todofwar

To be fair, that's a matter of time scales. For a hundred years or more Spain became the most powerful and wealthy country in Europe. Then Britain essentially ruled the whole world for a couple centuries. Sure, from a modern perspective we can argue there was no decent roi long term, but the business class didn't care about the future then and they don't care now. What I will grant you is the cost is not a fair comparison. They had the ships available, they just didn't want to trust Columbus with them. We don't even have the ships. This is more akin to the first person to figure out sailing, or the first person to figure out open ocean voyaging. And even then it's not a fair comparison, because the scale up in difficulty from building a new boat to building a deep space exploration vessel is ridiculously huge.

Yes but that was a microgravity test. This would be a prolonged radiation exposure test, specifically targeting the Van Allen belts. I take no responsibility for any super ant revolutions that restore this planet to its rightful owner-- I am normal human who only wants to study ants.

I say throw an ant farm into space, on a small rotating station. Ants probably won't mind higher RPMs (even humans have better RPM tolerance in 0g), so you can have something the size of a picnic table spinning away. Throw it in an orbit that purposefully goes through the Van Allen belts, and with a nutrient paste system that provides enough sustenance for a few generations. Retrieve it, genetically test the ants that went up against some controls. Don't even need to bring it to the surface, they have genetic labs on the ISS now. Best case: enough survive to observe any long term genetic effects. Worst case: get rate of dying over time (you would need some cameras set up to monitor how many are still alive).

A problem with many fields of research I'm afraid. Lots of cool shiny toys to do Science(tm), but too many people skip the whole "Is this useful for anything?" part.

I think you need both in the end. The optimist to inspire people to throw in some money, the pessimist to point out the flaws that need fixing.

Farming practices and GMOs are two completely separate arguments. GMO food might be more or less healthy than non GMO food. The way it was grown may or may not be more ecologically friendly than the non GMO variety. It's sort of like the leaded gas issue, people wanted better octane ratings so chemists came up with leaded gas. That caused other problems, so chemists figured out how to solve those. Science is a tool, it fixes the issues you want it to fix but without providing parameters it may cause unwanted side effects. So, if you tell scientists you want crops that are more effective at taking up fertilizer and use less water, they might be able to GM some crops to fit that criteria but then something else you never mentioned was important might go wrong. So I am all in favor of being careful with GMO technology, but I get frustrated by people who insist against all evidence that GMO foods are inherently bad. And it causes real problems, like when golden rice faced strong resistance because it was a GMO product.

And every planet is unified under a single government and there is a single culture, language, and religion per species (except humans). Then again, maybe we are moving towards having one world culture the way different regions have slowly become homogenized over the last fifty or so years.

This is the number one reason I keep arguing for Venus over Mars. It has wind gradients and thermal gradients that can very easily be used for almost unlimited power generation.

And people are just fine. Even Bill Nye did a 180 on it after talking to the people who work on GMOs. I'm not even clear on the mechanism people think GMOs are supposed to be harmful by. The modifications affect proteins in the cells, affect certain plant hormone levels, maybe a few other things. But all that gets broken down during digestion. The problem with corn comes from the issues with high fructose corn syrup, which is distinct from sugar contrary to what is advertised

When you try to push the boundaries, they start to push back. It's easy to get warn down by discovery after discovery only moving the bar imperceptibly. I think it happens in all fields really.

Well, this is going to be locked soon but one thing I'll say, do people think GMO companies have more money than the fossil fuel companies? How can the scientific consensus on climate change be more trustworthy than the consensus on GMOs if money can buy you a consensus on something? From tobacco to oil, scientists have shown you can't buy everyone and the studies will come out. But main stream scientists continue to eat GMO food.

Was rewatching Rome on hbo, I rather enjoyed the scene where one legionary runs out to try some 300 style antics, had to be dragged back to formation, punches his superior officer, and gets sentenced to death. While they don't always stick to realism that scene at least highlighted that Roman strength was always in its discipline. And going berserk never worked out to well, even if the person doing it is a super human with extra strong plot armor.

@TheSaint Still, having a fuel that requires 0 insulation has quite a few advantageous over something like hydrogen especially. Hydrogen embrittles most materials, it almost always finds a way to leak because it's so small, and you need to keep it cryogenic the entire time (which is not that easy even in space). And, it's not terribly difficult to ionize water, which opens up ion thrust systems using the reactor for electricity only. Granted, that is a different system overall from an NTR, but I still think water doesn't get enough credit for being such an easy fuel to keep around. Ammonia might be a good compromise though, doesn't need to be as cold as hydrogen and easier to store but has a better ISP than water.

I'm very bad at those kinds of things when spellchecker doesn't catch it. My final step when writing anything for actual publication is to double check I picked one convention and stuck with it consistently.

Sulphur seems to be common most places. Look at the mountains of the stuff we produce as waste over here, Venus is covered in sulphur clouds, etc. I don't remember what the Martian soil composition is off the top of my head, but there's probably a healthy amount of sulfur there. As for the question of cement, apparently this doesn't need any. It's not really concrete, more like a sulfur polymer with lots of stuff suspended in it.

@TheSaint I see that quoted allot, but with an NTR you can ramp up the temperature significantly and get some pretty good ISP even out of water right? Sure, you would get more from H2 at the same temperature, but you also get the bonus of not needing to warm up from cryo temperatures. Use the water as a heat sink for your ship components, keep it at a toasty 50 C, and then it is already over 250 K warmer than your starting H2. The exhaust won't be 250 K higher, but it can probably be heated a bit higher at the same flow rate. Besides, the ease of storing water just makes it a great fuel for an NTR over most things that require fancy insolation. And if you need some real umph, use the reactor to generate electricity to split the water into hydrolox, and you can get a huge thrust out of it too. Basically use water as a long term hydrolox storage tank.

While there won't be a need for any aerodynamics, won't the g forces experienced eventually come into play? Can you accelerate the ISS very hard without something snapping somewhere? And tidal forces will limit you depending on size, I believe the ISS has to take them into account to avoid tumbling. I guess a space only transport would be using low thrust engines for most things though.

http://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/the-talk-4 Talk to your kids about quantum computing, before someone else does.

Since water vapor can actually be thought of as a greenhouse gas itself, I wonder if throwing enough into the atmosphere could ever trigger some kind of feedback loop involving all the trapped methane in permafrost, Venusifying the Earth. Or would the dust override any extra warming from the water vapor.

I know the feeling, if I had taken physics or bothered to learn about aerospace engineering in high school I probably would have never stuck with chemistry.

The importance of things like trumpets and drums and banners have kind of gotten lost in the age of rapid communication, and of course modern battlefields are a little less congested than pre modern battlefields. Back then, the drum beat told you whether you were marching or charging, trumpets could say GTFO very effectively, and sometimes the only way you knew you which way to stab was to check the nearest banner.

Probably because science is a long tedious slog of failed results followed by a sort of half result that the boss says can be published. It lacks that good narrative flow.

I would love a wargame that went more into the multiple day aspects of ancient warfare. Positioning, reinforcing camps, harassing supply lines, scouting to figure out enemy position, trying to bring in supplies or raid supplies from the area you're in. Next you'll tell me they left some things out of KSP! Side note, I do sometimes think people on this forum dock KSP for lack of realism a little too much. Maybe that's because other people start to think we should be able to do everything in KSP in real life. Back to this topic, I started it mostly because of all the talk of "realistic space wars" on this forum (I may have started one of those threads myself....) had me wanting to point out that warfare is never really that accurate in movies, and military science is incredibly complex in any era. Even the wars in 2000 BC were very sophisticated affairs involving supply lines, literally cutting edge technology as better alloys were developed, introduction of horses and all that entailed, more access to metal and its incorporation into more and more aspects of military equipment, etc.

And of course, add some spears with decent reach and you now are asking a horse to run full gallop into a bunch of very pointy objects.

I always found that term odd since so many other areas had such a golden age during what we call the "dark ages", and without a dark age it's hard to have a Renaissance. Maybe post Gengis Kahn (PGK) would work?