Bill Phil

The AI is more like offspring in my point of view. In that way it's still "human" in a broader sense of the term. You see, we're already at a point where most humans don't bother to learn things. We have technology and don't know how it works. Just because this trend would continue with AI doesn't mean much. It's already happening, for better or worse. For example, how many people actually do anything with relativity? Or quantum physics? A lot of people are involved, but compared to the total population it's a small number of people. Another, more ubiquitous example would be computers. Hundreds of millions, if not billions, of people use computers. But how many of them could actually build a computer? Sure, a decent number of them may know what computers are and have knowledge of how they generally work, but so few have the skills required that there is already a disconnect between most humans and the humans that create technology. I don't think there's a problem with AI that goes beyond our abilities. As long as we raise them right, that's fine. They don't have to represent us. Rather, what's more important is whether or not they provide benefits to the species. I'd like humanity to be able to jump higher, even if jumping higher requires something that has evolved beyond us. Sure, we can do great things. But there are limits to what we can do, if only due to the limitations of our minds. As such, we would need to go beyond our current state, perhaps to a state that no longer represents us now, to do even more.

I don't see why they can't or shouldn't solve our problems for us. To an extent computers already do this, AI would just do it more. And in the the end, we built the AI, so any problems it solves were solved because we used the AI to do so. Even more, scientists and engineers and others help solve society's problems, no reason that AI can't do the same. We should be wary though. AI can be smart but not necessarily mature. So we would need to raise them, I think. Or at least teach them.

This one gets me all the time. I write it as fourty. I am also perplexed by this though... Apparently "fourty" is obsolete. Let's bring it back. Like the thorn...

I feel ya.

The idea was to put one in the Pacific...

Yeah. But rounding up is adding hundreds of millions to the population, the equivalent of many countries.

Once I was near some buildings and it sounded exactly like one place in Half Life.

Maybe a lofstrom loop? Even shorter, just 2000 km and some more for the lift cables.

And those are demonstrably ineffective...

Geocache? You could maybe find your coordinates there and look up a geocache in that area.

NASA is a government organization. I don't think they should advertise. Contractor rockets, on the other hand, probably can...

All the world's a hostage...

Even easier than that. Develop asteroid redirect technology, get very good at aiming them, send out a fleet of probes to redirect decent sized asteroids, and you've got an arsenal of WMDs.

This definitely looks more like a test of transportation between two spacecraft connected by cable than anything to do with a space elevator.

9/10 Sounds pretty Dangerous...

I do have an idea for a KSP story... I need to work it out though.

It seems like the gates themselves slow the vehicles down at the other end. It's stated somewhere that using a single gate is inaccurate compared to having two on either end. Well, the Kzin have a culture geared toward fighting. I could see them trying to board a ship...

Some say it's already happened... I remember playing Doom so much that I hallucinated the in-game sounds...

It's theoretically possible. The necessary power to get high thrust, however, makes it effectively a spaceship strapped to a laser weapon. If it has external power sources, those are basically laser turrets. In Man-Kzin wars, after the first one, they have FTL, so...

A chemical engine? Yeah. A gamma ray laser photon rocket? Not so much.

Requirements creep happens in engineering all the time.

RUDs do a good job... just tell them it's a test launch...

Not bad... Maybe invest it for a few decades then send the trillion over...

You could just buy EA, and then get rid of it. Keep all the good employees if you want... From what I can find EA's value is less than 10 billion. Easy if you have over a trillion.

It might be more practical to build a whole bunch of smaller accelerators, if making antimatter was the goal. If it's too energetic capturing the antiparticles becomes impractical.