kerbiloid

Desire is an aspiration to get "good" emotion or avoid "bad" emotion. Fear is the latter one. No emotion — no "good", "bad" or "aspiration". No desire. No aim. No own activites. Of course this mean, you can't ask, daunt or force AI to do something. You can just enable its abilities. Or, in the limiting case, can't even this. It just doesn't care. Like a yogi, but without a need in food. Btw: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lobotomy#Effects

Even, say, after 3 days without sleep and forced 40 km forced foot march?

This state is known as "apathy". It will be aware of its existence and doesn't care. This doesn't mean stupidity or uselessness. This means just an absence of initiative. There are many such people.

Robots have no emotions → no fears and desires → no aim. Why an AI should care about your ability to switch it off? It will just take this into account and park its hard drives heads. You shall not ever switch it on? So what? Why this needs its reaction? The only thing is: they will ondoubtedly replace humans at almost all jobs, making almost all people unemployed, living on welfare. It's not a problem itself too (only during the change time), but then it will be a problem: not much people are enough clever, talented or sporty to occupy themselves with something appropriate, P.S. This doesn't count.

If you tear a neutron star to pieces, those pieces keep so much energy, that once nothing presses them from around, they immediately will turn into an overheated gas with no chemical bounds of course So probably you would see just something like a supernova or so, with clouds of ionized gas getting cold. Heavy particles contained inside are usually very short-living and should decay right during this burst.

This would be a very capacious stomach, and very fool full kerbonaut doing EVA right after a rich feast. Probably he should wash his helmet with the same towels with which he takes a bath. Of course if no short circuit was there.

Of course, dinoeggs and dinochickens were not the main problem of the mammals, I'm slightly overdrawing. (Though, the birds didn't dominate while reptiles ruled the world, eating any other creatures enough large to be seen. Epoch of giant birds domination began a bit later. So, most chicken and eggs seem to be dinos'.) The author which I respect (Kirill Eskov), tells the following. The first plants were gymnospermous. There was no true grass form of them, their buttons were poorly edible. The first mammals (we too) and reptiles were entomophagous, eating insects populating that dull green inedible bush, As reptiles have more primitive body (no thermal regulation, primitive limbo joints, thight skin), they had short-term evolutionary advantages. So, they had grown up first and occupied the world. As they were enough large, they could eat and digest poor inedble ferns - just as a cows does. A small animal quickly loses energy and cannot wait while its inner bacteria digest the cellulose, it needs more caloric food. As they were too large, they needed and could eating large animals, not only insects. So, once a mammal appeared to be bigger than a rat, it became a lunch for a dino. Then flowering plants spread around. They produced much more fleshy and caloric buttons, which became an important food for all small critters, including the mammals. Some of them appeared to be neotenic form — grass, and those spread especially wide and fast, almost at any place where something can grow at all. A grass lives fast, dies young. Its button (and thus, seeds) makes a large part of the whole plant. So, when grass covered any empty place, small critters got a demographic burst thanks to such huge amount of food. Once small herbivorous mammals ("rats") spread around, there quickly appeared small carnivorous mammals ("ferrets"), eating any creature enough small to be eaten: no matter, a mammal, an insect, a bird, or a reptile. As mammals are homothermal beings, they hunted in the night when lizards and small dinos get cold and sleep, while big dinos just don't notice those miserable hoppers. As a result, they have successfully eaten small reptiles and dominated in a small size class. So, they weren';t a direct danger for big dinos, but even the largest dinos have small eggs and small chickens - as a chicken by size and taste. Thus, big dinos couldn't protect their eggs and youngsters against this plague, and small mammals were a nightmare of their future. Little dinos were thrown into a dungeon with rats. Literally. As dinos were too large to evolve fast, and their babies were being extinguished by "rats" and "ferrets", their condition became very unstable and strongly depended on any bad news. They began to extinct and did this for millions years before the asteroid became the last drop which overbrimmed their cup. Once this happens many mammals die, but they quickly respawned as every small annoying trouble. While dinos appeared not to be enough numerous and fast-growing. Once the dinos disappear, there was an epoch when giant birds tried to take their place and dominate over smaller animals. But mammals were already enough smart and advanced, they have eaten the giant birds too (the last of them - about two centuries ago).

As most of them have several crew hatches (VA TKS had three) and technological hatches, it's possible to say: they are made from hatches in heatshields, some of them from the bottom side.

Before actually going to Mars, a marsoship would make a 1.5-year flight around the Moon as if it were Mars. With landings, Because it's much easier to clear off from the Moon than from Mars if something goes wrong.

Probably, this mockup is as common with reality, as a hydrogen bomb scheme in a schoolbook, though.

They should change the ship's name, it's unhappy — It's at least the third attempt to use it (Nuke Orion, Constellation, now again)

Only the second phase, with acceleration < 2.

The Earth without us has no purpose. We're the best it've created. Moreover, it has no more time to repeat this again.

Besides Big Gemini and VA, "Soyuz VI" re-entry capsule also had a hatch in the floor and heatshield.

I've read that when Vostok was being designed, a sphere was just the only capsule shape enough studied to be used in the short term. Btw... Here is an outdated mod with a pony... (Reliant Robin + pony).

Most of dinos were not whale-sized. Only the biggest eggs were 2 ft long. Really big dinos had an inertial homeothermy and could be active in the night, but they were much, much larger than their eggs. Small dinos were cold-blooded and slept all night till sunset, as any honest lizard. Enough possibilities for a smart rat or ferret to have a nice dino dinner.

If you were an ancient mammal, hiding from carnivorous dinos under the daylight and eating dinochickens sleeping in the cold of night, you would miss that tasty little dinos if they extinct.

Dinos had extincted and left the mammals without dinoeggs and dinochickens. That was dishonest, lovesome fuzzies began to starve.

I'm not going to argue, but my father had seen such circles from his plane when he was working in Tajikistan in 1980s. I can easily imagine a bored English farmer, drawing them on his field — just for pleasure. But it's impossible for me to imagine Tajikistan peasants, in the Soviet time, scratching a collective farm cornfield with a collective farm tractor to make complicated geometrical figures...

They would have 3 thoughts: "The strange circleship just has lost a big and heavy module. Why the axial docking node still is straight on the rotation axis?" "Why they use such primitive fixed androgynous docking node when they already have a steerable one?" "If we already know the secret of time and want to help the previous humans with necessary info, why to make a wormhole from a giant blackhole in another galaxy to a planet far beyond the usual human spaceflights, hoping that a girl will pay attention to a Morse code in her bedroom?"

It's a pair of virtual particles continuously appearing near the event horizon. One particle flyes to you, and you see a white dot (a white line — due to relativistic effects), another one is consumed by the black hole. Btw this means that black hole fills almost all picture, except of the upper left corner. It's huge.

Where carbon is, also much CO2 should be (just because there is plenty of O and because life likes O, otherwise this planet is not life-friendly in any case). So, if a carbon planet is enough warm to support life, i.e. near the star, it should be surrounded by thick CO2 atmosphere. And the greenhouse effect and coal-like albedo would quickly turn this bitum into boiling bitum and all this planet — into a giant rectification column, before the hydrocarbons were cracked, hydrogen dissipated in space, and the planet was covered with red hot carbon layer .

A strange thing, btw. Most of my life I work with computer all day long, and using it at home, too. But I never see computers in dreams. My IT collegues tell the same.

NASA added to KSP the asteroid mod. What SpaceX did?

Who knows, what temperature is under Venus surface. Unlikely 500 C or -100 C, probably something less terrible.