Nuke

its the capacity for energy storage that evolved, not the obesity. you take those people out of their natural habitat of failed crops and poor hunts, and put them in a world where food can be had year round in large quantities, and they get big. its the healthier branch of that subset you want setting up a colony on mars.

i am kinda chubby, but if you gave me a ticket to space and the condition that i had to get down to a healthy weight, i would make every effort to do so. id give up soft drinks, start jogging and i would start eating the food that food eats. motivation is a key factor in loosing weight. ive done it before and i could do it again. then again i might be over the height limit too, so that is also an issue. fat people evolved in climates where food was not readily available year round, so they evolved a way to store energy. so while they may not be a good choice for space missions, they might be very useful to have when bootstrapping off world colonies. they could survive long periods on tiny rations where a skinny person with a high metabolism would just whither away and die. so if your first space crops fail or you need to wait for a resupply mission, you can survive it.

thing is if you can afford a trip to space, you can afford a gym membership. im sure the chance to go to space would provide the neccisary motivation.

you will probibly have to pay extra if you are fat.

developed by nasa... art department. is that round disc thing under the cockpit supposed to be a centrifuge, its kinda small.

it was nice. then i saw last night's episode of game of thrones almost immediately afterward. so it was kind of stacked amazement for me.

i think they should rerun the biosphere experiment, but in an open loop fashion (and of course after dealing with the roach problem). this time keeping close tabs on what gets imported to maintain the health of the participants. this will give us an idea of what the required isru output would need to be to maintain a habitat. im also convinced you could have a microbial ecosystem that can do much of the heavy lifting for you. algae are nature's co2 scrubbers, and they can run on light. for every waste product we have, there is a germ that converts it to something useful. the only actual plants you should be growing are food crops.

dpf seems like a scam because of all the green folk supporting it. i know that most of the articles ive read on it seem to prattle on about the environment this and global warming that, rather than discussing the technology in any detail. this is obviously neccisary to aid in the crowd funding, but it also has the side effect of making it look like a scam since there are some elements in the green movement that are totally nuts. however what ive seen from the tech side looks interesting. especially the part about exploiting the natural characteristics of plasmas, rather than fight them with magnetic fields. well this was in , which i assume anyone who gives a damn about fusion has seen (and i post that link a lot on this board), its well worth the watch. its rather amusing, he talks about how the dod loves to defund energy projects, then he talks about how the navy wants fusion reactors on all its ships. i especially love all the tokamak bashing.no source on the weaponry, but its not like those kinds of systems are scifi anymore, and having a reactor on board makes those weapon systems possible to integrate on smaller vessels without fission reactors. since the polywell is a small reactor, retrofitting them into almost anything the navy has should be possible.

not the dod, the navy. they want polywells on all their ships so that they can have unlimited propulsion and power left over for lasers and railguns. polywells are funded for the current phase, they still need 200m to build a demo reactor. they better impress some admirals.

id go to the moon. first of all regolith is rich in oxygen. it also has iron, and aluminum as well, both useful structural materials, as well as silicon for the fabrication of solar cells and glass. the stuff is already pulverized for you, so you just have to collect it. this saves you the mass of rock crushing equipment. i figure use some kind of electrostatic or mechanical system can be used for its collection. robots can collect and bag the stuff long before humans arrive. this serves 3 purposes. first is obvious, it clears the landing site of all of that annoying dust that screw with airlock seals. second, you can just sandbag your habitat modules for radiation shielding as soon as you arrive. finally its ready to be processed for resource extraction. you could magnetically separate out all the iron from the stuff, and use it as a material for dmls 3d printers for making hardware, or you can feed it into a furnace with o2 and make steel (idk where the carbon would come from, we might need to bring it). another thing robots can do is sinter lunar basalt into bricks, this can be used for construction/radiation shielding. you might eventually start using lunacrete for more permanent structures, depending on the availability of water. concrete is porous but these structures can be sealed with epoxy coatings brought from earth. there are also now several projects to allow 3d printing with concrete, so smaller structures and prefab parts can be created. it might even be possible to construct tunnel boring machines to create well shielded underground complexes for permanent habitation. you might also bore circular tunnels to encase subterranean centrifuges for earth-like gravity. with stuff to build with, you need people to build things. that requires life support. we can already inhabit space for months at a time without resupply. if you can resupply some of those materials locally from the moon, that would extend the habitability of the colony. we might develop some radiation hardened crops for growing in surface domes, or just grow regular plants underground with hydroponics. then the moon base becomes the gateway to the rest of the solar system. mars included. you can construct prefab habitats on the moon and drop them all over the solar system. these would be large spare no expense units to help bootstrap other colonies at a much faster rate. the advantages of having a manufacturing center outside of earth's gravity well are huge.

i read an article awhile back on direct conversion specifically in reference to polywells. ive yet to find the thing again. i know a couple times i wanted to use it as a source now and just drew a blank.

i think a direct conversion scheme for polywells exists, but you wont see it on first generation devices.

i think the reason for the smaller scale device was to come up with operational procedures prior to integrating all the subsystems into the full scale device. of course this is all sourceless scuttlebutt.

the indignation of airport security will ruin any flight no matter how luxurious. i mean if they gave me unlimited booze for free, unlimited snacks, they let me pick the in flight movie, the pilot let me fly the plane for abit, and i got to spend time in the lavatory with the female flight attendant of my choice. i think my experience would still be ruined by airport security.

unify all the things!

this would make managing multiple drop tanks alot less troublesome. also can we have action group defined fuel transfer?

orbits get funky towards the galactic center. though its not the kind of place you would want to call home.

you get a black hole inside a star, bye bye star.

theres no rule that says you cant do it manually though, mom and pop stores for example. of course that requires extra work. at the end of the year if the ins dont match the outs, you get audited.

five: STUFF

i walk everywhere i go. of course there aren't many places to go.

are either of these things capable of existing in our universe?

the problem is we spend 3.2 million dollars on a study to tell us the obvious. how does a study cost 3.2 million freaking dollars? murica needs to stop spending money on buffalo chips.

the thing i dont like is when a store shuts down because its computers are down. they wont even take cash like the cashiers dont know how to count money or do basic addition. my grandma's theory is that young people today are stupid. the real problem is that the stores buy this complete inventory control system that nobody a store can afford to hire knows how to fix. its almost always some kind of proprietary system on lease from a company that has its own repair men. the store employees are not allowed, by contract, to fix the system themselves, even if someone knew how. in any case the arrangement will be so inconvenient it will take hours to fix. the cashiers are only trained how to operate the register, not do all the inventory control tasks that the computer system handles automatically in the background, the store would have to hire additional employees to handle that in absence of the computer (which isnt practical). i worked in a pawn shop for about 6 months back in 2003. this was way beneath me, i just needed somewhere to work while i was failing to get a job in the it sector with my recently completed degree. of course one day the computer crashed, and nobody could do any work. it was this old dos software that was no longer supported by its developer, but it worked most of the time and they were too cheap to upgrade it. it took me all but 3 keystrokes to fix the error, recover the lost data and re-init the software. my boss gave be $200 cash on the spot. i dont think computers are making people stupid, i think that they are just removing the requirement for humans to be brilliant. but its ok, even in a world full of idiots you will find a wizzard or two.

i think that once we get the cost of launch down to sufficiently cheap levels, there will be money in operating orbital junk yards. especially out at geo and other high traffic areas. on site repair of satellites might be a thing.