"Mark McIntyre" wrote in message


A few terajoules is NOT a horrific amount of energy. Try
thunderstorms.

I've taken your advice and learned a little something of terrestrial
thunder storm energy.

http://www.thenakedscientists.com/HT...ithcolumn5.htm
"At any time there are over 2,000 thunderstorms occurring worldwide,
each producing over a 100 lightning strikes a second. That's over 8
million lightning bolts every day."

"Each lightning flash is about 3 miles long but only about a centimetre
wide. It discharges about 1-10 billion joules of energy"

His own math seems sufficiently conservative, but we certainly get the
idea that an average lightning strike is perhaps worthy of 2e9 joules.
If using his slight under-estimate of merely 8 million strikes per day
is 8e6 * 2e9 = 16e15 joules/day or upon average 185e9 joules/second
worth of terrestrial lightning energy that's getting discharged at any
moment, and along with our rapidly failing magnetosphere by a factor of
0.05%/year means that lots more of such solar wind driven atmospheric
energy discharges are likely to transpire, and I guess that's a good
sort of thing as scripted within your NASA infomercial-science based
koran.

I guess it's also a darn good thing our moon has that stealth
hocus-pocus shield that's so much better off than our magnetosphere,
whereas otherwise those moonsuit fools would be in serious trouble, as
in TBI(total body irradiated) plus solar and cosmic charged particles
worth of River City sort of trouble, and of their being rather nicely
exposed to such nifty gamma, X-rays and otherwise in direct touch with
being highly electrostatic covered while trekking through tens of meters
worth of absolutely dry and thereby fluffy element depths of local
basalt plus meteorite moon-dust that's rather carbon/graphite sooty,
iron, titanium and perhaps even a little radium and cobalt like dark and
nasty, as well as still a touch salty and not all that likely to clump,
not to mention their getting rather nicely double IR roasted by day and
continually blind sided by whatever items passing by 36+ km/s, plus
somehow dodging those nasty bits of incoming debris or that of their
unavoidable secondary shards.

Now then, 185e9 joules is I believe a touch less impressive than 2e20
joules, and it's even less than the 254e9 joules of extra recession
energy that's involved with the ongoing exit of our moon, that which can
be measured without having to involve any stinking retroreflectors that
supposedly at best offers all of 3 wussy photons per minute out of
trillions per laser ranging effort. Actually, other than an efficient
IR laser bounce, radar/radio ranging is so much easier and more
reliable, especially if known amounts of specific wavelength elements
were ever deployed from orbit and having subsequently survived hitting
that dusty deck.
-
Brad Guth




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