Winter Man

They have indeed, and years ago Harvester even talked about the MOOSE system. Guess it's just pretty low priority though.

Ethics are just something we've made up to stop our society falling apart, they're irrelevant for activities outside society. There's no universal good or evil, so as a species we can do whatever we damn well please.

To play devil's advocate, you would power the laser with the fission of thorium. Stick in a small neutron source and mix the thorium in some manner of lasing medium. Without looking into it properly, it actually sounds feasible.

Here's a weight saving refinement - pre-split the water on the ground into its constituent elements, then store them aboard the rocket. Like a normal rocket. Seriously, we don't have any kind of electrical storage that can beat good ol' chemical energy for a rocket. Maybe in the distant future when we've cracked antimatter tech or vacuum energy or whatever, but not now.

Thing is with Mars, you don't need to terraform it. You just need to build large domes on the surface as a starting point for digging underground and creating radiation-protected habitats - terraforming can come later. As for how much can be done towards that in 30 years, quite a bit. Once the Falcon 9-R is operational (assuming you build more than one), you could feasibly launch a great number of colony ships a year. You'd expend all of Earth's useful resources (http://what-if.xkcd.com/7/) and destroy the biosphere in the process, but that soon wouldn't be a problem. Also, if you ban reproduction between coming up with a plan and actually finishing it on Mars, you only have to lift ~5 billion people or so.

I say strap a railgun to it. It's not like they only just came up with the concept, it's just only now the technology exists to make it.

Yeah it's just not worth it. And I think if you were to do that they might just start hitting students out of sheer frustration knowing what they'd become.

Okay, so it's obviously not real physics, but it's good for a laugh.

I was building a space station and got hit by another. Thought I'd deorbited it which was why I was rebuilding, but it turns out I just meant to deorbit it.

As cool as the second one is, can't we just take better photos with current equipment for less time and effort?

Worth noting that it keeps referencing ytterbium, but it doesn't use that. It uses yttrium (if you're planning on building your own).

With tweakables though there'll be plenty of variety. Little upgrades to efficiency or capacity here and there for the little things like your probe running out of juice before it makes Kerbol orbit (before solar power), or slightly lighter parts if your spaceplane doesn't make it off the end of the runway. Don't need a massive parts list for that 'un.

Or you could just have them fade to invisible before destroying, with a bit of code that sees what the particles nearest it are doing and *almost* goes with it. That way you'd have the trail dissipate faster or slower in different areas leaving only sections of trail here and there, much like dissipation through a real uneven atmosphere.

You could even take that a step further to say the experiments had to be done in a specific environment, e.g. you need to take an AMS to into deep space to discover what dark energy really is and build yourself a warp drive (endgame example).

Thing is though when money's implemented, SPAM SCIENCE won't be possible because you just won't be able to afford it.

It'd be nice, but it'd have to be a minute or so before when you're supposed to start the burn, not before the node (roughly speaking, node time minus half the burn time).

I've said it before and I'll say it again. We need a sticky explaining how software version numbers work. Too many threads like this over the years. For the benefit of the OP (and anyone else who doesn't understand), they are not decimals and work as follows: 0.1 is the first alpha release. 0 denoting alpha, 1 denoting first release. 0.1.1 would be the first hotfix update for the first alpha release. 0.1 is not the same as 0.10, as 0.10 is the tenth release, 0.100 being the hundredth, etc. We had this confusion when 0.10 followed 0.9, and to be honest it really does need explaining because it's not a numbering system encountered in everyday life.

Watch Primer until you understand it completely. By that time a whole bunch of new sci fi will be out.

Not so much out of the blue. It came out back in 2011, but it's just been remade with higher production values.

Ooooh did you get the broom closet ending? That's my favourite.

"Reality is that which, once you stop believing in it, doesn't go away." - Phillip K. Dick Thought the quote was relevant. Although we've not detected irrefutable evidence of it yet, so it doesn't wholly apply.

Most of your assumptions are right, except I'm pretty sure the radiation in the core is lethally high (to Earth life, at least - don't discount the aliens entirely). Also, the lifespan of whatever lives there might be drastically different to our own. For critters that had million year natural lives, interstellar distances wouldn't seem like all that much.

Credit was implied, and clearly it's not a lack of humour if I already know which site it's from (http://www.xkcd.com damn good reading, btw, especially the What If section). Oh, and I think you misunderstand what offence is. No one's offended, just pointing out that intentional IP theft is a dick move. Maybe you found it from someone else nicking it, my assumption was due to the implication as mentioned above.

Retrograde motion of the planets. That was the original proof, IIRC.

It's not nice to pass others' work off as your own, especially as it's XKCD and he plays KSP.