Green Baron

I can't vote again it seems, but this makes more sense now. My bet is on ground based arrays, with participation of giant ones, like GMT, E-ELT for the light collection part. The TMT though may be too late for my aspiring time frame. Though they can resume construction now, first light has been shifted to 2027. I am confident we get an image of the orbit of an earth sized planet (planet >= 1 pixel) - together with a (more reasonable than now) atmospheric analysis if circumstances permit - before 2030. Term ends on the 31.12.2029 at 23:59 UTC. No surface features of course ...

It is an interesting question. But one can ask these people and they may describe their thoughts. Is a language even necessary for an internal dialogue ? Or is there a complexity threshold, maybe individually different, that sets a limit to these reflections ? Does complexity of thoughts develop parallel to language ? For basic thoughts like "hungry", "want to play", "angry", ... a language is not necessary. Many species of higher animals do this. Trained animals can make basic decisions, like choose a way, wait at a red traffic sign, return home from a task. Do they have an internal dialogue for this ? Is it more than running "firmware" ? I heavily doubt it think so.

*offers chair* Well, maybe it was in the 40s. E-ELT and TMT is the max that's possible with today's and partly tomorrow morning's tech. Yeah, one telescope alone will not have enough resolution to resolve a small rocky planet around the neighbour stars. It definitely will need interometry. The large single dish aperture makes it possible (or more probable) to collect enough light for a meaningful signal from such a faint object. I didn't make that clear enough.

Lead has come out of style because reasons . Most water installation stuff is, or plastic for in house. In this case, as is closes a circulation of hot water (in summer really hot because sun -> zenith) and is exposed to heavy insolation, plastic won't do. None. I am a fat lazy guy .

No hot shower today. The pressure valve of my solar water heater broke off. It is a proper bronze (or brass) cast part with a 1" thread. When unscrewed it serves as inlet for the circulation between the collector and the water tank. I never touched it, the highest force it ever had to bear was probably solar radiation. Today i touched it to open it up to control the content before the cold season ... and held it in my hand. The thread is neatly sheared off. It is not a big deal, i'll get me a new one. But until it is installed the sun will be too low to heat the whole content again.

There are a few directly imaged exoplanets and debris- and planetary disks. But things will surely get much better with the upcoming generation of telescopes.

Love it. A lot of useful info in here. To all of these, technology and material set a limit. The forty meter E-ELT telescope for example is about the max we can do right now and there had and has to be a lot of research work for all the components. Afaik the E-ELT isn't assumed to have its full resolution power right from the start, some more tech is in development. Good news: the E-ELT, once ready, is assumed to be able to resolve some more of the known planets from their stars. To image such small and faint things as exoplanets, usually outshone by their stars, in a reasonable time one needs a ludicrous resolution. Which is achieved by three things: aperture, aperture and aperture. This is either a single big platter, or several small dishes apart from each other. A big single one has much more area to collect photons than several small ones so does not need as much observation time. Several small ones are called an interferometer, which is what people are intensely working on right now. It has its own problems, like positioning accuracy, data management and processing, etc. First results in exoplanet interferometry are very nice, see the VLT for example. And hopefully soon the EHT and TMT. One more thing, many small sats probably won't help as much, you need a certain diameter to be able to distinguish clearly between noise from electronics or the background from the real signal you want. Not speaking of positioning and herding them all. The smaller they are, the closer false and real signals are together. If you prolong the exposure time instead because of too small an aperture, you also get many false signals. So, bigger is better. Which brings us back to aperture. And cost. $$$ Edit: and i am on the progressive side. If the economy doesn't crash and things are finished, there is a good chance that we have something nice (late) in the 20s. I hope ;-) By interferometry, maybe participation of the big ones. Project Starshot is a papertiger ;-)

It is a question of attitude and culture. Progress isn't about guns and fighting. It is about cooperation and sharing and we should get back to that because it has made us strong. Treaties can help, if people stick to them. If they ignore them we will have controversy. Imo.

One of the authors, Mr. Loeb, is a chair member of the Breakthrough Starshot project. Source: https://www.cfa.harvard.edu/~loeb/

It is a play of mind of these guys and will never be confirmed or falsified. It just adds to the noise around Oumuamua, its possible origins and history. The length index had already been corrected to 5/1 or even 3/1. The surface features, as far as they could have been interpreted, were concurrent with a very old asteroid. The observed acceleration that of a natural comet. Possible systems of origin are unclear, it has been underway for too long and too many potential encounters could have changed its path. That is what we know, the rest is modeling and more or less plausible suggestions or even speculations. The contradiction to classic solar system objects is its apparent density and surface features. But the explanation with a comet or comet fragment that formed a harder shell by sublimation of volatiles and exposure to radiation and particle bombardment for billions of years is much more plausible than a cut loose solar sail. And we already know that not every system is like our system. In fact, very few seem to be. So more possible ways of life for Ummagumma like objects can be expected in the future. And, frankly, in contradiction to what the paper suggests, i doubt that a such a thin surface as they suggest would really be intact after a long time in interstellar space.

Afaik one Jupiter's moons orbits retrograde which makes it a potentially captured kbo, but not necessarily interstellar. Otoh, it may explain why we aren't allowed to attempt a landing on Europa ...

Nothing travels in quantum entanglement. If you send two cards to two different persons and tell them one is a king, the other a queen, they will immediately know what the other one has when looking at their own card. M-theory has 11 dimensions (there were 13 before iirc). But afaik it has become a little out of fashion since a decade or so. And these dimensions may reveal themselves in a given environment ("universe") or not. And it is just mathemagics, not necessarily "real". Valid until correction :-)

Ok, this was to be expected sooner or later: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1810.11490.pdf They speculate about the artificial origin thing. It can't be falsified nor proved, Oumuamua is beyond any observation since a long time. Maybe we will see similar objects in the future. Until then, it may be best to stick with the original and widely accepted explanation of a comet like object with a very old surface.

Adding to this, one can actually work with the different aging and replacement rates of different cells and cell types. Example: Tooth enamel is built once as a child and not replaced, while the material in bones is replaced every seven to ten years because bones do modify during an individuals lifetime, reflecting strength, muscle buildup, etc. Stable isotopes thus reflect the material composition of the area the individual lived in during its lifetime. Knowing this, one can tell if somebody actually spent the last years of her/his life in the same place where he/she was raised. Nice for archaeologists :-) (Search spell: stable strontium isotopy)

Hi :-) But we are constantly and inevitably decaying. And in order for this process to be temporarily delayed we must transform energy in our metabolism. Life is much less mysterious and by no means defying anything if you see it as a more or less complex metabolism, an exchange of matter and energy in a specific organism-dependent combination with the surrounding. Once the combination is wrong or polluted or the exchange partly disrupted by internal or external factors, the organism stops to work properly. An adaptation can only occur within the physical limits of the material and the processes that take place. There is a maximum size for a frame of bones, a maximum theoretical age for a tree or a mammal, a minimum size of a population to stay healthy, and so on. You can see the process of aging only as an adaption if the environment exerts a pressure on an organism, that longevity gives it a reproductive advantage. This is clearly not the case in small mammals for example, they produce so many descendants that some species have actually developed an intraspecies aggressiveness (which they can loose during a generation under population control, example tamed and household animals). Aging plays no role in those and thus the wild individuals e.g. of small rodents sometimes just survive the term between birth and reproduction (if they get the chance). Deferred aging does play a role in humans, and there is quite some work on the necessity or usefulness of grandparents for example. But this is a strong observer bias, if i may say so :-) And anyway, there are vertebrates that may get as old or (a little) older than humans, without the hypothetical usefulness of grandparents ... Edit: ninja'd :-)

I have never really understood what the scatter generation depends on. Seems like the switch in the options is just a hint, not a command :-) Linux, last used version 1.4.5, few mods (KW, waypoint man, station parts, alarm clock, transfer calc, scansat, engineer, realplume, precise node, buffalo rover, near future solar).

Moon sugar ? :-)

Right with the "fine-ness". It takes care that the correct values are applied even if the program runs on computers with different performance. Well, in your example, if the speed is 10m/s, the rocket has moved 10m after 1 second. But the granularity of the clock is in micro- or even nanoseconds as it runs many times a second. PCs have a heartbeat of Gigahertz and 4-20 hearts :-), so on a PC your loop will run thousands of times a second if you let it. If movement is linear you're fine, but it isn't, you come down from some terminal velocity to 0. Also your thrust curve varies, as does center of gravity, air density, etc. So you have to interpolate between values or look them up from pre-calculated stuff before you apply them to your formulas and use integration methods for the forces you calculated, as @K^2 hast stated in detail. I would run them in different modules and do some communication between them so it is easier to keep them apart and later try tinkering with multithreading if Python permits. Suggestion: In your loop, first call the calculation of is-values and apply variable values for whatever you have as controlling stuff. Write calculated values to an independent data structure. Then call the controller module and let it read the structure, and compare it to what should be and calculate corrections to the controlling variable as it sees fit, and feed them back via another structure to the calculation routine. It all sounds that easy, but it isn't. Your rocket will probably paint funny things on the sky on the first tries :-) Also you must take care that the calculator has finished before the other one reads and vice versa. The biggest problem is probably choosing the right data structures for fast access and calculation ... ?

I am not a programmer but i do some hobby tinkering with a similar thing (for private use ;-)). Unfortunately i have no clue of Python but some understanding of C/C++, but i am not far enough to show something off. It is no witchcraft; seen from a very high level, in principle you 1 setup 2 loop 3 cleanup. 1 On program startup for every object you have, you setup the starting parameters. Lets assume a tank full of stuff and an engine consuming stuff. Then you enter the loop. 2 in the loop (fixed or variable doesn't matter), you simply calculate the deltaTime between the current and the last loop run, and apply that to your formulas for engine consumption, tank content, center of gravity, velocity, acceleration, whatever. The new values are used at the next loop run. 3 well, yeah. Cleanup after the loop has finished by user interaction (escape or so). Defining your objects cleverly is crucial, and the technical challenges lie in the arrangement of objects, tasks and scheduling, memory management (in Python not that important), event handling etc. This concept is frequently called the "game loop" and is one of the principle patterns of everything that calculates and does user interaction. Searching "game loop pattern" will give you many results. Also, if you have a concrete example or idea, we could try some pseudo code just for demo. And maybe a real programmer shows up and helps :-)

Data evaluation from a 2013 observation campaign with a "smaller version" spanning about half the world: http://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/1538-4357/aabe2e and: https://www.mpifr-bonn.mpg.de/pressreleases/2018/7 tl, dr: Up to then, they were down to a resolution of about 3 Schwarzschild radii of the black hole in Sag A*. More can be expected from the "full size version". Time to start gnawing fingernails ?

Ignoring the treaty would be short sighted and will start the same destruction in space that we have on earth, not only by the above named persons but also and specially by private companies. We're all friends :-)

For now i would assume that mere breaking force is the first barrier. Second is getting enough construction material for such a thing. Then questions like how to hold an atmosphere, how to build a somewhat independent biosphere (elemental cycles) ... Afterwards its instabilities from tidal forces, friction depending on height (better out of or high up in the thermosphere), pressure from solar radiation and particles, .... But i am not a specialist ;-)

A subterranean orbital ring through hills and mountains ? Decimeters AMSL ? I do not understand what you mean ...