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Joined 12 days ago
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Cake day: February 10th, 2025

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  • They spend a lot to decommission the ships and make them safe. It’s just cheaper to buy an old ship and clean it up than to buy a similar amount of other artificial reef materials.

    Also, being ships in shallow water, it drives scuba diving tourists as well as creating new locations for recreational fishing.

    They’re pretty big boons for the local towns.


  • They’re usually sank in areas that are otherwise uninhabited by corals due to the depth of the water. The wrecks provide surfaces in the light zone which allows corals to grow.

    It’s entirely new habitat and it provides more breeding sites in the area. Even if it takes wildlife from other areas, the decrease in population in those results in higher breeding rates in those locations due to decreased competition for food and breeding sites. More breeding sites = more breeding and a higher overall population of wildlife over time.

    Ecology aside, these sites draw a lot of tourism. They’re “shipwrecks” that are in shallow water, often shallow enough that you can experience them while scuba diving, without needing decompression stops. This means that scuba divers can experience wreck diving without the extra complexity of decompression.

    There are many of these artificial reefs around Florida and they’re very popular dive sites in areas that otherwise would have no similar attractions.

    Source: Dated a woman who worked at fish and wildlife, department of marine fisheries and attended the sinking of the Oriskany ( https://www.padi.com/dive-site/united-states-of-america-usa/uss-oriskany/#overview )










  • The walls get hot, you absorb the heat from the walls with a fluid. You use the fluid to heat water, you use the steam to drive a turbine, you use the turbine to turn a permanent magnet inside of a coil of wire. In addition, you can capture neutrons using a liquid metal (lithium) which heats the lithium, which heats the walls, which heats the water, which makes steam, which drives a turbine, which generates electricity.

    If you poured water onto them they wouldn’t explode. 100 million degrees Celsius doesn’t mean much when the mass is so low compared to the mass of the water.










  • No, it’s recognizing that tinkering means different things now.

    In the 80s and 90s, if you were learning computers you had no choice but to understand how the physical machine worked and how software interacted with it. Understanding the operating system, and scripting was required for essentially any task that wasn’t in the narrow collection of tasks where there was commercial software. There was essentially one path (or a bunch of paths that were closely related to each other) for people interested in computers.

    That just isn’t the case now. There are more options available and many (most?) of them are built on top of software that abstracts away the underlying complexity. Now, a person can use technology and never need to understand how it works. Smartphones are an excellent example of this. People learn to use iOS or Android without ever knowing how it works, they deal with the abstractions instead of the underlying bits that were used to create it.

    For example, If you want to play games, you press a button in Steam and it installs. If you want to stream your gaming session to millions of people, you install OBS and enter your Twitch credentials. You don’t need to understand graphical pipelines, codecs, networking, load balancing, or worry about creating client-side applications for your users. Everything is already created for you.

    There are more options available in technology and it is completely expected that people distribute themselves amongst those options.