don't get your thesis.

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John Larkin's business model seems to be designing bespoke electronics for people too dumb to work out how to use the stuff they could buy off the she lf.

Taking silly ideas seriously is a vital skill in that line of work.

John Would probably do better if he limited himself to putting new packagin g around off-the-shelf gear, but he's too much of a narcissist to admit it.

Evolution has done that for us.

So are volcanoes and asteroids.

nah, it'd turn back into neutronium if left in contact with the neutron star.

d.

The earth core is a lump of solid nickel iron alloy, incorporating a variet y of other compomnents. It's not homogenous, and it is surrounded by lump o f circulating liquid nickel iron, which isn't homogenous either. There may be a tendency for heavier elements to concentrate deeper down, but they are n't in a position to "sink to the core" as isolated pure nuggets.

The Earth didn't have a solid inner core for the first few million years of its existence - it's estimated to be between 0.5 and 2 billions years old.

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There are going to be "iron" meteorites that contain a proportion of tungst en, gold and platinum - when a supernova blows up the stuff blown out comes out as turbulent mass of very hot gas, and will condense into fragments of impure iron.

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If you read the whole of the wikipedia article, you'd note that when Earth' s atmosphere got enough oxygen, uranium in surface rocks could get oxidised to water-soluble compounds and washed down into lakes where it could preci pitate out into uranium-rich layers - rich enough to form a natural reactor .

Gold used to be collected by crushing gold-rich rocks and relying on the gr eater density of gold to cause it to fall out of suspensions of rock partic les in water - panning for gold. Nowadays we hit it with cyanide rich solut ions that selectively take up the gold atoms as water-soluble gold-cyanide complex.

Speaking from my time as an inorganic chemistry, there are lots of other li gands around that selectively chelate particular heavy atoms. There might e ven be plant that incidentally generates a uranium-complexing chemical.

Rhubarb generates oxalic acid, which does a similar job on iron

Surely it makes more sense to design what you can do very well than try to make some product work. Be good rather than get by.

NT

It was good for me. I learned a huge amount. Later on, when I got more selective and could decide for myself what to do, all that crazy experience (well, most of it) turned out to be valuable.

If I were fresh out of college now, I think I'd try to be an apps engineer for TI or LTC or something. Apps engineers get exposed to a huge range of problems, and get basically an extended series of job interviews, while being paid.