Winter Man

Dude, think about it. Fuel doesn't just drain into the engine, it's pumped. There isn't just a hole between the combustion chamber and the fuel tanks with a valve, there's pumps powered by smaller solid rocket motors - far more reliable than using an electric motor. That exhaust has to vent somewhere (near cryogenic fuel, at that), the solid motor has to be shaped right to provide the correct thrust profile to pump the correct amount of fuel throughout the ascent, the pump itself has to deal with an extreme temperature gradient between the fuel and motor exhaust and a whole book (literally) worth of other issues. Then you've got to consider that you're feeding two engines now at different rates meaning a separate pump for each, then it needs to be decouple-able (sealing the centre engine off from external atmosphere - or lack thereof) and it starts to get a fair bit more complicated than just clicking on a fuel line. It is rocket science, remember.

*slow clap for the same damn response given at least once a page* Anyway, to address the main question. We should try. We should try because it's difficult, because people say it can't be done and so we can say we tried. That's what people mean when they repeat that 'FOR SCIENCE' mantra (most of the time just repeating it because it's the 'in' thing to say now, but still). What people don't seem to be able to understand is we don't need to extract a complete chunk of DNA from a fossil or a mosquito to clone from, we can take many samples and sequence it. Already we have sequenced a 700,000 year old horse genome and it's thought that the coming year will see the million-year mark broken. After that it gets progressively more difficult but you're building on a foundation of work done by others already. 'Standing on the shoulders of giants' or however Ian Malcolm put it. Maybe it'll take us another hundred years but it'll get done.

They're a race of food fanatics, travelling from planet to planet just to taste new meats.

To be perfectly honest, I'm not above letting off a small localised EMP or net gunning a drone for free pizza.

People using the wrong terms for things. I dare you to google that. Go on.

...no, no reasons for it not to work have been given. Only assumptions.

Read the whole post. It's relatively negative. Like having a floating ground for processing analog signals in a DC circuit, you can go to + or - 9V, but only because you floated the ground at +9V from an 18V source. Look up zero point energy (and try to avoid all the damned quacks trying to sell you chakra magnets or whatever!), there's a base energy to the universe which you can go below using casimir cavities.

The most efficient thing to do though would just be to use the nuclear fuel.

Our universe needn't be not losing energy/mass, because as it stands it's expanding, meaning if the above were true the black hole connecting us to a parent universe would currently be 'eating' something. Anything it loses would be immeasurable next to the gain. As soon as it's done with that (the time scales could be bloody anything, we're talking about a parent universe of a sheer scale big enough that just one of its black holes is as massive as our entire universe!), we'd expect cosmic inflation to slow down and slowly start to reverse. It's accelerating at the moment, but that could easily be due to the size of the event horizon on the 'other side' expanding and being able to absorb more of whatever's currently falling into it. Once our universe starts to lose mass appreciably to the outside again, we would see it shrink in size incredibly slowly (appearing at first to be absolutely stationary) then shrinking faster. The vacuum energy would lower until there's virtually nothing left and then *poof*. Everything collapses into a nice little gamma ray emission on the other side.

I had exactly the same idea - and if you look into it a little more, so has Smolin. That was weird, reading his book for the first time and actually having someone with credentials back up a gut feeling! It's certainly not a theory without weight, in fact it's looking more likely to be the case. You have a universe that forms a singularity. Something that's infinitely dense? That's a ridiculous idea if you think about it. Get something soft - plasticine maybe - and squeeze it between your fingers. It squashes and expands into and fills a new axis. If you're compressing something enough, who's to say at this point you don't, solely inside the singularity, unravel the much-talked-about 'coiled hidden dimensions' and force matter to expand into them? Adding more matter into the black hole would cause the dimensions to expand more, appearing on the inside like an expanding universe with matter just coming into existence here and there (much like spontaneous pair production in our universe). At least, that's what I gleaned from the whole idea. edit: Forgot to mention that the observable universe lies within its own Schwarzschild radius, meaning we're technically inside a black hole

Crash Cassini into Saturn like they originally planned, wait for compression to send the RTG critical, watch it pop.

Let's take funding from all space agencies and make a new international one.

A vacuum aerogel would be quite easy, although I think with the mass of the gel itself we haven't managed to get one much lighter than air yet.

Not like NASA's really needed anymore anyway. There's private companies that fill pretty much every niche NASA did. Sure, they were good in the 50's when there wasn't the commercial motivation to develop space technologies but now there is, and without all the bloated bureaucracy behind them.

I prefer it, myself. It seems to have stymied the flow of angry children and pushed them back to reddit where their abusive remarks can be downvoted for no one to see.

I remember seeing that when they announced they'd done it. Pretty awesome stuff. Anyone know the methods of measuring such short time? Does it involve damn fast electronics or do they generally employ some kind of cheat, like using several measuring devices harmonically?

Anyone know what the smallest unit of time currently measurable is by any means? I don't mean the absolute smallest theoretical unit like the Planck time or Chronon, I mean the smallest you can actually read by actual experimentally possible means.

A good book that's been handed down in my family is this: Worth a read if you can find a copy. It predates transistors, but the principles are all the same. Also for the purposes of aiming a signal on a cubesat you have more than just wireless comms issues. You need to think about satellite orientation as well. Even the biggest dish won't do you any good if it's facing the wrong way. Although on the dish side of things, I recall seeing somewhere an inflatable dish like a half-metalised balloon. Those things could be really quite huge and pack down to not all that much.

Depends what you oil your slide with

This is true, and for a planet like Mars it's vastly easier to just dome it here and there, eventually joining the domes up centuries down the line. By that point you've effectively terraformed it anyway, you just have an artificial sky.

Although you could count PETA, ALF, ELF and Greenpeace among terrorist groups in light of actions perpetrated by their members.

Didn't say I wouldn't expect a fight

Now now, don't act like it's some kind of victory, you're still wrong about the sociopathy. I said somewhat. My mental health is an unusual condition which is really beyond the scope of this thread. Closer to dissociative personality disorder. From your perspective, at least. From a more neutral, un-emotionally charged perspective, it makes much more sense. Unless you can communicate with an animal, you cannot sufficiently determine whether it has a concept of 'I'. It may have an entirely different or even parallel concept that it sees you lacking in. Doesn't make it non-sentient.

Somewhat accurate though, even if he does fail a little on the delivery. I do lack empathy, although I can switch it on if needs be. To address the non-namecalling bit: Morality is purely a human (or arguably primate) construct, so when you are looking at something outside of humans and what directly affects us it really can be cancelled out. 'Whatever' is exactly the right word, as the fact remains that war criminals have committed atrocities. It's purely down to what is considered an atrocity. We commit mass genocide on cows, pigs, chickens, etc. but christ are they tasty. By all means keep isolated areas of a terraformed planet for study (see: Olympus Mons caldera in the Mars trilogy), but 'loss' is subjective. Also, sentience isn't something you can measure with notches on a stick. A crow wouldn't consider a dolphin sentient, but they are both arguably similarly intelligent.

Yup. Especially if they taste good. Through societal benefit. A child will take what it wants and cry when it has to share until its brain develops empathy. Once this happens, social morals and ethics arise because our survival chances are better as a group than as an individual, so we care for our own. Whether or not there's a god is wholly irrelevant. I don't believe any species is inferior or superior, there's no ingrained rank to anything. There's no ingrained meaning in anything at all so we can do what we want, while still applying our social ethics so we don't go mad. And no, we're certainly not alone in the universe. Things become our society when we want them to, not when we interact with them. Sure, butterfly effect, observe and you change and all that, but as society is purely a construct in our minds we get to choose what to include. Society isn't based on proximity.