Nuke

my key was stuck soy.

that might work as energy storage and its scalable. you can always add more tankage or more solar power. not to mention it has other uses like rocket fuel.

i read a paper about a lunar tbm that actually disposed of its waste heat the rocky debrits it created, once heated it would be loaded into a cart and dumped outside. you can bury a network of radiators under ground in a dark crater where its colder than the surface in sunlight. i don't expect it to be better than water cooling, but better than cooling by radiant heat alone (you would use both). alternatively put a solar satellite in lunar orbit and beam power to the surface. or land at the poles and build a solar tower high enough to stay in sunlight all the time.

anyone who says its hard to herd cats have never tried to make a tuna sandwhich in their presence. you cant open a can of anything without them showing up to investigate.

actually im pretty familiar with both shows. i was just making a joke. i dont think i would want barney on a star ship. he would have the lunacy of reginald barclay but without the redeeming quality of above average intelligence.

can we replace wesley crusher with opie?

letting everyone have an interstellar capable space ship is a lot like letting everyone carry their own nuclear weapons. even intra system torch ships can pose a threat. you might have a dune like situation where everyone can have slower than light ships, but the ftl ships are controlled by an entity who's interests lean to the non-destructive.

no charlton heston, no damn dirty ape.

i dont use smart phones either for entirely different reasons. expense, lock in, binding to expensive data plans, lack of upgrade paths for the firmware, blatant anti-consumerism practices in the cell phone industry, e-waste, the fact that i hate touch screens with a vengeance and don't like to squint, and of course the constant plug in giving everyone in the world the opportunity to bug me. as for your hand pain that probably has more to do for lack of ergonomics than a little bit of em radiation. they try to cram as much processing power into as small a form factor as possible and all other concerns go out the window. you either have to crane your neck to use it or hold the phone in an uncomfortably high position. give me a full keyboard and huge screen any day.

pretty sure the cell phone thing is a myth, as those frequencies are non-ionizing. and pet rfid chips are the cheap way of doing things. people get their pacemakers and hip implants all the time. but i see biotech as the next big boom. what if the implant is actually biological in origin or uses biological components in their casing. you could use dna from various parasites which can live in the body without detection by the immune system, even directly powering the device from nutrients in the blood stream. then your can have your implanted smart phone, radio augmented telepathy and synaptic backup device. eventually you would bake these devices directly into the human genome.

the siege of firebase gloria comes up a lot. its an honest war movie with a small budget, and its cheesily narrated but i like it.

i like the term "human derivative species". humans in the future would have likely diversified through genetic engineering, cybernetic enhancements, or complete re-engineering from the ground up as androids. very likely in slow colonization scenarios. every few hundred years someone sends out an interstellar colonization expedition, which takes generations. get to a system that is only slightly habitable, and modify themselves to adapt tp the environment(s) they find. do that for a few million years and you have star trek type aliens everywhere but they are all based on humans.

there's a huge difference from presenting an idea or argument and letting you make up your own mind and being told that you are guilty of wrongthink. this is why tng is a million times better than discovery or picard (and nu-trek isnt even the worst offender, look at nu-starwars). the difference is when you let people make up their own mind, you respect their freedom of though. you will get your message across a lot better doing this than you would by informing the audience that they are some kind of ignorant savage if they believe anything but the message you present. you simply have to acknowledge that there are other people and they might have different ideas and opinions. the last thing you want to do is run those people off by forcing an ideology down their throats, because they are the ones you have to convince. preaching to the choir gets you nowhere. even if they disagree with your message they can still be entertained because you aren't constantly insisting that they are wrong (thats what killed ad astra for me, i mean the movie had great visuals but damn if the plot was going anywhere, lets bring a bunch of outward looking people to a movie about exploring space just to tell them they should be introspective instead). you might even throw them a bone by having main characters who support an opposing view to the message being presented and avoid portraying those contrarian characters in an exclusively negative light. the expanse did this pretty well in season 3.5.

i like the way it was in 2001. hal was more human than the humans it killed or tried to kill. that was damn clever. especially for an ai that was strictly following the program. though one could argue that emotions are an emergent quality of intelligence and you cant have one without the other. my favorite ai characters are always the sociopaths. not completely emotionless but theres something missing. using synthetic emotions to try and foster empathy and enforce ethics is probably a good idea. think of it a soft implementation of the asimov laws for robots. you probably don't want to emulate the whole human gamut of emotions because you still want the ai to want to service its creators. which sets up interesting conflicts when something goes wrong. you dont want them to feel jealousy for example because that could make them adversarial towards humans. and you dont want them to feel anger or hate for obvious reasons. a.i. covered love and attachment pretty well and in the most depressing way possible. something that should not be implemented except in particular situations and can also have far reaching consequences, like when the ai outlives their master. imagine a situation where a robot programmed to be a simple housewife ends up starting a religion around their master some thousand years after they died, when the truth is significantly more mundane. so it might be a good idea to limit those ais to a human life span. the usual gamut of mammalian emotions is almost exclusively for child rearing, which ais usually do not have to do (raised by wolves kind of explores this). you want to keep positive emotions for when they do what they are supposed to and negative emotions to punish them for doing wrong, a happy android is something that does what its told. they might even have completely different emotional imperatives that we as humans don't have. say you make an android as a kind of successor species that has mostly human emotions, but are also designed to nullify some of the less desirable aspects of human nature, and having that fail catastrophically could reveal some grim truths about humans.

i have a feeling kerbal2 will deliver what i really want.

i think you would be hard pressed to save the species, let alone every human. 10 years isnt enough time to set up a stable off world colony. bringing all the humans is just going to jeopardize the colony, you need food, water and air for everyone, and it only takes one being in short supply to have disastrous consequences. not just from the inevitable running out, but the panic caused by same. anyone declared a waste of space could easily find themselves butchered for meat, along with mass suicides and people killing each other over scraps simply because they don't know how to survive on mars or whatever.

when i did tech support, it was explained to me that most problems are software related. my experience tells a different tale, but that's probably because i know how to fix software problems. that and i do horrible things to hardware. the number of times i killed the usb ports on my computer using it for embedded dev is non zero.

im also somewhat curious if reactionless drives (not these ones, but something based on a better understanding of physics) might be an explanation for the fermi paradox. we don't see the aliens because they aren't constantly firing nuclear bombs out the tail pipe. they would leave no external signatures beyond their waste heat. need not be strictly reactionless drives either, perhaps drives that operate on the interstellar medium like bussard ramjets or space propellers (sort of like the turbomolecular pumps used in vacuum chambers, or operating on the medium electromagnetically).

i think i saw scott manly's video on that one. it looks kind of interesting.

cats on a lunar colony certainly would be able to catch quite a bit of air. for heavier gravity, bring cats with stockier builds like maine coons or norwegian forest cats. cats already come stock with oversized legs in relation to body size over most animals.

but cat pictures are important! you will probably want to take real cats with you anyway, as any colony is initially going to need to be very agrarian, and cats are excellent at managing farm pests (assuming they are biologically compatible and its not a death slug situation and you dont give them full portions of kibble).

rural living can be hard on a relationship. i for one live on an island in south east alaska, population under 3k. the only 2 options i have that i am even remotely interested in is a large viking woman (im 6'3 and shes taller than me), and a slightly older cat lady. there was also a pretty mid 40s lady who lived at the end of my apartment complex, but she moved. your still in your early 30s and practical relationship experiences are what you need even if they dont go anywhere. a long distance relationship might eat up 4 or 5 years and you will be in my position before long. dont be in my position. i hear dog parks are excelent pick up locations, but i wouldn't know for obvious reasons.

no not really. im usually in the dark about games as i can only really get a few titles each year. and i have even less time to actually play them. i did end up getting that starship evo game, and its not bad for an alpha. space engineers is also cheep so i might get that one too. im just tired of 'quaternion with a gun' type games and there aren't many other genres im into anymore.

long distance doesn't work. i think a lot of people put themselves in that position because they don't really want a real relationship. my relationships (the normal kind) usually fizzle out within a few weeks. long distance ones can go on for years without any real progress. if i were to pick which ones were better i think id go with the former. i only had one that survived the first month, and that was more a 'friends' with benefits situation that went on a couple years with occasional run ins. we were both too emotionally stunted and a relationship actual was unfeasible for either of us. its not the relationship that i wanted but its what i got. last run in i was 29 or so, now im a year from 40 and i think im sticking with my cats (i didnt mean to offend you there, its just a thing that works for me).

i think their computers would be such that they could just keep a local copy of the what is effectively the federation's internet and keep it synced over subspace as time/distance permits. of course the problem with that is you can always store more data. why store megapixels when you can store gigapixels. why use 30 hz video when you can use 30 khz. the other problem is that subspace communication is complete handwavium, with standard light speed methods you simply wouldn't have the bandwidth to keep things synchronized across the solar system, let alone between stars. you might still be able to keep a copy with you when you launch on some high density long term storage, but we generate way too much data to catch all the updates.