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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • Yes

    As long as the object doesn’t reach escape velocity, it’s in orbit and thus bound by the primary object. Now this orbit can by very weird and huge, but it’s still a loop. Only above escape velocity does the loop “break” and leaving the object without a guaranteed return is possible.

    So in theory if an object is in orbit and the boost is sufficient, it can just leave. However even then it is subject to the gravity fields and will make an arc instead of just a straight line. So “point and shoot” is never really an option. But often in movies a small spacecraft is seen making a small maneuver and somehow being seen as lost to space. That will for certain not be the case, a small boost just gives you a different orbit, but an orbit still.

    For example the movie Life (2017) comes to mind. Spoiler alert. In the end they decide to use an escape pod to launch into “deep space” with the alien. The escape pod just points up and fires the rocket for a short while and now is lost to deep space forever. This is total nonsense. The reason escape pods can work with very little fuel is they often have just enough oompf (or delta-V if you want to be technical) to put the pod into a slightly lower orbit. This lower orbit means more drag from the atmosphere which slows it down further, lowering the orbit again etc. until the thing is slowed enough it can totally re-enter and land. It isn’t like an escape pod pointed down goes to Earth and pointed up goes into outer space. The pod actually fires in the direction of the orbit, so horizontally, in order to slow it down.

    Orbital mechanics get really weird really fast. For example slowing down can cause the orbit to become higher before it goes lower. And putting in energy sideways can alter the angle of the orbit just like those spinning flywheel desk toys. Playing around with orbits in Kerbal Space Program can give a better understanding and can even make the concept of delta-V very easy to understand. KSP players would be unable to watch the movie Gravity (2013) for example without screaming at the screen: “THIS IS NOT HOW ANY OF THIS WORKS”.

    It’s hard to figure out, that’s why we refer to hard things as “rocket science”. It’s not just the complexity of the rocket as a machine and engineering challenge. But also figuring out stuff like orbits, taking into account the different gravity fields of objects that are of note. Doing things like gravity assists or Hohmann transfer orbit, taking into account the influence the extremely thin atmosphere has. And remembering everything moves, so shoot for where the target is going to be, not where it is now.





  • There is a few different concepts here in conflict, which is why the question is hard to answer.

    What do we mean when we say space? Usually we mean above the Kármán line, or above 100km. At that point you are above almost all of the atmosphere, so we consider that space. The atmosphere does actually extend quite a bit above that, but at that point it’s so thin we consider it to be space.

    However as we know, the Earth has a bunch of gravity from its mass. So when you get up to 100km you just fall back down. Space isn’t free of gravity, the gravity of the Earth extends basically forever. It’s influence does get less (thanks to Newton we know by how much), but considering the Earth is thousands of km wide when we get up to 100km we are pretty much still on the ground as far as gravity is concerned.

    So why do we see astronauts fly around? They are weightless, so there is no gravity right? This is something popular media gets wrong a whole bunch, it’s not like there is some magically line called space and beyond there you are weightless. Those astronauts are actually in orbit, that’s why they don’t experience gravity from the Earth. To understand orbits, imagine we fire a big ass cannon. The ball flies through the air in an arc and lands on the ground. How far away it lands, depends on how fast we shot the ball. The faster it went out of the cannon, the further it flies. Now imagine we shoot the ball over the horizon, so it lands so far away we can’t even see it anymore. It still lands right? Yes, but only up to a point. It turns out if you shoot the ball fast enough, the arc just continues falling beyond the horizon until it loops around the Earth. As it is falling, it doesn’t experience gravity except for the arc it follows.

    Usually when we put stuff into space, we mean put it in orbit and especially something called Low Earth Orbit . That means it needs to have a speed just like the cannon ball, to keep falling indefinitely. The speed we need is dependent on how large the arc we want to have, or in other words how high the orbit is above the Earth. For context, if we want to fly in orbit in space so at an altitude of 100km, we would need to go almost 28254 km/h. Imagine driving that fast on the highway, it’s crazy fast.

    That’s why we use rockets, it’s not as much about going up, it’s more about going really fast. So a rocket takes off and goes vertical for the first bit, this is to get to a thinner part of the atmosphere to reduce drag. Then it does something called the pitch over maneuver, usually in the form of a gravity turn. This is to go mostly horizontal and get that speed up. At the speeds rockets are going, they get to the 100km altitude in no time. So they pitch over as to not overshoot and use all their energy to go as fast as they can horizontally and thus into orbit. Then you get into the realm of orbital mechanics, which popular media also gets wrong a whole bunch. You can’t just point your spacecraft into space, give it a boost and be flying off into the void forever. If you want to learn more I would recommend playing Kerbal Space Program, to get a feel for how orbits work.

    But say we are totally done with Earth and just want to leave it all behind, go into Deep Space. How would we do that? For that we need even more speed, something called escape velocity. If we get to that speed (40270 km/h), we can leave the Earth and go wherever we want, right? No not just yet, we might have left Earth behind, but we are still in orbit around the Sun. So we are still following orbital mechanics, only the Sun is the primary body we have to account for instead of the Earth. We can use orbital mechanics to fly around the solar system.

    If we want to leave the solar system, we would need to go even faster. But the issue is there is nothing out there. To get anywhere interesting, we would need to travel close to the speed of light for years. Even our fastest spacecraft are standing still compared to the speed of light, so leaving the solar system isn’t very useful right now. But we do have the Voyager space probes which kinda sorta left the solar system and we got some interesting data from them, which is cool!


  • I think you are right, but also feel like it’s a too narrow view. Other places which aren’t the US have the same kinds of things going on.

    In my personal experience and amateur opinion, people have swung back. During the pandemic, especially at the start it was all about protecting each other, caring for each other. About doing stuff for the greater good, limiting freedom of what you can and can’t do, not to help yourself but to help others. There was always this group which resisted that, but as the pandemic went on, it got harder and harder for more people. You saw people ignoring masks and hygiene rules and doing what they felt like, especially near the “end” of the pandemic. Even the people that really cared and tried (me amongst them), there was a mental fatigue and mistakes slipped in. And I can’t imagine how hard it must have been for young folk.

    When the pandemic was declared to be over, there was this real shift in people’s attitudes. People got more selfish and less worried about stuff like personal space and basic hygiene. Especially since the pandemic wasn’t really over, a lot of people felt like it was all bullshit. We could have just declared it over way sooner and they could have gotten on with their lives. I’ve seen people buy bigger, less environmentally friendly cars. Buy loud motorcycles. Eat more meat, use more energy and water. Be rude to people all the time, be rude to people in services. Let their kids do whatever. Play more loud music.

    It’s like people got so tired of caring for others, they feel like the world owes them what they want for themselves.

    Of course there are many other factors, like the insane amount of social media people consume and what that does to their brains. The big media companies driving what people need to think. Pressure from wars and climate change, driving up refugee numbers etc. etc. But for me personally, I feel like the swing back from the pandemic has had a big impact.



  • Thorry84@feddit.nltoAndroid@lemmy.worldPlay Store is Bad
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    2 days ago

    I really hate it when I search for an app the search result is on the right and the sponsored result is on the left. It makes zero sense and they only do it so people misclick and Google can charge the sponsored app for that. It’s the kind of shit that just makes the world a worse place, in the name of earning a few more bucks. Google could have made billions forever and be the good guys, instead they choose to be assholes because number must go up.


  • I have both kinds and I don’t really care. I just buy the pants because I like how they look, don’t even check what kind of fly they have. I have the ones with a regular zipper and 1 button, zipper with 2 buttons, no zipper just buttons, a little hook thingy button and fly combination. There are more important aspects of pants for me, like the fit, feeling, price and how they look.







  • That’s not how AC works at all.

    AC works by evaporating a gas, evaporation (going from liquid to gas) takes a lot of energy. By dong this inside a ribbed evaporator, the energy gets extracted from the evaporator cooling it down. Then a fan ventilates the air in the room over the evaporator, which in turn extracts the energy from the air. On the other side the AC has a compressor which turns the gas into a liquid. This takes energy to do, so the compressor puts all that energy in, heating up in turn. A large condenser (looks like a radiator) is used to cool the coolant down. The compressor puts in energy in the form of pressure, but as the gas is hot it can’t turn into a liquid. By cooling it down in the condensor it can turn into a liquid. A fan is used over the condensor to dump the energy from the gas into the outside air.

    For gas in the past something like R134a was used, these days something like R290 (propane, but very pure/clean) is used which is better for the environment. In a very real sense ACs are energy pumps, they take the energy from inside and dump it outside. But they can also work the other way around, taking energy from outside and dumping it inside. This leads to pretty cool effects where you can heat your home with more than 100% efficiency. Because the energy you need to put in is only the overhead for pumping the energy, but the amount of energy being pumped can by much much larger. Over 100% efficiency in a closed system isn’t possible, but since an AC dumps the energy in the outside air it isn’t a closed system. ACs are also known as heatpumps for this reason.

    The way an AC can be used to dehumidify is because of the dew point in the air. This is a combination of the amount of moisture in the air, the pressure and the temperature. When the AC pushes the temperature from above the dew point to below, the air can’t contain all the moisture it contains. This will cause the water to condens on the evaporator in the AC. This can (and probably will unless you are in a very dry area) occur during normal cooling operation. This is why there are normally lines to take the water and get it out of the AC unit. When the water would remain, it’s a breading ground for all sorts of nasty stuff (look up legionnaires disease), so it’s important to get it out of there. A lot of times a small water pump is used to pump the water away.

    When cooling the AC tries to regulate the amount of energy pumped to keep a constant temperature in the room. Older/cheaper ACs just do this by start/stop, but better more modern ACs can regulate their power to prevent big swings in temperature and save energy. But when in dehumidify mode, the only purpose is to push the condensor below the dew point. Now the AC could do all sorts of fancy calculations to figure out the dew point and get it there. However that isn’t done at all, most ACs just push the temperature down as hard as they can. This is because the further you get down below the dew point, the more water condenses, so it gets the moisture out faster. And it’s also really complicated to calculate the exact dew point and get the measurements, because the AC itself influences the measurements a lot, so it would need sensors further away. Some big systems can do this and also measure the amount of moisture in the air and regulate to that. But small systems people have at home usually just go as hard as possible.

    This is the reason why it just never stops in dehumidify mode and the air gets colder and colder. Nerds can probably get something cooking with sensors and homeassistant, but regular home systems won’t go to a target when in dehumidify mode. There are hard limits to how cold it will allow the condensor to get, to protect the system and prevent frost, but that’s not really the same as a target temperature in cooling mode.

    Some better ACs also have a smart dehumidify mode, where it closes the inside unit, turns off the fan. Then cools down the condensor a huge amount. Then opens the inside unit and slowly blows air. This way it can get a lot of moisture out of the air fast and not cool down the air a lot at once. But in the end it’s the same effect. The energy still comes from the room, so the room will cool down, it will just not have huge swings in temperature.