Codraroll

If they recommend sacking each board member individually, they could rack up quite a few recommendations on that alone.

Chemical rockets would be better than nuclear, I think, if you only plan to use them when the jump drive isn't suitable, which I take would mean that the jump drive is used to "teleport" from place to place and the rockets are used to match the relative speed of the spacecraft and the planets/stations/whatever you are teleporting towards. This means that rockets would mostly be used in proximity to spaceports, where you wouldn't want to spew radiation in every direction.

It's wrong to compare a disease which is endemic in the population already, with a disease with only a few tens of thousands of cases known worldwide. If the coronavirus became endemic the same way the flu is, we'd be deep in the doo-doo. Or, well, not that it would wipe out humanity or anything, but the extra strain on the healthcare system in addition to all the other stuff the healthcare system is already having its hands full of, would at the very least be hellishly expensive. It's an inconvenience worth fighting against.

A backpack full of batteries and shoulder-mounted auto-aiming lasers should take care of that threat. You could possibly also just jam the drones, cause them to detonate prematurely, or shoot down the plane that dropped them in the first place.

It's as if they believe the tests is just a milestone to be completed as quickly as possible. The point of the tests being to pass the tests, so that a box can be checked and the product shipped. "We mustn't do any tests the product is likely to fail, because that would delay the project and make shareholders unhappy". It's almost strange that they haven't swapped out the entire leadership. Sure, the head honcho had to go, but it seems the philosophy remains.

If I remember the SpaceY engines correctly, the engine referred to is the 5-meter "multi-Ratite" cluster of 5 Ratite engines. This being an emissive texture sounds to me like it's about the "glow" effect on engine bells if they've run for a while. No idea how to address the issue, though.

The closest comparison here would probably be airships of the 1920s and 30s. They had compartment walls made of fabric and all the furniture was made from balsa wood to reduce weight. It was a good attempt at luxury - though far from that afforded on an ocean liner - given the tight constraints.

Uhh... this doesn't quite make sense to me. Its density is 22.59 g/cm3, or 22 590 kg/m3. A five meter sphere of osmium would have a volume of 65.4 m3 and weigh almost 1500 tons. Assuming you input that wrong number in your calculations, your already pretty spectacular estimates are too low by a factor of almost 150.

At that speed there wouldn't be any Earth to hit at all. Go faster than light and physics break down. Heck, with that number of zeroes there would barely have been time for physics to happen even in the frame of physics as we know them. It may be that a ball of such "super-matter" capable of moving at such high speeds wouldn't have time to even interact with physical matter because it would instantly travel the width of the universe, passing through all of it without leaving a mark. Time itself is a very iffy concept when high relativistic velocities are involved. From the ball's perspective, the universe would go straight from the Big Bang to heat death the instant the ball appeared in it. From the universe's perspective, the ball wouldn't exist for long enough for its existence to even be registered.

In theory, this is possible, though. Cutting off a part of the ship and throwing it away to reduce mass. Air balloons do it all the time. Doing so in a spaceship might be a little more perilous, though.

Then my vote goes for some sort of relay satellite with a giant receiver that can happily and quickly suck up any data transmitted from the probe the moment it is generated, store it temporarily, and then send it back to Earth at a more leisurely pace. Just put something out there that can make pictures more convenient. Even if it may require an extra launch per mission.

I might as well chime in with this little bit of math trivia, which makes a ton of sense when you think about it, but which still is very under-communicated in math curricula out there: X% of Y = Y% of X. Handy if you need to find, for instance, 4% of 75. It's a bit tricky. 75% of 4, however, is fairly simple. And the answer is the same. "X% of Y" really only means "Multiply X by Y and divide by 100", and it doesn't matter which order you do things in.

-100 degrees, but also a near vacuum, so there wouldn't be much of a heat exchange with the atmosphere. The limiting factor for insulation on Earth is the air it contains, which means its thermal conductivity can't fall much below ~22 mW/meter*Kelvin. Imagine the insulation being soaked in water so it's wet and poorly insulating, only that it isn't water but air. Advanced thermal insulation materials exist, which achieve a lower thermal conductivity by filling the insulation pores with gas, or even better, gas is pumped out entirely (vacuum insulation - great insulation value, a major chore to build with since you're effectively building with balloons, that have the pressure on the outside as opposed to the inside - poke a hole anywhere in a panel and it's useless). It should actually be fairly simple to insulate a building on Mars for this reason. You have so little convection that steals heat from the building. I think heat losses to the ground would be high, but it would also be simple to insulate - no ground water to mess things up, so as long as you can space the structure apart from the ground, you'd be good there too. I think even a polystyrene block would suffice. Also, I wouldn't worry much about heat per se. All the other life support systems you'd need would presumably generate plenty of waste heat. Cooling the colony down might actually be more tricky. Using some sort of heat exchanger with the ground should suffice, though.

Which is exactly why we should strive for it. If we can get a whole colony's worth of stuff to Mars and make it survive there, we can, in practice, build a colony anywhere. At least anywhere within a reasonable distance from the Sun, if our chosen technology depends on solar energy in one form or another. The level of self-sustainability needed to achieve this milestone will be greatly appreciated by other industries on Earth as well. The solutions found for the relatively unconventional problems in space travel (say, waste recycling, radiation shielding, photovoltaics, spacesuits, etc.) can have direct application in taking care of Earth as well.

Quick question: The capsule was apparently loaded with supplies for the ISS and even Christmas presents for the astronauts. Does anybody know what happens to supplies that don't make it to space? I presume the Christmas gifts could be presented at a later occasion, but what about the rest? Will some of it potentially be re-used, or is it all just dumped into a container and trucked off to the garbage dump?

I'd say, go for Mercury. It's a big ball of metal with as much solar energy as we would ever want, and statistically it's the closest planet to all the others because of the way orbits work. Practically infinite metals, practically infinite energy, and a relatively short hop to everywhere else. If we become advanced enough to colonize Mars, Mercury would be a good place to set up the next shop.

I think it's unlikely that they decided to store the test results for posterity solely by relying on the memory of the people who saw it. Then again, considering that this was, more or less, how the know-how required to build the Saturn V was stored, one can never be sure.

"January 4, 2020" sounds so far off. But it's in less than four weeks. Strange to think that by the end of this month, we'll be closer to the 2050s than the 1980s...

Nah, he's obviously interested in sending the President of France away at really high speeds. (I didn't read much beyond the title either)

Presumably, by making the rocket shorter.

Or alternatively, use a helicopter. You didn't specify how far above a planet you should hover?

Actually using superhuman strength with a human body has its limitations too. As @Streetwind said, lifting heavy things becomes complicated, because your puny body can only span a rather limited area of ground. If your center of mass moves outside the area spanned by your feet, you will fall over regardless of strength, unless your foot is somehow gripping the ground. And since you only have two feet, that area would always be long and narrow. No good if you're trying to lift, say, a concert piano without crawling underneath it first. To lift something big, you'd have to find its center of mass, get a handhold right underneath it, and lift straight up. Otherwise, you'd be throwing yourself off balance and falling over. But your grip on the object in question is a difficult matter too. Not all materials are rigid enough that they are practical to lift as they scale up. Imagine trying to lift a beached whale, for instance: You can lift up a small corner of blubber if you find a good handhold, but the rest of the whale would still sag and rest firmly on the ground. And if you tried to drag the poor whale by gripping its tail fin and pulling with your super strength, you'd be more likely to tear off a hand-sized chunk of the fin than to move the whale anywhere. Actually, due to the grip issue not even that would happen - you'd simply pull yourself towards the whale instead, as it is a lot more firmly anchored to the ground than you are. Now, not all heavy objects are whales, but even seemingly rigid objects behave somewhat like them on a larger scale. Try lifting a car by its side mirror, for instance, you'd just tear it off. Try pulling a Superman and lifting a plane with your bare hands - the plane's hull would just buckle around them. And lifting a building would be completely out of the question. Your average flimsy LEGO building is much, much more rigid relative to its size than a real-life building is. No matter how you gripped it, without carefully placed supporting structures you'd just tear off a chunk. If you try to lift very heavy things, you have to ensure that the piece you're gripping is solid enough to carry the entire weight of the object. A secondary ability that would be required for practical super strength is also super durability. For instance, say that you try to lift one of those cartoon weights of one ton lying on the floor in front of you. You'd probably tear your arms off before you got the weight off the ground. Pulling a tree out of the ground? Same story. That tree is a lot more firmly anchored to the ground than your arm is to your shoulder. You can't win that tug-of-war by strength alone. Of course, this assumes you manage to brace against something, otherwise you'd just pull yourself towards the object instead. Then for really heavy objects, you'd run into problems with the ground itself. If you somehow were to find the center of mass of an airliner, had a convenient and sturdy handhold to grip, and you were solid enough to handle the load, you still wouldn't be able to lift it over your head and walk down the road with it. Then the entire mass of that airliner would rest on your foot, which would be similar to balancing your entire weight on the point of a knife. You'd step right through the pavement and sink into the ground until the airliner came to rest on the surface. So yeah, with super strength you could probably be better at throwing things (although the recoil would knock you off your feet) and doing slightly more heavy taks than a regular human, but physics would limit how much your ability would scale up. Don't expect anybody to be able to hold back a jumbojet from taking off or lifting trucks over their head with one hand or anything like that.

I was watching a video about satellite building when the thought struck me: How cheaply could you feasibly build a satellite? As the word has many definitions, let's consider a case: A satellite about the size of a washing machine, in low Earth orbit, with no functionality whatsoever except being visible to trackers (and the right type of telescope) and having your name engraved on it. Let's pretend you have a dream and much money to spare, but not that much money. Let's assume the cost of the launch itself is not a problem, but on manufacturing the satellite itself you want to cut as many corners as feasible. Could you feasibly weld something together in your own garage, be confident enough in your own craftsmanship to know it won't fall apart from the launch forces, hoist it onto your flatbed truck and haul it off to Cape Canaveral? Or would the launch companies refuse to have anything to do with anything that isn't accompanied by a stack of signed documentation from a certified and trusted supplier, included proof of assembly by certified and trusted personnel? And if you have to order your satellite from a manufacturer, how much would they charge you? Assume that your goal is to launch an intact satellite way above cubesat size, but it doesn't have to actually do anything once up there. There's no way for the satellite itself to stop working unless it physically breaks apart, and you're building it sturdy enough to know that it won't. Does it still have to, for instance, pass all those expensive radiation and temperature tests or be handled in clean-room conditions at all times?

Or unless they take the Hot Fuzz approach, and shoot the mundane stuff with fast cuts and dramatic music. Seriously, that movie contains an ungodly amount of paperwork you barely notice because it's made to look cool.

On the contrary, I don't think Interstellar does such a good job of portraying science either. At the beginning of the movie, the main character's son is told that he shouldn't study science, because society needs more farmers due to the ecosystem collapse. You know, a problem to be figured out through agriculture (not through agriculture research, just through growing more crops) and not by scientists. Society seems to tackle the problem of blights and crop failure with "well, this planet is screwed, time to find another one". Because I guess research into blight-resistant crops wouldn't help at all. I also seem to recall that the government had begun to promote conspiracy theories to discredit science and engineering, so that more people would go into farming jobs. The scene portrays science as both unable to solve problems, and an unnecessary pastime when a situation comes along to call for farmers. Later on, the infuriating scene on the planet deep in the black hole's gravity well. Before they descend to the surface, they tell each other "As we all know because we all have degrees in this sort of thing, the high gravity on the planet means one hour on the surface is like 25 years outside here." "Yes, when one hour passes down there, 25 years will have passed up here where I'm staying." "One hour there means 25 years here, got it." (and so on a few times - they repeat that "one hour = 25 years" thing for a while to make sure the audience really understands it). Then they arrive on that very surface to find out to their great surprise that the beacon that had kept sending emergency signals for 25 years was still active because... only one hour had passed on the surface! Who could have foreseen that! And then they go back up to rendezvous with the mothership, and are shocked to find the guy onboard to be 25 years older. It's also a plot point that massive tidal forces from the black hole would regularly send enormous tidal waves around the planet, but everybody fails to notice this before they land. In short, the entire scene portrays scientists as incompetent. And then at the very end, they throw science out the window and decide to show how feelings and intuitions are better tools for making decisions rather than assessing the facts, and it produces better results too! To put it in the words of this Cracked.com article: Cracked actually has another pair of articles about the stupid portrayal of science in movies that would be relevant to this thread. Read them, they're a delight.