Sillychris

WOOOOOOH CANADA! That is all.

Biologists think that the classes of mammals and birds descended from reptiles. In both cases, new characteristics not previously seen in life emerged. ie Mammals became warm blooded, grew hair, and gave live birth (to name a few of the new characteristics that separated this new class of animal). My question is this: Allowing evolution to run its course, what kinds of new characteristics may show up in a new class of animal? Postulates for the sake of this discussion: 1) New characteristic means: Does not currently exist in any organism whatsoever (ie Putting gills on a mammal doesn't count. Use your imagination). 2) Allowing evolution to run its course means: Humans do not interfere. Although human evolution may be hypothesized on, assume that nature runs uninterrupted. Postulate #2 has the following consequences: -Cyborgs/computers as the next step is NOT a valid answer -We are just going to blow ourselves up is NOT a valid answer -Turning into pure energy is NOT a valid answer Generally, try to keep humans out of the discussion. However, you can discuss human biological evolution with careful discretion. 3) Regardless of your personal beliefs, we shall treat the current scientific model of natural selection as the mechanism of species diversity

It seems that the naysayers in this forum tend to develop tunnel vision over the engineering difficulties and practicality/economics of such a device. But the question was whether it was possible. The question was NOT whether humans could/would do it or whether it would happen in the forseeable future with technology we could predict at present. As such, I stand by my original answer: There is nothing in known physics that prohibits rearrangement of nuclear matter at will. All you need is energy.

156! Great score! Think you can make it blow apart after re-entry so the drop pods are a little more scattered? I also REALLY like the modded hitchiker idea. The "Clown Car" of drop ships.

We can transmute lead into gold, and do similar processes on a regular basis. "Transmutation" of elements became a well established field in the 20th century and earned the name "nuclear physics". In practice, it is much easier to transmute mercury into gold via neutron bombardment and this is in fact carried out on a regular basis to manufacture extremely high purity gold(generally for scientific applications). Before you point out that it would not be economically practical to transmute elements instead of just mining them, I would like to point out that the point of this thread is to investigate whether it is theoretically possible. Economics do not enter the discussion.

My first instinct for this challenge would be to make a bunch of rovers to push the kerball around. Maybe they could have retro-thrusters to pass the kerball with.

There is nothing necessarily prohibiting a single giant dropship, or using larger command modules with more Kerbals in each, or have external command seats strapped to probe cores etc. The challenge is intentionally open ended. Your goal is to get troops into orbit and rapidly deploy them to a target. Ship doesn't need to break up, but it sure is fun watching command modules spread out and cover a football field's worth of ground.

The above submission would have gained me 20 points if I had bothered to put it into orbit first, and if I had aimed for land, and if I had filled all the pods with Kerbals. It's an obvious design... what I am interested in seeing is the creative stuff people come up with.

Yeah, mod your brains out. The parakerbals don't need to have the parachutes attached to them, personally. My first dropship used a bunch of command modules to deploy troops. I will look at attaching parachutes to external comman seats in my next version. I'm hoping someone makes a gun mod.

That totally counts, and I like the direct and quick nature of your solution!

Yeah, it's more of a demonstration that you established the necessary devices for a sport. Switch between players using the ] key and take pictures of a Kerball getting kicked around. It would be turn based, but your goal is to to show that in theory, if all players could be controlled simultaneously, you would have a match.

I'd work on combining laser cooling (ie optical tweezers) and neutron bombardment.

Ship is not permitted to dock with other ships.

Build a dropship. Drop as many Kerbals as possible onto Kerbin from orbit in one ship. +1 for every surviving parakerbal. 1/2 points if they land in water without harpoons. Double points if they land on land with guns.

Why aren't there "like" buttons?!

Some suggestions for manipulating a Kerball: -Thrust -Abusing stabilization gyros and structural panels. -Catapults, perhaps? -Parts and Mods restrictions: None whatsoever, which brings me to my next point: Creating a mod and using it for the first time in human history in your Kersport: +10

It's 1957. The Krussians have just invented the world's first ball. It was named a Kerball, in honour of a renaissance cheese rendered as a sphere in a vacuum. The sport race is on and President Kennedy has vowed to make a sports team by 1969 to avenge the embarrassment of his country's loss of the adding K-to every word race of the 30's. Definition of a Kerbal sport: 1) There must be a "Kerball". This is a neutral object, usually opposing sides fight over it. (+1 for Kerball development) 2) There must be a way to win. Football players like to call this state "kicktory" or "Kicktorious". 3) There must be at least 2 competitors. +1 for modelling a mythic "Earth" sport +1 for inventing a completely new Kerbal sport (This bonus can not be combined with previous bonus) +1 for finding a way to not be in either of the two previous categories (This bonus can not be combined with previous two bonuses) +1 to +5 for style (To be judged. We'll figure out judging later) +1 for every Separate player (Can be Kerbal or robot. Must be distinct vessel) Player eligibility: a) Player must engage in the match. All players must not die or be rendered inoperative. c) Failure to meet previous condition will move your entry to the "Gory" category of competition. You must provide some kind of proof of all claims for scoring.

If it doesn't work, find a new job.

I think your number one priority for the first launch window should be to launch a moisture farm module and a hydroponic/power generation module. Both Robotic. If it works, start preparing for the first manned window.

I'm joining the discussion late, but here's my answer to the original question: I don't feel that we understand the human brain well enough to definitively answer this question. But, My gut feeling is that yes, it would be possible. We would need way better computers and mastery of neuroscience, but the human brain is a real world phenomenon. I see no reason it couldn't be modeled given sufficient computing power. How much computing power? Lots. How much is lots? Enough to model the human brain. Could be a while... or it could be this century. Or we might not be smart enough to ever make it happen, even though it is possible, in principle.

I wanted to have myself mummified and used as scaffolding for a satellite. Solar panel in each hand and a transmitter hat. Maybe some propulsion in my butt, that's close to the center of mass, right?

All ordinary matter is made out of protons, neutrons and electrons (actually up quarks, down quarks, and electrons but that's deeper than we need for transmutation purposes). Over the course of the 20th century, man had become increasingly more adept at transmutation. Gold from lead is now possible, as it is merely a rearrangement of the nuclear matter. In fact, high purity gold IS manufactured by neutron bombardment of mercury for extremely high purity scientific applications. Back to your question: How do we do it? By putting the protons and neutrons where the recipe says they need to be. Electrons are plentiful and will just show up on their own. How does one arrange protons and neutrons? With forces. There are four forces we know of... well, actually 3 but for all practical purposes at our energy levels there are 4: Nuclear strong force, Nuclear weak force, electromagnetic force and gravity. Master manipulation of the four forces and build your bucket of chicken out of air. You want more specific? This is distant future technology. How am I supposed to guess what kind of technology could exist in millions of years? However, physicists have become quite proficient at manipulating individual atoms in recent years. They have been quite proficient at changing atoms from one element to another since pre-ww2. Those are the two skills required for a Santa-Claus machine. Maybe we aren't as far as I would wager...

I am not sure exactly what you mean by magical spheres, but I think what you mean is to take the 2kg of feathers and compact them until they occupied the same volume as 1 kg of iron. In your situation, the feather ball would have twice the density of the iron ball and would accelerate more quickly in an atmosphere. Let's do some grade 11 physics: ΣF=ma. Your sum of forces are Gravity and air resistance. There are various methods of modelling air resistance, but the largest term is always proportional to cross sectional area. Stick a constant in front and we've got an equation of F(drag)=CA where C is the modelling constant and A is the cross sectional area. F(gravity), as established by Newton is quite easy near the surface of the Earth. F(grav)=mg where g is 9.8m/s^2 Ok, let's put together the equation of motion for these spheres in freefall. ΣF=F(Grav)+F(drag) and if we define down as positive then this becomes ΣF=|F(Grav)|-|F(drag)|=mg-CA=ma. Let's divide everything by m to make it easier to read: a=g-CA/m The cross sectional areas being equal, you can see quite plainly by inspection that a larger mass in the denominator in the second term makes CA/m smaller, and thus more of g is "left" to go towards the object's acceleration. Note: The above argument is only valid for objects of identical shape and size with differing masses in the presence of an atmosphere.

The question was whether it's possible, not whether we're close.