Nuke

it would be the most impractical moonship ever. and the only way it would be possible is to swap out the oms engines with arcjets or perhaps vasmir engines, and you need a lot of solar area you can deploy from the cargo bay. im not sure if the propellant would fit in the remaining space. but the ship is designed to accept an external tank (which you would need to launch on another rocket). you might also swap the main engines with a nerva engine, and you might need more boosters to get that to orbit without irradiating the launch complex. you might also cook the crew while crossing the van allen belts, but im sure you can convince the astronauts its "worth the risk". tldr: build a new ship.

my current rig chugs along fine in a $30 case. it doesn't have any fancy (unnecessary) things like liquid cooling or more than one video card. of course there will always be performance geeks out there who will pay 4x as much for a system that is only is 10% faster. next build is going to be a mini-itx case with a bare minumum of hardware and a low tdp cpu.

this will happen mostly in purely capitalist countries like the usa. especially with the anti-entitlement crowd slashing social services. the more socialist countries might be happy to have a mandatory basic needs policy in which everyone is granted enough money to live on. food, shelter, education, and healthcare would all be supplied to everyone. if you simply had a job you would be considered middle class. this kind of thing would be impossible in the usa for cultural reasons. beurocracy would simply be added to give people work to do. back in the 70s they tried a mincome experiment in canada: http://www.dominionpaper.ca/articles/4100 it had nothing but positive outcomes. rates of crime and vagrancy was reduced. it also increased productivity because people were finding jobs that actually suited their personality and skill set, rather than being forced to take any job just to get by (most of the jobs ive had have just been ones i could get, not ones i would be good at). so we know this kind of thing can work. but probibly not in the usa.

i have several ideas none of which can be mentioned here.

perhaps entering a binary system where it passes by the first star, is decelerated, and enters orbit of the other.

simply, we become a race of bureaucrats. there is no real work to do, so we invent ways to keep us busy. we have already started doing this. every time a politician claims to have "created jobs" what they really have done is create a new agency to overly complicate a simple problem, so that it absorbs a good chunk of the work force.

you got to start somewhere. my first programming experience threw me into the deep end with c. this was in the mid 90s and up to that point i didnt even own a computer. later when i finally got a computer, it was a 120mhz processor with 8mb of ram, i dont think you could have run a graphic programming language very well. you would be constantly out of memory. its rather nice that you have things like scratch to play with. it takes an otherwise steep learning curve and flattens it out to the point where a child can do it.

i prefer real programming. visual programming is great for learning, but not that useful for creating big projects. lego rcx/nxt was nice for getting the basic concepts of programming robotics down, but i quickly switched to nqc/nxc programming and found it much easier to work with for large projects. i dont think i would want to go backwards and use something like scratch. i do a lot of c/++, much on embedded platforms. my most recent project was a software renderer i wrote in c++ for the raspberry pi, which is loaded with bugs and still not working right, but it is drawing shoddy 3d graphics in a pitft screen. i do a lot of arduino projects too, sometimes on custom boards, and sometimes i even ditch the arduino ide and do everything in winavr. i also do a lot of lua, i have a more complete game engine running in pure lua, and i also use lua to build quick gui apps (usually to talk to an mcu over a com port). but i dont do scratch. one thing that is interesting to note is that textual hardware descriptor languages (such as verilog and vhdl), which are used to design and simulate microarchitectures, replace more traditional circuit/logic diagrams. because when a system gets significantly complex, diagrams become very confusing, very fast. code is just very easy to organize. so for simple little apps scratch might do well. but i wouldn't want to design an os or game engine with it.

i think that survival in the iceball scenario is much more plausible. you dont have to go off planet to survive (though your best bet is probibly to shoot for jupiter and colonize its moons if you did). there are a lot of underground areas which would be perfect for habitation, old mines, cave systems, nuclear waste depositories (the irony). anywhere where you have access to geothermal energy. you might even be able to survive on the surface with nuclear heaters, though i doubt that would be of much use. having the earth snowball would help insulate against loss of core heat, which would prolong the earth's capacity for heat retention. im actually somewhat interested what happens to the rest of the solar system, would everything just kind of scatter out into interstellar space or would jupiter capture some of the bodies. earth looked like it was headed in jupiter's general direction. i doubt earth would get captured because of its greater orbital velocity, but other bodies might. i also wonder how long it would take a rogue earth to pass through another solar system, perhaps humanity can survive that long on core heat alone. at some point you need to abandon ship and go somewhere else. then again, who knows when you live in a universe where starts randomly blink out of existence.

we certainly know how to tunnel that deep into rock. i think the record here on earth is 12km. though that was a vertical bore hole. im not sure how deep a tunnel boring machine could go. one feature is they are capable of adding tunnel reinforcement as they progress. on earth this is usually in the form of prefab concrete sections, that are bolted together and injected with concrete to fill in any gaps between the segments and the wall. i found an old study of tunnel boring machines for use on the moon, where instead of prefab sections, waste heat from the nuclear reactor is used to glassify the material surrounding the tunnel. it has a rather interesting way of disposing of waste heat, which it does by heating up the removed material, and simply trucking the heat away with the rocks. http://www.boomslanger.com/images/lunartbm.pdf it would be a clever idea for creating an emergency habitation on the moon in the event of such a cataclysm. i suppose to survive any secondary debris, it would be neccisary to have many colony sites. you might improve your chances doing a bore on mars as well, which would likely avoid the debris all together. you might have curricular tunnel loops a few km in radius to build train centrifuges to get a 1g environment. you also need a means for creating airlocks in the tunnels, but that should be a fairly simple thing to do. the nuclear reactors from the tbms can be used for powering the colony when the tunnel boring is complete. then to pressurize the whole thing would require processing the oxygen out of the regolith. subsurface ice provides water. a separate nitrogen source would also be needed to bulk up the atmosphere. then hydroponic farming provides the food supply. its not the kind of thing that would happen in the absence of impending doom (politicians wouldn't let you launch massive nuclear tunnel boring machines aboard gargantuan rockets otherwise), but it can be done in a pinch.

i kinda think the best bet for long term lunar habitation would be several meters underground. send nuclear powered tunnel boring machines to etch out a complex tunnel network. enough to give you appropriate levels of radiation shielding. underground centrifuges may also be neccisary for health reasons and successful reproduction. needs more science.

i picked f2 and d1: nuke all the things

alpha/beta voltaic cells are a thing, but they tend to be very low power devices. it might be better just to recover the fuel, but that requires digging up the core, which would likely be a very hazardous and expensive affair. and what you get out of that is essentially high level nuclear waste, you might be able to feed that into a modern reactor and use it as fuel. but its probibly better off staying where it is. there are much safer/cheaper ways to get nuclear fuel.

i dont like droid either.

thing is touch screens are nothing new. the first one came out in 1983! for nearly 3 decades they were completely impractical. only through success in the ultra portable niche have we finally found a place for them. however this does not make them any more practical for a desktop. i certainly dont want to hover my arm in front of my screen all day, and i dont think anyone who works in a cubicle wants to either. thats where resistance to global acceptance of touch screens will come from, in the office. it would be rather foolish to completely alienate mouse users to push an impractical technology.

i always liked a machine where i could get my hands dirty, dig into the hardware and make modifications. the apple route really doesn't give you that experience to the same degree a pc does. though i have had a lot of fun keeping my 5th gen ipod running. gone through 2 batteries and a screen, its run ipod linux and rockbox so far and its still kicking.

i dont like touchscreens, they are always plastered with finger prints. i yell at people who touch my display. its just not practical for a large high resolution display to be a touchscreen. i dont even like them on portable devices.

thats what norad does.

we could do a lot with gravity assists, aerobreaking, and minor course corrections. you are going to need an rtg for the outer solar system, and a lot of propellant. computing power is pretty much irrelevant. you are not doing lots of collision tests and structural simulations like you do in ksp and you can focus all cpu power on integrating your trajectory, which mathematically speaking isn't very hard. you dont need anything but your typical rad-hard 32-bit system on a chip module.

battleships are ment to be able to slug it out. you dont need to do that if your offensive and defensive weapons have a really long range. you actually want something closer to a destroyer or corvette.

all of my usual recipes.

you probibly have some kind of noisemaker just to keep birds away from the launch area. tight security takes care of humans.

ive mostly been holding off, for no other reason than the fact that i am quite comfy with 7. im going to do a new pc build next month sometime and so will likely use win8 as its os. if i dont like it, i can nuke it from orbit and install win7. ive known for a long time that ms seldom does little more than a few major changes to its products each version. win 8 appears to be a spit and polish upgrade (windows 7 was pretty much a 'make vista suck less' release that turned out to be a pretty solid os). gives ms a chance to make it look pretty, and to try new interfaces, and shoehorn in a horrible app store (and possibly rename all the icons in the control panel again). im more interested in the refinements of its internals rather its outward appearance. id be happy with the win2k interface if the guts of the os were more up to date. i always tend to use as little of the os as possible anyway, disabling as many features as i can.

seems like part of having such a device installed in your skull is learning an electronic language of sorts. that or use some kind of external signal processor that can interpret the data in real time. probibly a combination of both.

i always figured radio augmented telepathy would be a thing one day. i guess that day is now. but il wait for peer review.