​How To Solve Earth’s Orbital Waste Crisis For Just $30 ● An Invention In Western Turkey Over 2,000 Years Ahead ● The US Just Discovered The World’s Largest Lithium Reserve

How to solve Earth’s orbital waste crisis for just $30

It is a known fact that the Earth’s orbit is already extremely cluttered with space debris. The danger of chain collisions with potentially catastrophic consequences for space missions is also quite real. As well as the fact that urgent solutions are being sought to clear the Earth’s orbit of the more than 100 trillion pieces of debris that are there.

The solution was recently provided by a team of students from Brown University in Rhode Island, USA. Not exactly to clean the orbit of space debris, but to prevent the accumulation of others.

More precisely, students launched a small cube satellite (CubeSat) called SBUDNIC on board a SpaceX rocket on May 25, 2022. Then they kept in touch with him through a radio device. What is interesting about this satellite is that it was equipped with a small plastic sail that opened when the satellite reached an altitude of 520 kilometers as planned.

With the help of this trivial invention, at great cost, the satellite was gradually directed towards the Earth’s atmosphere. In March of this year, he reached 470 kilometers. In August 2023, it was already at a distance of 147 kilometers from the Earth, where radio communication with it was lost. Later, it burned up in the atmosphere, somewhere over Turkey.

Those who started the research demonstrated not only that this whole sea of ​​waste could be avoided at some ridiculous cost, but that we can do it now. And if we talk about costs, then the entire operation, from the creation of the satellite to its destruction in the atmosphere, cost about 10 thousand dollars. A plastic sail cost about $30.

An invention of western Turkey, which was more than 2000 years ahead of its time

According to the archaeological evidence we have so far, the earliest man-made water transport canals were established about 6,000 years ago through Mesopotamia, followed soon after by canals in the Indus Civilization area. However, a surprising discovery in western Turkey shows us that there were communities that practiced it millennia before anything was known.

It is a Neolithic community that arose about 8,500 years ago, and whose traces were discovered in Yesilova Hoyuk, near the city of Izmir. By the way, it is already known that Turkey is a real El Dorado for prehistoric archeology, and that the traces of ancient cultures are just beginning to emerge. This is also because in the past archaeologists were much more inclined, as in Greece, to focus on the classical Hellenistic or medieval period.

Returning to the community in question, it becomes clear that it was different from an even older one, from Catalhuyuk, whose origins can be traced back about 10 thousand years. A clue to this difference comes from the way they built their houses. If the residents of Čatalguyuk built their houses next to each other or on top of each other, like apartment buildings, the residents of Yesylov Goyuk lived isolated from each other and with an independent roof system.

As for the mentioned invention, an artificial watercourse, it was discovered relatively recently. According to the group of archaeologists who excavated there, the canal would have been 6.5 meters wide and would have passed through the center of the settlement. So far, although it is estimated that only a small part of this canal has been excavated, parts of it extending over 220 meters have been discovered. However, according to calculations, it would be much higher.

That it was a work elaborately developed earlier and which already had a tradition is shown by its stone-encrusted edges, like the earthen embankment that surrounds the canal. Any way you look at it, it’s an amazing invention for the time it was created, 8,200 years ago.

All that is known about a mysterious Neolithic community in western Turkey is that it disappeared almost 6,500 years ago. 500 years earlier, the people of Mesopotamia had built what was believed to be the world’s first artificial water channel.

The US has just discovered the world’s largest lithium reserves

A group of volcanologists from the University of Oregon, the New Zealand Institute of Geological and Nuclear Sciences, and the mining company Lithium Americas Corp. just published a specialized article in the journal Science, in which they report not only the discovery of the largest lithium deposits in the world, but also, what we were interested in, the determination of how they were formed.

The deposits are located in the so-called McDermitt Caldera in southern Oregon and northern Nevada, a caldera 45 kilometers long and 35 kilometers wide. In fact, the potential of the caldera was known as early as 1953, when uranium and mercury were mined there. Later, reserves of antimony, cesium and, apparently, lithium were discovered.

As for the caldera in question, it began to form about 19 million years ago as part of the Yellowstone volcanic chain. The authors of the latest study say that around 16 million years ago, magma began to push its way to the surface again, a geological process that led to the formation of Montana’s mountain ranges.

As a result of this process, numerous cracks appeared, which allowed previously formed deposits of lithium to reach close to the surface. How much lithium? According to prospectors, there will be at least 100 million tons. And this means that the US has just moved into 1st place, overtaking Chile, in the top countries with the largest lithium deposits in the world. And with this, they really impressed, given the rise in the price of lithium.

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