crubs

My main concern is how we're going to to provide vitamin D to our early colonists. They're going to be deprived of UV light for a while in their EVA suits and pressurized buildings. It's going to be very costly to send shipments of supplements, so I'm curious what your thoughts are. I suppose they could get it from fish and eggs, but I'm not sure how practical animal farming is going to be early on.

If you haven't seen this yet. If the Soviets had beaten the US, we'd probably have landed on Mars to have one-upped them by now.

I think the US should alternate between the two systems like I do. For the purpose of science and engineering, I always use metric. However, for everyday practical measurements such as my height or room temperature or distance traveled, I find imperial to be more convenient.

An ODST platform would allow you to get boots on the ground practically anywhere in the world in an extremely short period of time compared to other transport methods. Your right, the payoff would be small but I can't think of much better.

If they're an interstellar civilization than going up against them would probably be like Native Americans fighting against European guns by using spears. The only thing that they might even raise an eyebrow to is nukes. But if we were to nuke them, they would probably just nuke us harder. The best option would probably be just to establish our conditions of surrender early on. A more interesting question would be how our military could exploit space to fight other countries. I'd say ODST platforms on centrifuged orbital stations would be possible with current technology, but it would be far too expensive to be worth it.

Whenever someone makes this argument, you have to keep in mind that it's a completely subjective probability. What if the probability of life "appearing" on any given planet is 10^-1000? In that case, the fact that life exists at all is statistically a miracle. At this point, the hypothesis that Earth holds the only life in the universe is completely valid. And what do you have to say to people who insist that God exists due to similar personal experiences such as your own? You may have been looking for God and claimed not to have found Him, but what would you say to someone who was not intending to find God and yet did? The same applies to angels and demons. Heck, you're convinced that the phenomena you observed were "ghosts" and "aliens", but what if someone were to tell you that you were actually observing spiritual entities? Such as angels, demons, or even deities? I've certainly heard countless claims both ways. I can explain many of these things through natural phenomena such as sleep paralysis, but I can't explain them all. Personally, I always raise an eyebrow of skepticism whenever I hear of "oogie-boogie" claims such as these, but as scientists, we are supposed to be open minded. Because we are dealing with phenomena that we don't understand, which is the entire point of science. The ancients may have considered fire to be some sort of spiritual magic because they didn't understand it. Now that science has helped us understand it we don't consider it such. If we can ever prove that consciousness can exist independent of the body, it would likely be considered paranormal until science understood it, at which point it would just be considered another part of nature. Now I'd rather not go off track and get into that discussion; I'm just using it as an example.

Plutonium cuz dat stuff is da BOMB

We can still save it! TARS, analyze the spin!

Centrifuges bro. At that point the problem is complexity and the amount of money the government is willing to fork over.

If the goal is to save fuel, then why not just add one or two external fuel tanks like the the orange shuttle tank? If it could SSTO from a planet with 1.3g, I doubt this would be a problem. Long-story-short, it's okay to be scientifically inaccurate as long as it's awesome. Conventional rocket launches are far more dramatic.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aerocapture#In_practice According to Wiki, aerocaptures have never been performed. Do any of you have sources to show otherwise?

Maybe instead of simply having the centrifuge jam, it could be an act of terrorism by some nutty anti-human fundamentalist or something... Otherwise, about how many people do you plan to have on this ship? I'm assuming it's hundreds at least.

Theoretically this is entirely possible. The key differences between male and female ultimately comes down to parental investment, and this begins at the gametic level. Males give sperm cells with small mass and make practically no contribution to the developing organism other than DNA. Females on the other hand have massive gametes that are energetically expensive to make, which limits her ability to make them. Furthermore, females in our species have to carry that egg around for nine months as it drains her nutrients, while the father gets to sit around, eat, and watch TV. Even after pregnancy, they still drain mom's nutrients in the form of breast milk. In other species, females have to sit on their eggs for a long period of time before they hatch. Furthermore, females tend to be primary caretakers until the children are on their own. With all the investment and work females have to put up with, they tend to be very picky about which males they mate with. This often means extravagant features such as those found in peacocks. Or in many mammals, strong, healthy, hard-working, and faithful males. To paraphrase Richard Dawkins in "The Selfish Gene", the evolutionary hypothesis for the origin of biological gender is as follows: Perhaps one organism decided to reduce the amount of investment he put into a single offspring and instead aimed for quantity as opposed to quality. Conversely, other organisms compensated the lack of investment from their mates by increasing their relative investment to ensure that their offspring would make it. This in turn allows the slackers to slack off even more... Over time this becomes a positive feedback loop that leaves us with two sexes.

Wow, I haven't seen that picture before, that's quite well done. I hope female kerbals will resemble that when they come out.