Nuke

the differences are bigger than that. pigs are livestock. if demand for pork goes up we can breed more pigs. if you want to compare whaling to something compare it to commercial fishing. we have a rough idea of how many there are, but no accurate count. limits are imposed (and frequently exceeded) that will prevent us from taking animals at a rate greater than can be naturally replaced. we just sorta hope the relationship between the two is linear. domesticate the damn whales and farm them like any other species. problem solved (oh wait, japanese real estate is too expensive to make that an economically viable buisness model).

24 contiguous lines of text at 1080p is just impossible for me to read. besides it looked like the transcript to some documentary ive seen 7 times.

and do you think the agricultural revolution would have happened without that hunter gatherer brain? i think not. the way i understand it it was bipedalism that allowed protohumans to look for prey and wield weapons. the subsequent increased consumption of meat fueled brain growth, and the need for more complex group interaction is what selected for those traits. this allowed for things like complex language and passing of knowledge. which was neccisary to develop agriculture.

hunting whales is a buisness. you just cant run a buisness if you make the thing your buisness is based on go extinct. there are few enough players so that wont happen with whales. if everyone suddenly developed a taste for whale, or other food sources died out you might have a problem, but as it stands whaling today is just too small scale to make a major dent in the population. cant say the same thing about tigers. if china gave the cats as much attention as their pandas, they could turn that around. but when you are dealing with a large predator and all the people in rural communities want it dead (its either a direct threat to them or costs them livestock or is competition for hunters), there is a black market for tiger that pays more than farming or other rural jobs, and you have a government and society that turns a blind eye to all that, its going to be hunted to extinction. which is unfortunate (im a cat person). eventually practitioners of eastern medicine are going to wonder why they cant get the tiger bits they need for their ancient traditional healing practices.

did you even read the sources? the fossil record clearly shows a change in dental structure to better accommodate meat followed by an increase in size of the cranial cavity. the moral of this story is: dinosaurs were laying eggs long before chickens ever existed.

formatting is everything.

you might make a device that can spin indefinably, but the second you try to convert any of that angular momentum to usable energy, its gone (unless you put it back). a low entropy system might make a good energy storage device (see flywheel storage), but its not going to give you unlimited energy. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flywheel_energy_storage

the increased eating of meat is directly tied to the evolution of the human brain. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_evolution#Encephalization http://berkeley.edu/news/media/releases/99legacy/6-14-1999a.html http://www.thefreelibrary.com/Meat+in+the+human+diet:+an+anthropological+perspective-a0169311689 im going to have a ribeye steak, an inch thick, and i want it rare.

tldr maybe with line breaks just no.

im not about to deceive myself about human blood lust. if were not out there doing the killing then we are paying someone else to do it for us. save the few that guilt tripped themselves into not eating meat. this also doesn't just pertain to food. many resources we consume come from conflict zones where humans are being brutalized, exploited, enslaved and even murdered in the process of getting the raw materials to make products that we buy all the time. we are murderous beasts who will turn a blind eye to animals (including humans) suffering if it suits us.

of course, the japanese are killing blues and humpbacks. but the anti whaling groups want a total, unconditional ban on whaling. they could easily compromise, but both sides are stubborn and no one is negotiating.

its not going to be pretty. basic freedoms go out the window when human extinction is one suicide bomber away. everyone is going to be monitored. everyone will be subject to routine psychological screening. extreme ideologies are going to be completely intolerable. imprisonment of criminals will not even be possible due to supply constraints (ration cutting might be punishment for small offenses, anything major that endangers the ship or causes instabilities in the population carries the death penalty). its going to suck. things might be a little more lax if humans are not in danger of extinction, for example ships to seed new colonies.

during the 1800s we hunted whales for their oil. this oil was used for lighting lamps before we started using petroleum products. this was big buisness and resulted in hunting many species to the brink of extinction. when we did this we left most of the animals behind to rot. that was a far more evil thing than to hunt them for food. the japanese are at least eating the whales. if modern whale processing is anything like whats done for livestock, then nothing goes to waste. i find it really hard to come up with a good reason to prohibit hunting of whales, provided that only species with healthy populations are harvested and within reasonable limits. especially with so few players on the whaling market, and usually carried out by people who have cultural ties to the practice, and where few whales need to be killed to meet demands. so long as its sustainable, good hunting.

the research is testing the effects of soy sauce and wasabi on whale meat. i dont like the whole research smokescreen, the japanese would look better if they just admit they are going to eat them. the alaskan natives dont put up smokescreens and nobody messes with their subsistence whaling operations.

regardless if you make it as unnatural looking as possible, it will draw attention.

i was making some new parts, but progress has been slow. it takes me forever to get anything done.

i dont really care so long as they leave the endangered species alone.

5 is going to be the default if nothing else happens. eventually we are going to crack the problem fusion, that could happen in 5 years or 50, and that will lead to new propulsion technologies. we wont get the same amount of political fear mongering as with fission based engine tech (it will still be there but just at the extreme fringes).

i dont think labeling is an issue. if your probe looks significantly unnatural enough, it will warrant investigation from anyone who happens to spot it. though it may collect enough debris to look like an asteroid. a bigger issue is once they are inside the vault containing all the storage media, how are they supposed to read it. you would need to describe your data formats mathematically (and this is the easy part). then you need to describe our language in the same way. our languages with phonetic alphabets might be a limitation here, since they are just a way to write down the sounds made by spoken language. if an alien comes along that does not have ears, they may have an issue understanding this. if we use a language like chinese (with an ideographic alphabet), we can assign a number to a character and then convey the meaning of the character with math (and that sounds really hard). you just need to describe one language and then provide a rosetta stone for all the other languages (same text written in all languages), to open the door to understanding all human language.

way i understand it you need heu (90% u235) to make a bomb, reactor grade fuel is only like 3-4% u235. a critical mass of u238 wont explode, but it will probibly melt (unless we add coolant, and run that coolant through a turbine, in which case we get a powerplant). scifi teaches us that the reactor "going critical" is a bad thing. it really just means that the reactor is on.

the only real difference between a gaming rig and any other computer is the cost of the video card. you may also have some things overclocked, especially memory, but that doesn't really give you that much extra. you can easily sink a couple thousand for an extra 10% on your bench marks.

most of my builds come in around $900. all of them play games well. of course i do recycle cases, psus, monitors, drives, peripherals and sometimes video cards.

some things: its a ship. the government is going to be the captain and officers. though you might use the pirate ship model, where the captain is voted in by the crew and can be deposed by the crew at any time. you also dont want a bunch of passengers making these decisions, as they do not have the training neccisary to understand who would make a good captain. you might have a democratic civilian leadership that is independent of the crew structure, this would have the job of keeping the population happy while the crew have the job of keeping the ship safe. the economic model will probibly be communist or possibly socialist to eliminate inter-class conflicts. rationing will be how goods are ultimately distributed. it will be an engineered society. population control is going to be critical. if you somehow create more humans than you can feed, you are going to have to resort to cannibalism. too few and you will have an insufficient workforce to maintain food production and keeping systems functional. so population control measures will need to be taken. so not only will you be limited to how many offspring you have, in some situations you may have a quota (to fill yourself or transfer to someone else). workforce is going to need to be maintained at an optimal level. priority will go to filling essential jobs first, and personal choice second. so you might not get to choose your occupation aboard the ship. you will of course be placed in the available job you are best suited for, and would be required to stay there. because of the resource cost to retrain someone. traditional education will probibly be replaced with an accelerated education, you might do in 8 years what normally takes 12 (by setting people into their job early and eliminating unnecessary classes), then go through an aptitude selection process followed by vocational skills training or an apprenticeship for your job, depending on skill level and training required. unskilled labor could enter the workforce by age 16 and skilled workers could be ready by 18 or 20.

when i was a kid i discovered something about spiders. if you smash them they die. ive never had a problem with spiders ever since.

cosmic rays and other cosmic radiation are pretty much the universe's random number generator. ive seen some hacks on various blogs (such as hackaday) that exploit this noise to generate random numbers for a computer. the possibility of genetically engineering a life form to extract energy from cosmic noise so that it can keep a dna string replicating is a good idea, im thinking a very basic unicellular life form that only breeds. data loss would be significant but if half the data was recoverable it would just take multiple satellites and multiple strains to increase the odds for the whole archive. the problem is keeping the data from getting switched on and causing the life form to die out. it would need to be engineered to thrive on nothing but cosmic radiation in very extreme conditions, which im not even sure is possible.