problemecium

^ I had a feeling someone would say this. I don't want to start a big debate, but long story short, we have plenty of math telling us how the forces behave, and we have some decent theories regarding waves, potentials, and carrier particles. Where those come from and what makes them tick, fundamentally, is still poorly understood, as it is for all fundamental forces.

^ This. The law of conservation of mass still exists, and there's also the issue of slime molds going everywhere you don't want them. Regarding difficulty, the difference between using genetic engineering vs. breeding is really one of time. If you have enough time, selective breeding will get the job done, but if you don't, and you have oodles of money, genetic engineering will get it done faster.

Familiar with MOND? This isn't the only theory I've encountered wherein gravity doesn't perfectly follow the inverse square law as we'd always presumed. At this point I'm starting to have a hunch it really doesn't. That parable with the satellite scans and the rock also reminds me of String Theory's ideas about tiny rolled-up extra spacial dimensions.

They should make a Spore 2 targeted at teens and older players. You know, like the original Spore was supposed to be ;P

+1 parameciumkid likes this.

IRL: The Dragon v2. Sooo shiny O_O Sci-fi: Probably this, the Abaddon battleship from EVE Online. I just love how robust it is and its glorious laser spam ^^ Oh, and if I may nominate a second one, Sidonia is pretty nice too (the big one, not the generic mech):

There there. I know how you feel. I'm not even that old and I've had lots of pets die on me. And no, not because I'm a bad owner. We humans just tend to live longer than dogs and parakeets xP Did you discover or witness her death? I know from experience that can be the most disturbing part.

I've done it before, but A: I don't remember exactly what it was. I could probably sort it out again, but that brings us to B: I don't wanna spoil it for everyone else xD

Life finds a way

*reads title* WELCOME TO SCIENCE! xD (nobody actually understands the fundamental reason magnets work) Ahem. The above responses are right though. Your original equation is modifying the force effectively by linear interpolation, making it decrease to zero in a linear fashion with distance. On a graph this would make a straight line (segment), which is why it's known as a linear function. What you want is a rational function, i.e. one that makes a hyperbolic curve that decreases ever closer to zero without ever touching it, and which increases very sharply at short distances. The basic recipe is to divide by some version of the distance, e.g. F = f / m (but where f is the force at 1 unit rather than zero - because at zero units the force would be infinite). In this particular case, due to the inverse square law, you want to be using the square of the distance rather than the distance directly, giving you: F = f / (m * m) From that point you just tune the scale for m and the magnitude of f until things play nice.

1. Invent a warp drive 2. Fly to a magnetar 3. Somehow rotate it so one of its magnetic poles is pointed at Earth 4. ?????? 5. Profit

A bit off-topic, but that's among the more likely reasons we haven't encountered extraterrestrials. If we're this careful now, then in the future if we discover Pandora or something, we're liable to take every possible measure not to even be noticed. So likewise, the extraterrestrials might be treating us the same. Not that I'm saying anything for certain, just possibilities

Regarding the universe vs. the observable universe, something's been bugging me of late. How, specifically, do we know for sure that the universe is so much bigger than the observable portion, or bigger at all? - You say in the OP that if the CMB were near the edge of the universe, a "hole" would appear from which the radiation would fade over time. Okay. Well we haven't been around nearly long enough to be able to measure any such change. Perhaps it is fading, but since we're basically looking at a freeze-frame, we can't tell. And coincidentally... there IS a mysterious dark patch in the CMB. I'm not going to jump to conclusions here, but it could be related. - We keep building bigger and more sensitive telescopes, but we've never looked so far into the past that we see the primordial universe. Sure, we've spotted the CMB, and distant quasars appear younger, but where is the dense, super-distorted cloud of proto-galaxies we should be seeing out there at around 13.7 billion light-years? Rather, what we see are more and more fully-formed galaxies, then... nothing at all. This could mean that the universe is enormous and the light simply hasn't arrived yet, but there's little reason we shouldn't be able to detect the light from the beginning of the universe (again, we can see the CMB, but what about light from just after that?). And perhaps our telescopes just aren't sensitive enough yet, in which case we'll find out when we find out. The fact that beyond the visible galaxies we see nothing suggests about as strongly, given Occam's Razor, that there aren't any more and we're looking at the edge.

I admit I didn't read the book, but I did just go watch the movie yesterday and Matt Damon's Watney was pretty amusing.

How about negative matter? Negative asidoazide azide for instance? Actually scratch that. I know an even more dangerous substance: the stuff that makes up a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exotic_star#Planck_star That or Liquid Schwartz. ;P

We have no reason to assume that you wouldn't see a grand swath of galaxies stretching out endlessly from any point in the universe; but neither do we have any reason to assume that you would. The Cosmological Principle is founded on the presumption that the laws of physics are the same everywhere, which doesn't necessarily mean that the universe is homogeneous forever. It may well be that the cloud of galaxies simply ends and yields to infinite empty space. Or, perhaps, "wraps around" like a game of Asteroids so you look out into the distance and eventually see Earth again. And personally that makes me wonder this: If there are an infinite number of galaxies, then there must be an infinite amount of space for them to occupy. Thus the universe as generated in the Big Bang must have expanded to an infinite size in a finite amount of time, meaning it must have expanded infinitely fast. Were that the case, how would anything be able to condense into matter and form galaxies if it's all rocketing away from everything else at infinite speed? I have thus concluded that while the universe is very large, the universe as we know it (space with galaxies and stars in it) can't literally go on forever.

I was all excited, but then I went outside and there were clouds all over the place :C

It sounds like a bill ensuring that mining companies get to keep the rocks they mine, not that they own the whole asteroid. So if I go land on Ceres, I still can't sue someone else for landing on Ceres, per the Outer Space Treaty. Conversely, when I bring the rocks home, people can't go demanding I give them my rocks per the 2015 SPACE act.

But Halloween is always on the 31st o_O

My prior readings on the Dyson Sphere have told me this: - Basically everything acts like a gas on a large enough scale: things like gravity end up becoming more powerful over the length of the object than the bonds between its atoms. No known material is anywhere close to strong enough to build a rigid hollow sphere big enough to enclose the Sun. - If you did build a giant sphere around the Sun, due to some interesting mathematics, it wouldn't be affected by the Sun's gravity and would thus drift freely as it orbited the galactic core. Given enough time, the Sun would reach the edge of the sphere and burn through the wall. At this point the sphere would be once again subject to its gravity, but... it's kinda ruined now. - A non-rigid sphere could be built around the Sun: either a cloud of satellites orbiting at different angles or a formation of satellites hovering using radiation pressure. At these scales, radiation pressure is enormous and can support an incredible mass, but the necessary density has a maximum threshold, in terms of mass per unit surface area. Even a piece of tissue paper is much too heavy to do this, so we'd have to invent some kind of ultra-thin, ultra-light solar array. - If all of the energy emitted by the Sun is trapped within the Dyson sphere, all of the space within will inevitably reach the temperature of the Sun. Kinda bad for people on Earth. - The Dyson Sphere needn't enclose the entire Solar system. More commonly, plans involve a radius of 1 AU or even smaller. Nevertheless, this is big enough for all of the above concerns to be valid.

0 Go Team Zero!

4/10 for having a fat, blunt fairing and not using nose cones where you should really use some nose cones.

Due to wars, your map is out of date.