Nuke

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.

most of the games i emulate are games i've bought at some point and wanted to re-play out of nostalgia, without the trouble of replacing the long dead hardware, scratched discs and non-functional cartridges. if nintendo and others were smart they would have emulators built into their next gen consoles, and sell old roms in an app store. people would pay $2 a game just for the convenience of not having to source roms and emulators from sketchy web sites. also an official sanctioned emulator with an active dev team to fix bugs its probably also worth paying for, so you don't need 3 different emulators to run all your roms.

its good to go back and play old games. but its more a nostalgia thing than something i use daily. in some cases you can even improve the visuals of some old games. i also like some of the things you can do with virtualization.

debugging magnetic systems. i have some diy hall encoders and pots where id love to see where all the flux lines are going.

motorhead: overkill black sabbath: paranoid

mom has a miniature of one of these old timey toilets, i also believe they showed one in the godfather (apparently a good place to hide a pistol).

i think it would be significantly simpler just to colonize lifeless worlds. any world with life on it is going to be very incompatible with whatever biology humans would need to bring with them to bootstrap a colony. if you aim for a strong terraforming candidate, right mass, magnetic field, big stabilizing moon. i think you would be better off colonizing the moon initially until enough science can be done to verify the target planet.

it does need fluid inertia to get the siphon action going though. small water jet accelerates the water in the pipes enough to make it over the trap to initiate the siphon.

older, this is the same kind of thing that makes toilets work.

ive had random components explode on me. like one i just got it im my bench and took the lid off. then i booted it up, worked fine. next thing i know i hear a loud pop and see a flaming power mosfet flying across the room like a tracer round.

when i was doing computer builds we delivered a bunch of computers to a charter school. the school was for the most part modern, except they had this old timey school house out front. this thing had to be built in the late 1800s and wired up sometime in the 1910s supposedly using the bare wire on ceramic insulators approach that was common back then. all the recepticals were installed external from the wall with drop down conduit, not flush installed like normal outlets and was somewhat more modern, like the 1950s. anyway, for some reason they decided to use this building for the computer lab rather than the significantly larger modern building with good up-to-code wiring. after 3 months computers were failing left and right. i was fixing them and sending them back. this went on for several months. almost all had power supply issues. finally i said what everyone was thinking but didnt want to fess up to. "check your power quality", which of course turned out to be bad. i convinced them to invest in line conditioners, of course at our usual markup. solved the problems. though i dont think the higher ups liked this, they were probably trying to milk them for support fees. they fired me a week later.