My understanding is that this does work, but there has to be very low humidity to minimize the Greenhouse Effect. The water can’t be very deep either. So what temperature it works at will vary depending on those two variables.
I read in one of his books if you were to suddenly teleport a nuclear submarine into space, the crew would actually survive alright for a while, as the submarine is airtight and they get their oxygen from internal sources anyway. I believe eventually though the nuclear reactor would overheat because they wouldn’t be able to release excess heat effectively which would shut down the reactor and then quickly suffocate the crew.
Yes, many “depends.”
While the book is lots of fun and heartily recommended, it’s also full of cheats. Usually they are the exact opposite of this vague throwaway sentence: the more detail he goes into the more he hides that he’s answering the question he wants to answer rather than the question the person thought they were asking. That works two ways. Most obviously, the resulting book is far more fun than a straightforward scientific analysis.
The subtle point is one that should be on the cover in capital letters. When asking and answering questions, it’s absolutely essential that everything be meticulously, even tediously, defined in exacting detail so that the answer actually provides the proper information that covers a well-thought out, properly-constructed, question.
Scientists know this. Real science is written this way and quickly gets to be too technical and too narrow and too boring for outsiders to work through. They do it because that means any other trained scientist can get the same results or find a reason why. Translation between insiders and outsiders suffers nonetheless.
We see it here everyday. People ask questions that seem straightforward (like so many of the question in What If) but are neither straightforward nor exactly what they really wanted to know. And answerers make their own assumptions about the words, going down paths that seem obtuse to the asker. Ill feelings follow.
Putting science into English is truly one of the great problems of our day. So is putting English into English, to be honest.
New Zealand is on a different continent from Australia.
Depends on who you ask. From Google’s front page for: what continent is new zealand part of
New Zealand is an island country and one of the many islands that make up Oceania. It includes the continent of Australia and 13 other countries—Papua New Guinea, New Zealand, Fiji, Solomon Islands, Vanuatu, Samoa, Kiribati, Micronesia, Tonga, Marshall Islands, Palau, Tuvalu, and Nauru.Aug 26, 2020
[
GSA Today - Zealandia: Earth’s Hidden Continent
https://www.geosociety.org › gsatoday › archive › article
](https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=&ved=2ahUKEwiO4t_5vML6AhU-GTQIHfSkARIQFnoECAwQAQ&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.geosociety.org%2Fgsatoday%2Farchive%2F27%2F3%2Farticle%2FGSATG321A.1.htm&usg=AOvVaw26v3iKh70El3vVo7IXCBZr)New Zealand and New Caledonia are large, isolated islands in the southwest Pacific Ocean. They have never been regarded as part of the Australian continent, …
That paper calls for a new continent called Zealandia that would include New Zealand and New Caledonia. A few other sites have adopted the usage, but it’s obviously not reached the general public yet.
Although reducing Oceania to Australia is not much of a fact.
We are at war with Oceania! We have always been at war with Oceania!
It also doesn’t mention the temperature underneath the tray of ice. The ground can be frozen and the air temperature be above freezing. If the tray is on the ground or perhaps concrete in an area that doesn’t see sunlight during the day, this is absolutely possible.
The reason the water freezing in a tray works has nothing to do with the temp of the ground. It’s all because the heat of the water radiates into space. Space has a much lower temperature than anything on Earth, so the cooling effect is high.
Since it’s radiative cooling, it helps a whole lot to maximize the surface to volume ratio (thin layer of water) and minimize any interference by the atmosphere (clear night with low humidity). Ideally you want the ground under the trays to be a good insulator, so the concrete you suggest may not be the best. This effect works best in arid areas, i.e. deserts.
If you were to tie a rope around the earth at its equator, the additional length of rope needed to elevate the entire rope one foot above the surface of the earth is 6.3 ft.
Made me laugh. Doubleplusgood.
Right. The dry air is a poor conductor that insulates the exposed water surface and container from any heat in the surroundings. Conventional insulation has to surround the rest of the container. The water temperature has to start low enough to cool sufficiently in the hours of total
darkness available. The effect is described as a very thin layer of ice on top of the water.
There’d be no surviving going on.
In the vacuum of outer space the sub would explode because of pressure differential.
No. Not unless they were made of tissue paper.
Yep. And this is why frost will sometimes form on a vehicle’s windshield when it’s parked outside, even though the air temperature never dipped below 0 °C. And sometimes it’s only the windshield, since it’s often the case that the other windows are not pointing toward space.
The westernmost capital city in the western hemisphere is Mexico City.
Yeah, I’m starting to wonder if these are the same guys as who came up with “If you say “ORANGE” really slowly, it sounds like G-U-L-L-I-B-L-E.”
But how would you keep the rope from getting wet in the oceans?
I sure hope this is a joke. Because it reads serious.
It really can be true that: “Truth is stranger than fiction.”
We were talking about tissue paper subs, right? 
BTW… whats the crush depth of tissue paper anyway?
Yupppers… i didn’t quite think before I posted. A bad idea, in general!