[ExI] Update on the Hawaiian observatory shutdown

spike at rainier66.com spike at rainier66.com
Fri Aug 23 16:44:49 UTC 2019


 

 

From: extropy-chat <extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org> On Behalf Of Adrian Tymes via extropy-chat
Subject: Re: [ExI] Update on the Hawaiian observatory shutdown

 

On Fri, Aug 23, 2019 at 8:55 AM spike jones via extropy-chat <extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org <mailto:extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> > wrote:

From: spike at rainier66.com <mailto:spike at rainier66.com>  <spike at rainier66.com <mailto:spike at rainier66.com> > 

 

>…Failing that, we could make a closed system oxygen-enriched office/sleeping space.  It would not be pressurized but more like a warm car on a cold day, with that kind of doors, a rubber seal but at ambient pressure.  Instead of about 20% oxygen in there it would be about 33%, so that the oxygen level is about the same as down at the women’s locker room where the invisible man lives.   spike

 

 

Another idea: to compensate for the elevated fire risk in an oxygen-enriched chamber, the proles could wear wool clothing.

 

>…Or, y'know, just don't enrich the oxygen.  Add nitrogen as well as oxygen, keeping the fraction of oxygen the same as at ground level and making it 1 atmosphere pressure, similar to the ISS and Shuttle.  The airlock environment itself could be useful for science, in addition to the observatory.

 

 

Ja, that’s what I meant.  The atmosphere is about 20% oxygen and about 80% nitrogen (ja I know, there is about a percent which is everything else combined) so the notion is to enrich the oxygen so that the partial pressure of O2 is about 0.2 atm in the chamber, as it is on the ground, but the partial pressure of N2 is about 0.4 atm instead of 0.8, so the percentage of oxygen would be about a third instead of a fifth of the air, even though the pressure is lower.  The cooking would still be funky (85C boiling point ( I boiled the hell outta my ramen up there for about 15 minutes and it was still chewy as a bunch of rubber bands (but I was crazy starving so it still tasted great (particularly on the second night on my way back down (hey simple solution, use pressure cookers at the observatory.)))  In a 0.6 atm chamber the astronomers should still be able to concentrate in that environment.  

 

The fire risk would be elevated somewhat because there would be less inert nitrogen available to carry away heat, even though the partial pressure of oxygen is about the same.

 

The reason I might lean away from a pressurized environment is that it would take a lot of sturdy building material and crews, giving the protestors even more to complain about.  They would argue the invisible man has never needed any of this stuff (they deny what we all know already: that guy lives in the women’s dormitory down at the U of Hawaii now.)

 

spike

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