Nuke

torch drives seem more feasable than warp drives, but i dont think we will have expanse levels of performance from them and will probibly look more like flying radiators with tiny habitable spaces than the compact utilitarian looking expanse ships. star trek technically has torch drives (impulse engines), but their ships are neither optimized for them nor do they make it apparent in the way its shot. actually space battles in star trek are a lot like the fights in dragonball z. 2 opponents staring each other down from a distance, sometimes spewing forth threats, bravado, or boasts, and not doing a whole lot else.

i kind of think things have gone a little too far at this point. the term politically correct is almost certainly oxymoronic in nature. as i have never known any politician to do anything correctly. so its not really something people should aspire to. many people fall afoul of power gradients in society and generalizing who has it worse is just bad. i for one think its pretty damn racist/sexist/whateverist to be lumped into a group of privileged individuals based on my skin color/gender/whatever and not my actual situation. id go into it more but its kind of hard without breaking the no politics rules, which i may have already stepped over with this post. not to mention i only clicked on it because i thought it was about computers.

use lasers to ablate the surface of the ice, then using cv algorithms and physics modeling software figure out the right spots to hit to get the ice where you want it. thus turn each chunk into its own little space ship on its way to a collection area. i imagine having them march single file right onto a tangental approach to a ring station.

some of the most interesting people ive met have always been society's rejects. unfortunately they usually have such a low view of themselves, or worse are outright narcissists (sometimes both) that they either too good for or you are you are not good enough for them. the more normal types tend to go for the safe bet. they tend to have such a low tolerance for anything but other normals and thus end up in boring safe lives where nothing can ever go wrong. i feel sorry for them sometimes. and these days to get anyones attention you need to set off a nuke near by so all their phones get emped just to get them to frantically ask eachother if they have any bars, never mind the incoming blast wave. people are often not worth the trouble. theres this large viking woman (im 6'4" and shes still taller than me and pleasantly plump) that im interested in, but i cant get her eyes off her screen for 2 seconds to ask her out. shes one of 5 women on the island in my age bracket (late thirties) and the only one that single as far as i can tell. i even made her brownies once but it turns out shes diabetic (and a bit bipolar but that's not a deal breaker). she even plays the drums so between the two of us that like an entire black metal band. i mean its her or one of the 40+ gals that keep oogling me, im kind of starting to get interested in the cat lady.

neither a leader nor a follower be. omega or bust.

still it would suck to lose your slowboat ion probe because someone with a bigger budget than you fired up their torch drive nearby.

for launchers i tend to make the case leave the reactor on the ground, make hydrolox. you can always build bigger rockets. especially large multi-stage reusable rockets. once in space all bets are off and you can use whatever you want from the nastiest of hypergolics to the cleanest fusion drives. though you might have a nuclear exclusion zone for really nasty drives like fission fragment and orion (for the latter we might be talking in a solar orbit no closer than mars). actually im curious how far actual exclusion zones would be for various drives. not just to keep fission products from entering the atmo, but also to protect satellites. i dont think there has ever been a study as no one has ever flown a dirty drive in space to the best of my knowledge.

i love the violent reaction you get when you fail to dry your potatoes before tossing them into the deep frier. a fine example of why you should never rush the cook. there is a way to get rid of hot oil without lighting your house on fire though. turn the faucet on cold perhaps a quarter its max flow rate. allow it to flow gently down the side of the sink towards the drain with laminar flow (avoid splashes), then slowly pour your oil directly into the drain. its important that your oil to water ratio be at least 3x more water than oil, as you need enough thermal mass to avoid a rapid boil off. you should never pour water into hot oil because that is a good way to build and impromptu flame thrower. i dont like leaving it out because the cats have a way of checking out the kitchen while everyone else is eating, and leaving it out to cool can cause kitty some nasty burns. i suppose you could just cover it but that's wasting dishes, which would not be an issue if the freeloaders i feed would do dishes. oh damn necro.

habitable is not so much a black and white thing as a shade of grey, with very few planets completely in the black and even earth itself not being completely white. right kind of power supplies and you can make any of them useful to a spacefaring civilization.

nah, they are to be butchered, florets separated from their stalks and thrown into a pan full of onions and dead cow parts and covered in an asian ginger sauce. thus is the nature of life. and dont forget the fungus too, it soaks up sauce, them mushrooms are not immune to the butchery. at least in my kitchen their suffering will be honored by being delicious.

probably old boom boom. granted you would need to have everyone hand over their nuclear warheads so you can reprocess the plutonium to make pulse units. the thing i have doubts about is the shock absorber, not the engine itself. an antimatter engine is likely going to be operated at steady state. reacting very small amounts of antimatter over time, completely eliminating the need for a pusher plate. i cant help but think it would work better with a magnetic nozzle. nukes have the opposite problem, the whole reason behind the pusher plate is that nuclear warheads like to put a lot of energy out at once and there is no way to run them steady state with the same specific impulse. with antimatter you can better control flow rates and can opt for a far far safer long burn. all those repetitive shocks is likely going to make their antimatter particles skip out their containment, and the first thing they will encounter and destroy is the containment system. that said we are nowhere near the level of technology needed for antimatter propulsion. if we could have sufficiently good containment we would be able to have breakeven fusion reactors. were also going to need the experience of operating fusion reactors to figure out where all the gotchas are. when we can contain normal matter well enough so the escapees can't destroy the reactor, then we can do it with antimatter. i also dont think antimatter will be useful as anything other than energy storage. the energy needed to make it will likely come from fusion, so why not just have a fusion engine?

dont you need back pressure for those kind of rockets anyway? because for a lot of rockets having the fuel tank pressurized is necessary to maintain structural integrity.

if you cant taste its fear its not meat.

let meat be meat and let veggies be veggies. anything else is overprocessed garbage, yes even if it tastes good. food scientists can and have made cardboard palatable. i cringe to think about what else can be made palatable.

i dont think immortality would change human nature at all. people can do horrible things even when their own survival is not in question.

antimatter goes backwards makes me think about negative time. could an antimatter big bang be going off in the direction of negative time while antimatter goes in forward time? one big bang causes 2 universes expanding in opposite time directions?

i like to think of it more as an exploration of ideas, and that probably applies to any kind of fiction. of course where fantasy deals in the improbable, scifi, for the most part deals with the possible, the consequences of progress or the way people deal with new and unexpected situations.

the heat death is a long ways away and immortals might opt to end there existence than live in a dark dead universe forever. its not just the universe you have to worry about. immortals might value their own existence so much they are willing to throw other immortals under the bus for their own survival. people dont have to be immortal to exhibit that kind of behavior.

i think immortality if theoretically possible would be statistically improbable in practice. even if you have perfect cellular repair or maybe you uploaded your wetware into a computer, that system is still going to require an energy intake, its still going to require environmental tolerances which should not be exceeded. the laws of thermodynamics are what they are. like if you are stuck orbiting a dying star, you are going to need to relocate. and if you cant make the delta-v budget, you are going to fry. if you have to ride a generation ship (if you live a few million years its not a generation ship anymore), and that ship has problems in transit, you might run out of power and freeze to death. its possible you might survive till the heat death of the universe, but even if immortal, not everyone is going to make it, and those that do will get to watch the stars blink out one by one and their survival would be impossible or very difficult at that point.

no it does not, i just want to see what the real physicists think.

one thing that pops up in a lot of quantum physics documentaries is the mystery of where all the antimatter is. there should have been equal amounts of matter and antimatter. i think the consensus is that there was a small difference, annihilation happened, and what matter we see in the universe are the remnants. then the other day i was reading about certain configurations of hexaquarks being a candidate for dark matter, specifically the one with 3 up quarks and 3 down quarks. i then went off on a tangent reading about other quark configurations. in pentaquarks i noticed that some included antiquarks as well. based on 45 minutes of reading wikipedia, i therefore hypothesize that an as of yet unknown hexaquark configuration, containing mostly antiquarks, is responsible for consuming the antiquarks from the early universe. perhaps matter is the leftovers from the event that created dark matter. of course im sure people who are smarter than me (and understand qcd/qfd better than i do) have thought of this.

yep, thats the one. as for skyline, you didnt watch the crappy low budget sequal did you?

i think deep space nine had a few good war episodes. and there's always starship troopers. my favorite war movie is probably siege at firebase gloria. i think i like that its narrated like an early live action disney film while simultaneously being a grimdark vietnam war movie. i forget what it was called but there was this fairly recent alien invasion movie with a more or less conventional warfare, where some soldiers captured an alien and proceeded to mutilate it until they found a weak point that they could exploit.

i think of it as a bit of karma for those who make fun of nerds. they will drive themselves mad with the notion that humans need other humans to survive. i can think of no better revenge. humans are the real virus.

i was already kind of a shut in. so this is business as usual for me. not sure what kind of workarounds im going to need to come up with on shopping day though. i normally shop a month at a time, though with a bunch of snack runs throughout the month. looks like the latter are going to need to be rolled into the former, and some staples are likely going to be absent. i do kind of live in a very isolated town in alaska so virus really hasn't hit us hard yet. of course that also means supply is going to be much more limited as we only got 2 grocery stores.