crubs

My main concern is how we're going to to provide vitamin D to our early colonists. They're going to be deprived of UV light for a while in their EVA suits and pressurized buildings. It's going to be very costly to send shipments of supplements, so I'm curious what your thoughts are. I suppose they could get it from fish and eggs, but I'm not sure how practical animal farming is going to be early on.

If you haven't seen this yet. If the Soviets had beaten the US, we'd probably have landed on Mars to have one-upped them by now.

I think the US should alternate between the two systems like I do. For the purpose of science and engineering, I always use metric. However, for everyday practical measurements such as my height or room temperature or distance traveled, I find imperial to be more convenient.

An ODST platform would allow you to get boots on the ground practically anywhere in the world in an extremely short period of time compared to other transport methods. Your right, the payoff would be small but I can't think of much better.

If they're an interstellar civilization than going up against them would probably be like Native Americans fighting against European guns by using spears. The only thing that they might even raise an eyebrow to is nukes. But if we were to nuke them, they would probably just nuke us harder. The best option would probably be just to establish our conditions of surrender early on. A more interesting question would be how our military could exploit space to fight other countries. I'd say ODST platforms on centrifuged orbital stations would be possible with current technology, but it would be far too expensive to be worth it.

Whenever someone makes this argument, you have to keep in mind that it's a completely subjective probability. What if the probability of life "appearing" on any given planet is 10^-1000? In that case, the fact that life exists at all is statistically a miracle. At this point, the hypothesis that Earth holds the only life in the universe is completely valid. And what do you have to say to people who insist that God exists due to similar personal experiences such as your own? You may have been looking for God and claimed not to have found Him, but what would you say to someone who was not intending to find God and yet did? The same applies to angels and demons. Heck, you're convinced that the phenomena you observed were "ghosts" and "aliens", but what if someone were to tell you that you were actually observing spiritual entities? Such as angels, demons, or even deities? I've certainly heard countless claims both ways. I can explain many of these things through natural phenomena such as sleep paralysis, but I can't explain them all. Personally, I always raise an eyebrow of skepticism whenever I hear of "oogie-boogie" claims such as these, but as scientists, we are supposed to be open minded. Because we are dealing with phenomena that we don't understand, which is the entire point of science. The ancients may have considered fire to be some sort of spiritual magic because they didn't understand it. Now that science has helped us understand it we don't consider it such. If we can ever prove that consciousness can exist independent of the body, it would likely be considered paranormal until science understood it, at which point it would just be considered another part of nature. Now I'd rather not go off track and get into that discussion; I'm just using it as an example.

Plutonium cuz dat stuff is da BOMB

We can still save it! TARS, analyze the spin!

Centrifuges bro. At that point the problem is complexity and the amount of money the government is willing to fork over.

If the goal is to save fuel, then why not just add one or two external fuel tanks like the the orange shuttle tank? If it could SSTO from a planet with 1.3g, I doubt this would be a problem. Long-story-short, it's okay to be scientifically inaccurate as long as it's awesome. Conventional rocket launches are far more dramatic.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aerocapture#In_practice According to Wiki, aerocaptures have never been performed. Do any of you have sources to show otherwise?

Maybe instead of simply having the centrifuge jam, it could be an act of terrorism by some nutty anti-human fundamentalist or something... Otherwise, about how many people do you plan to have on this ship? I'm assuming it's hundreds at least.

What ages is KerbalEdu appropriate for? The only kids I see playing computer games are elementary school kids. Do you think they'd be capable of comprehending the mechanics?

Theoretically this is entirely possible. The key differences between male and female ultimately comes down to parental investment, and this begins at the gametic level. Males give sperm cells with small mass and make practically no contribution to the developing organism other than DNA. Females on the other hand have massive gametes that are energetically expensive to make, which limits her ability to make them. Furthermore, females in our species have to carry that egg around for nine months as it drains her nutrients, while the father gets to sit around, eat, and watch TV. Even after pregnancy, they still drain mom's nutrients in the form of breast milk. In other species, females have to sit on their eggs for a long period of time before they hatch. Furthermore, females tend to be primary caretakers until the children are on their own. With all the investment and work females have to put up with, they tend to be very picky about which males they mate with. This often means extravagant features such as those found in peacocks. Or in many mammals, strong, healthy, hard-working, and faithful males. To paraphrase Richard Dawkins in "The Selfish Gene", the evolutionary hypothesis for the origin of biological gender is as follows: Perhaps one organism decided to reduce the amount of investment he put into a single offspring and instead aimed for quantity as opposed to quality. Conversely, other organisms compensated the lack of investment from their mates by increasing their relative investment to ensure that their offspring would make it. This in turn allows the slackers to slack off even more... Over time this becomes a positive feedback loop that leaves us with two sexes.

Wow, I haven't seen that picture before, that's quite well done. I hope female kerbals will resemble that when they come out.

We could learn from the "Are you serious?" meme.

In many of those species, the fact that females are larger deals with the simple fact that egg cells are exponentially larger than sperm. With insects, whom are already small, this is an evolutionary constrain. Females have to be bigger simply because that's the minimum size they need to successfully reproduce. In other species, males may be smaller due to the difference in parental investment. Since all they need to do is deliver energetically-cheap, easy-to-make sperm, they maintain a small size to save calories. The females, on the other hand, have to do all the work to make up for the lazy father. That means becoming a big, strong, ferocious predator that may eat her mate after he's done his only duty in the relationship. However many species that are both social and intelligent, such as humans, males are selected to be larger because the gap in parental investment is much smaller. Females select big, strong, hard working, and faithful men to father their children. Conversely, men maximize their fitness by selecting women whom are younger, which means being more childlike. This is because younger women are going to be able to make more kids on average between the time of first copulation and menopause. Childlike characteristics in humans means smaller bodies, less rigid faces, and bigger eyes, to name a few things. Since kerbals are analgous to humans, I expect kerbal females to share dimorphisms with human females. I think many players would be confused by females being larger and more ferocious of the genders. As for the childbirth thing, I figure it would be possible if the head started as being more rounded instead of cylindrical, which is why kerbal females might have more rounded heads. Otherwise, I suppose kerbals could be egg layers like pokemon...

I'm guessing that we all want to see female kerbals introduced in a future release. But the question remains, what should female kerbals look like? From the mods I've seen thus far, the only modifications made basically comes down to a feminine hairstyle and lipstick. I imagine that if a dimorphism in kerbal parental investment exists as it does in humans, then dimorphisms in anatomy will also occur. That is, I expect to see females be smaller in both volume and mass, have proportionally bigger eyes, and possibly a more "rounded" head. Otherwise It's hard for me to think of much else beyond hairstyles and lipstick. Do you guys have any thoughts? Also, do you think we should have different kerbal races? Like red kerbals from kerbofell, with curved ladders? Curved. Ladders.

Why not use a hybrid approach? That's how I landed on eve...

Well I guess that depends on how one defines "death". The medical definition is simply "cardiac arrest". Cardiac arrest in itself is possibly perceivable since one can be conscious for a moment even after the heart has stopped. Sleep is nothing like death. However, unconsciousness due to anesthesia arguably is. One doesn't percieve a passage of time under the knife, unlike when one sleeps.

Species may not need to be genetically modified, they grew panda fetuses in a cat womb (wiki interspecies pregnancy). Ectogenesis chambers would probably be unnecessary except in specific cases. Your right about the need for epigenetic mechanisms in place to get from DNA to an organism, in part that what makes cloning difficult, but that understanding has resulted in improved technique. E.g. one method, that has been developed is to transfer a somatic cell into an oocyte, then repeat the nuclear transfer from the embryo to a new oocyte. In theory, the DNA has gone under much epigenetic reprogramming which makes development far easier for the second embryo. What if you forget a species at home? It seems quite inevitable actually. Besides, storing billions of cells in isolated chambers could not only be expensive, but the weight could begin to add up. Besides, species are 99% identical in sequences so a lot of the information is going to be redundant. This won't be a problem if the information is stored digitally. We could simply tell the computer which sequences have allelic variance, and in theory, we could document every single SNP in the human population on a thumb drive. Beaming the genetic code across the stars would be not only faster, but far more cost effective then having to load them onto an interstellar ship. Synthesizing DNA might not be easy, but I wouldn't be surprised if we gain the technology to synthesize entire animal genomes within the next few decades. We could clone the mammoth as a proof of concept.

Queso you've quickly ruined this discussion with a very simple, straightforward, cost effective solution. I was hoping for a more overcomplicated kerbal-esque response such as some sort of interplanetary/interstellar ark. Just as NFUN posted, an overloaded bathtub in space. Actually, the Biblical Noah had it easy, but I won't go there since that gets on the border with religion... The human genome would easily fit onto a thumb drive, one could have many species stored in digital form, and transport many more via radio. But yes, one would probably want a few "seed" species to bring along just so one has something to work with. Reconstruction of prokaryotic genomes can be done with modern technology. We've been able to reconstruct a simple eukaryotic yeast chromosome. Extend that technology and you could clone multiple species and grow them via inter-species pregnancy. Why transport them all? Gee, I guess we could simply have a bare-minimum ecosystem just complex enough to support a farm world. But wouldn't that be a little boring? Isn't our culture better off with more biodiversity? Not to mention that we often find new uses for a given species even after having known about them for a long time.

By some estimations there are over 8 million species on planet earth. Given that another earth-like planet is available for colonization, how exactly do we get all those species there? Say we thicken Mars' atmosphere or discover an earth-like planet around Alpha Centauri and are capable of going to 40% light speed for a few trillion dollars (assuming the vessel is no larger than two ISS combined). What would be the most effective way of transporting all those species to the new world? How would we ship a blue whale? Keep in mind that we may have to ship several from the same species to copy over as much genetic diversity as possible.

Yeesh, I didn't realize pluto was that inclined. Did New Horizons even bother doing a plane change?