Thanks. I've got an OpenAI subscription and tried this in the past, and got a handful of results, but nothing comprehensive. Perhaps it is better now, or I could change the way I ask.
No prob, see if there's anything useful in any of the links I added to the post. I'm always interested in good benchmarks and test cases, as I usually don't have enough of my own to justify my expensive pro subscriptions. (I did not review them myself as I don't know what I'm looking at.)
A few years later, the gravitational deflection of the Himalayas on a plumb line by Airy proved less than expected, which suggested that mountains have 'roots' that extend below them, displacing more dense rock--like icebergs more or less.
I used the gravitational force of the Longmenshan range to calculate the perturbations in the elastic stress field of the Earth's crust in Sichuan province, China, to estimate the tectonic forces in the region, which caused the 2008 Wenchuan earthquake: https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/201...
Think of those numbers as one kind of in extreme case argument.
Another reality is that most of the global grid scale energy usage is not transport via mobile batteries that benefits most from high energy density lithium batteries that pack maximal energy from least weight.
Battery farms don't move, they can use other battery chemistries that are cheaper in resources and weigh a lot more per energy unit than lithium while still powering cities, smelters, processing plants, etc.
As for desalination in general, yes, there will be a lot more of that in coming years, fresh potable water supplies are stretched from a global PoV.
There were no alphabets in the Americas before European contact. Mayan had written mathematics and hieroglyphics, and some Quechuan speaking peoples had string that had symbolic knots that had some mathematical representation (I don't know if it allowed arithmetic or was just record keeping).
Sequoia developed the Cherokee syllabary (where symbols represent syllables instead of vowels/consonants) in the 1800s after seeing white men reading, and figuring out what they were doing (he spoke little English and could not read it). This is the first real written indigenous language in the Americas.
The Skeena characters shown here are obviously derived from European characters, as was the Cherokee syllabary. I think most written forms of native languages in the Americas are similar.
The Cree have a script which is far from European characters but was nonetheless developed for the Cree by a missionary in the 1800s. The Inuit have modified it for their language.
I don't know much about indigenous languages in the rest of the world.
Rocks could be potential sources. Crystals that large are by no means rare, with feldspars being the most common on Earth and perhaps on most rocky planets (quartz is well known of course but I think would be rare without the magmatic fractionation that happens due to plate tectonics, which is perhaps unique to Earth in the solar system.)
Volcanic glass (eg obsidian) is also shiny and by no means rare in the solar system.
Many asteroids are also metallic, and perhaps metal crystals or fracture planes could produce reflectors of the right size.
Don't quote me on this but I think a lot of the change has to do with fire and flood suppression. Certainly on the Konza prairie and similar areas, small trees (post oaks and eastern red cedar) grew in natural fire breaks like bluffs, and individual trees would live for several hundred years. Floodplains would have large cottonwoods which can withstand seasonal inundation but wouldn't necessarily be thick forest otherwise. And the prodigious lightning storms and (throughout the Holocene) burning by native tribes for hunting kept trees off of the uplands.
Do not quote me either but you are correct. Prairies depend on fire as do most native forests. Many trees are dependent on fire for their off-spring to succeed (Jack Pine, Red/White Pine, Bur/Northern/Pin Oak) and to kill off invasive species (prairies). Prescribed burns are critical in maintaining these eco-systems and are an under utilized resource. They require 'perfect' conditions (temp, humidity, timing, human resources), so are rarely done correctly if done at all. Source wildland firefighter in another life.
Because it's for your kid's bed. At 3 AM the previous night, they peed the bed, so you got the other one out and put it on, throwing this one in the laundry room. Then, today you washed it but the one on the bed already is still in good shape.
Or, you have sheets of a few different colors, each paired to a comforter with a different weight that is changed seasonally, or biweekly, depending on the preferences of you and your bedmate.
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