A measurement device is necessarily local: if it’s “zooming in” from a light year away, it’s using transmitted particles to observe—and those particles are traveling (and entangled) with the particles you’re trying to observe.
When you say zoom in, what you are actually asking is what if the wall was a light year away, and you’re building the delayed choice version of the experiment, details here …m.wikipedia.org/…/Delayed-choice_quantum_eraser
But basically, the universe knows, and you can’t worm your way around it.if you detect which slit the photons flow through, then you lose the interference pattern.
I’d say the most important part is moisture. When a desert starts getting more rainwater, it starts to be an interesting habitat for algea and cyanobacteria (all they need is sun and moisture). These organisms start colonizing the desert, because it’s not hostile for them anymore. As they live and die there, organic matter starts to pile up and allows other organisms that consume this matter to colonize the desert as well. Soil is slowly developing and allowing more and more plants and animals to inhabit the place. The whole proces is very slow. You can do the same (and faster) through artificial means, but you have to water the land and take the water from somewhere else. If you stop watering, the land turns into desert again if there’s not enough rainfall. At some places that are not dry naturally you could reestablish a long term green habitat - e.g. instead of a dam and dry land surrounding it, you could recreate a wetland forest with a meandering river, which would help the surrounding area, because forests create their own small water cycles so more rain can be expected around them.
Naturally this kind of thing happens over tens or hundreds of thousands of years. So, even going back to BC times, we’re still only a small fraction of how far we need to go back to find really major, long-term climatic shifts. These things are supposed to happen sloooowwwwllly, not really discernable as changing over the scale of a single human lifetime, which is just the blink of an eye in planetary time scales.
Can we though? Probably. We can certainly dam rivers and use irrigation to make the land more agriculturally productive. But we should have the technology currently to attempt more dramatic geoengineering projects if we wished.
The problem though, is unintended consequences, where you change one thing over here, and you didn’t realize it was also controlling something else over there, and that thing changes too now, even though you didn’t necessarily want it to.
Like, to make up a fictional example, say we engineered rainfall over the Sahara somehow. But we didn’t know some of this moisture influences air currents, and now southern Europe and the Middle East are changing too somehow, by accident.
It’s like when you’re trying to untie a really tangled knot, and you pull on one part thinking its going to start undoing it, but it just tightens it somewhere else instead.
I know China has done a lot of “regreening” of areas and I’ve read that the Sinai could be a good candidate for the same sort of restoration. It’s not my area of expertise but the best candidates seem to be areas that are deserts because of human activity (like over farming, excessive water use, etc.).
What China did was plant trees, restore nutrients to the soil, add terraces to hills, limit livestock, and other things that slow down water loss. They successfully regreened and area the size of France but I think, crucially, it got enough water naturally. The land was just depleted, which caused the water to wash away topsoil instead of support vegetation.
So, I don’t think we could realistically show up to an arid desert and turn it into much. But there’s places we think of as desert now that would be good candidates for restoration.
I seem to recall that Mythbusters episode proving the exact opposite. They showed that fecal matter definitely gets sprayed all over the bathroom when the lid is up when flushed.
I think someone urgently needs to come up with one of these solutions:
The foot-operated lid;
The toilet with flush and suction;
The Jedi throne (a Jedi-style toilet lid activated by hand movements) and lastly
The Terminator (a time-activated flames of hell) solution. The time-activated mechanism locks the toilet door after the user leaves and burns the entire compartment at solar flare temperatures.
Jim’s a clever guy. We could even seek inspiration in some trash cans that have embraced the pedal idea. Can you believe we’re in the 21st century, surround by ai systems, risking extinction for various reasons, and unable to solve the toilet seat conundrum?
In France they have public toilets that basically do number 4. The toilet gets completely cleaned automatically with hot water and detergent after you used it. It works by locking up after you unlocked the door after using it. If you hold the door for someone, they get the cleaning treatment.
Unfortunately, I’ve never been to France, but nothing beats a spotless clean public toilet. And, thanks for the tip: if someone holds the door for you, kindly step back. That alone should be highlighted in all tourist guides.
It’s written quite clearly on the door, but last time I used one I saved a tourist who would have had an unfortunate shower. She grabbed the door when I went out and was going in, I had to warn her and tell her to first let the door close so that the wash cycle would do its job.
You know what they say: you have to rush when Mother Nature calls. Under those circumstances, it can be difficult to read the instructions first. Good to know you saved the poor tourist a free chemical bath.
Just think about all those public restrooms with like 8 toilets in a small area, all of which have no lids (not like anyone would put them down anyway) and use those super high pressure flushing mechanisms!
Woah, cool video! I think this video deserves its own post. I just need to figure out which scientific community it is most relevant to … Physics? Epidemiology? Hmmm 🤔
you don’t, most of the time is not needed. if it is, a sencond lighter flush with the brush thing will take care of everything that is still there. with a controlled flush you just let some water run.
I won’t lie, if you don’t close the lid and I know it, we’ve nothing to ever speak about because that’s disgusting and please stay away from me, I don’t want your toilet aura near me. 💀
Toothbrushes were mentioned, and I'd assume that the toothpaste does a good enough job at killing bacteria that it doesn't make a difference, aside from that the bacterial load is probably low enough to be negligible.
But yeah, you don't want to be thinking about putting a pooey stick in your mouth either.
I mean, we still CLEAN our toilets when they’re still just visibly stained with hard water or whatever causes rings and whatnot, so I can see the feeling better about being a huge component
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