Bill Phil

Sustainable population is difficult to really quantify. This is because you can get different numbers depending on your assumptions. Like for example, if you don't assume agriculture you get a significantly lower number than the current population. If you assume sustainable agriculture with current technology, a few billion may be doable unless you run into the heat limit. But you can do some wild things with more advanced technology. Eventually the carrying capacity of the biosphere vs. the carrying capacity of the civilization become two distinct things - the biosphere could support th

Ah, no worries. I just never bothered to learn much about it. I could probably figure it out if I tried but I'm kind of set in my ways in how I play KSP. I don't play as often as I want to though, so I usually just end up doing an Apollo style mission to some target planet/moon and back. I do want to do some probe missions as well but I usually end up sending Kerbals. Being at the tip of the rocket makes it easier to design around in my experience.

I don't see the point of this statement. I was saying that your argument about probes being more difficult only applies if the communication mechanic is left on. It's a mechanic that I never figured out, and I have always played without it from the beginning, long before it was even added. I know there's a number of others that do so as well. Still, not everyone plays with the same settings. But I don't see what your response is supposed to mean here. I do think that probes are more awkward to design rockets around though.

Not if you turn off the comm mechanic of the game, like I regularly do.

I'm the opposite. I'm more concerned about the negative effects of the slowing growth rate. I don't think overpopulation is a problem, or rather, it's just one element of the world and is a very solvable issue. Not a problem in and of itself but it can feed other problems due to how the world is organized and the systems in place.

Doing nothing would have led to even more devastation. Just because we could have handled it better does not mean that nothing would be better.

Well, 72, but yeah.

Well that actually could work, if you had a strong enough fan. Not efficient though. Catching spent propellant for a rocket though... not gonna work. You'll get nowhere fast.

It's almost always easier to fix Earth than go interstellar.

I mean, being cheaty is by no means an issue when we already have torchships confirmed.

NASA isn't a launch service provider. They'll probably keep trucking on doing much the same thing they've been doing.

There's a difference between what we think the supply is now and what it could be in the future. Indeed, there's a history of the supply for a given resource expanding in size over time as we discover or consider new sources. Even in the crust there's a high confidence that there's 2.2 billion tonnes of uranium in concentrations higher than 100 ppm. For conventional reactors that can last nearly a thousand years for 50 TWth capacity. Add in breeders and you get over 100 thousand years. And if the energy return on lower concentrations is reasonable in the future, then we could extract uraniu

Yeah, people are still doing ICF. Lasers can do it, but I don't think they're the best for ICF as it is. Heavy ion beams seem to have better performance but no one has built a heavy ion beam ICF system. But lasers are getting better and will continue to do so. It's just that there really isn't enough funding for fusion research, sadly.

I think that ICF is more likely to work out. It's hard on its own, but it looks like it has a better chance to me. But my point is that it's just one more obstacle to using tritium. Might as well try to avoid even needing it. Li7 isn't useless, it can breed tritium too. It costs energy and releases a neutron though. I don't understand what you're saying here. I never said to stop with fission. Fusion is worth developing. My point is that if early fusion reactors need tritium, we can breed it with fission reactors. And fission reactors have a much larger existing industry to

The uranium separation process is complicated, but some reactors can be fueled by natural uranium. Even those that aren't are generally fueled by low enriched uranium. It doesn't have to be endless, my point is that the extraction is a mature technology that can be used for mature technologies (fission reactors). Fission reactors can (and do) breed tritium from Li. Yes, smaller reactors can be said to generally cost less. They also generally perform worse. There's a few reasons for this, but basically miniaturizing fusion reactors isn't really in the cards right now.