Beamer

Earth has technically been a desert world at several periods in its past (after the start of life). There are a couple of definitions of a 'desert'. The biological one is typically centered around the hostility to life. Needless to say if you take this definition it would be unlikely as the definition itself is specifically centered around "hostility to life". The geological one typically mentions the lack of precipitation caused by extreme heat or cold and/or the absence of abundant surface water. By this definition, Antarctica is a desert, and the entire Earth was a desert planet the few times in its past when it froze over completely. Of course life was quite simple during those times and it's possible biogenesis couldn't occur on such a world, but once life gets a foothold it is very good at hanging on. We have a considerably large sample of planets and moons in our solar system. Virtually all of them are desert worlds. As far as we know only one of them carries life, I'd say it can't be a coincidence that this is also one of the very few rocky bodies that isn't a desert world. The only other ones I can think of are Venus and Titan. The idea that you need a world with water on it to have life isn't based on a sample of just 1, it is based on a single positive in a large sample of different worlds. Of course the final word on whether there's microbial life elsewhere in the solar system isn't out yet, we still have quite some sub-surface work to do to be certain, but so far the results are pretty bleak. The universe at large doesn't seem to be very kind to life.

Don't shoot the messenger, but... https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/planets/in-depth/ So regardless of how it came to be, or if it once started out as a natural planet, once you make/magic this thing, it is not technically a planet anymore... It would have to be fairly light to stay in its 'sculpted' shape, and any sort of atmosphere or surface water would wear down the sharp edges within no time (geologically speaking) and fill up the 'valleys' with sediment quickly (valley being the center of the polygon). If you want a KSP example look no further than Gilly, although not nearly as regularly shaped as a Pythagorean solid you can imagine it being more regularly shaped and standing on the surface of it wouldn't be all that different. You'd effectively have 2 'biomes', the low lands and the high lands, with an arbitrary cut-off point somewhere in between. As we all know, when it comes to launching a rocket from Gilly it really isn't worth it to stumble/bounce yourself to a high point first, the gravity is so low on such non-spherical bodies that you'd just pretty much jump off into space. For the heck of it let's say we have a planet sized body made out of nanobots that actively kept themselves in such a shape (and we disregard the enormous amounts of waste heat of all the work needed to fight gravity, which I have no doubt would melt the entire thing). I think the interesting thing about it would just be to walk from the center of a polygon to its edge. You'd be walking on a perfectly flat surface, as far as the eye could see, yet with every step you took away from the center of the polygon it would feel like you're walking up a steeper and steeper incline. I think it would be very disorienting, possibly nausea inducing... but only if the body was small enough to actually notice a difference in the direction of gravity after a short distance. I think that's kinda the problem with the idea. If the body is so big it has enough gravity for normal surface travel, then it is probably also big enough for local differences in gravity to be unnoticeable at typical surface traveling speeds. If OTOH the body is small enough to notice the gravity shift over short distances, then its gravity would be so low that surface movement was just a series of ballistic trajectories (like 'driving' on Gilly or even walking on Minmus) and it probably wouldn't bother your sense of balance and direction any more than being in free fall would. Note on Donut-shaped planets, Sixty Symbols did an episode about that:

The Otrag ( http://www.astronautix.com/o/otrag.html ) was designed to use parallel staging, making it look a lot like a KSP asparagus creation, however afaik it was never intended to pump fuel between the stages. Although its engines racked up an impressive 1 million plus seconds of static firing and there were over a dozen successful test launches, the project was eventually cancelled. It was meant to have its stages in concentric squares so that each square further out would have enough trust to lift the whole thing. Once the outermost square of boosters was discarded, the next square would take over and the staging would work its way to the inner core like that. The way it would have discarded its stages would have made it at least appear very much like a KSP asparagus staged rocket.

Web is mooning the MAZ: "After several months of discussions, NASA optics and micrometeoroid experts working on the James Webb Space Telescope have figured out how to reduce micrometeor damage to the $10 billion machine: turn it around." https://www.theregister.com/2022/11/21/nasas_jwst_meteor_avoidance_plan/

I think you're missing the extent to which this research goes. Phrases like "blocking the sun" is exactly the kind of rhetoric that is used to scare politicians into blocking research, and it's complete nonsense. Nobody is blocking the sun, we're talking about small scale research into regulating the amount of sunlight that reaches the surface or the atmosphere of the earth. The particular project that scared the UN into this treaty in 2010 was a proposal by NASA to do some small scale experiments with reflective dust in low earth orbit. It would have had zero effect on the global climate, it would have been a short duration experiment, and it would have given us a lot of useful data, not only about how effective (or ineffective) such measures could potentially be but also on the effect of sunlight on cloud formation and wind patterns. I don't subscribe to the notion that simply 'bettering our ways' with regards to pollution is going to save us. All the data we have says that it most definitely will not. And it irks me greatly that people keep pushing that nonsense. We're way to far down the slope to just 'stop being bad' for the environment. The amount of damage we have already done requires active regulation to solve, reducing our climate footprint can only prevent future damage, not repair past damage. Until people start realizing this, we will keep sliding down the slope until we hit the bottom hard enough to form a crater. Edit: It is worth considering that the situation we find ourselves in is in itself the result of large scale global geoengineering, albeit unintentional, and without knowledge. Research into actively altering the climate stands to also give us a lot of knowledge in how to prevent altering it unintentionally.

I suspect there will be plenty of "our song" entries to this thread eventually, so as a committed bachelor I'll throw in mine for a bit of variation I fell in love with Tom Waits in the late 80s and have been following him ever since. Unfortunately he retired some years ago, but he left a legacy of around 2 dozen albums, all of which I own, many on multiple media formats. I was fortunate enough to see him live in 1999 in the amazing setting of the Royal Opera House in The Hague, one of the best concerts I have ever seen. There are many songs of his that resonate with me, but this one I definitely count as a personal 'anthem':

Thanks to the ban on research, we don't have reliable data to make that assertion. What is stupid is acting without knowledge, and by extension blocking the gathering of said knowledge. Given the fact that a) all stars are variable, even stable ones like our sun, and b) our civilization requires stability to survive, it seems only inevitable that we will eventually start regulating the amount of energy the earth receives from the sun. Better we know how to do that safely before we actually start doing it.

Yes, that's possible. Snap to edges of the frame, or to edges of other windows. I work daily with applications that have a design like this. You don't have to look further than any typical Microsoft business tool for that. Visual studio has used this type of UI design for many years, as does a variety of MS server applications (like their various server managers). So do many programmer environments from other companies, as well as coding-aimed text editors (UltraEdit, Notepad++ etc). I would say it's fairly common for productivity environments to allow the user to snap things like property windows or result windows to any edge of the screen or to the edge of another window, or even just snap them loose completely and place them anywhere on the screen as a loose floating window. It's less common in game design though, gaming companies tend to go for a specific look or design, artists are involved and we all know how those artsy types feel about messing up their carefully crafted ideas I believe the viewers used for SecondLife have a flexible UI design like this, arguably not a real 'game' but close enough. One of the first MMORPGs I played, Anarchy Online (think Everquest but in a sci-fi setting instead of a Tolkienesque setting) allowed you to snap various windows like inventory, nano-programs (i.e. spells), chat, equipment window etc to whatever edge you wanted in whatever order you wanted, and that was some 20 years ago. Sometimes it is accomplished by modders, I have seen several UI mods for Cyberpunk 2077 that allow you to move UI elements to whatever position you want them - the flexibility is there in the engine, it just wasn't implemented as such by the gaming company itself. So it's all perfectly possible, just less common in game design than in productivity applications.

Another one of the old masters kicked the bucket: https://news.slashdot.org/story/22/11/20/1558240/hard-science-fiction-master-greg-bear-dies-at-age-71

Don't know about a movie, but the aforementioned Larry Niven also wrote Footfall, about an invasion of Earth by an elephant-like civilization. Another great read from the master of sci-fi world building.

Story developing: https://www.whitehouse.gov/ostp/legal/ / https://www.thedailybeast.com/white-house-admits-we-might-need-to-block-the-sun-to-stop-climate-change Finally! In 2010 the UN (in)famously placed a ban on any geoengineering projects in what I at the time believed (and still do) was the biggest mistake they ever made. Although I (and more importantly, the scientists involved) am well aware of the potential dangers of large scale geoengineering, they didn't just ban geoengineering, they banned even the small scale (in the field) research on such projects (there were some vague loopholes in the treaty however considering the burden of proof necessary to be allowed to run projects like this it effectively ruled out anything that went beyond "let's put a CO2 filter on this chimney"). See for example https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn19660-what-the-un-ban-on-geoengineering-really-means/ Seems like at least some politicians are starting to wake up. although whether it lasts beyond this presidency time will have to tell...

But doesn't that create an infinite regress? You explained an acceleration in 3-space by creating an acceleration in 4-space. What causes 3-space to accelerate through 4-space? And although it seems to give a plausible explanation for what could be the cause of gravity, unless I missed something it doesn't seem to explain how an acceleration in 4-space causes us to observe an accelerating expansion in 3-space? To go back to the rubber sheet analogy, to create the observation for any 'flatlanders' on this sheet that their space is expanding faster and faster, we would have to actually stretch the rubber sheet, faster and faster. The only thing we need to do to create the gravity part for them is to translate the rubber sheet perpendicular to its plane (faster and faster). So even without the infinite regress, it doesn't seem to tie our observations of the expansion rate of the universe to this explanation of gravity. I won't go so far as to suggest stretching the rubber sheet would decrease the curvature of space-time which would mean we would need to accelerate through 4-space (or 3-space for the sheet) even faster and faster to compensate for that. This analogy definitely breaks down a few steps before that

I'm in the cinematic audience, and I endorse Mojave Green for the next major sci-fi blockbuster.

What about pears?

That's only half the story though. The surface gravity is the same but its mass is over 100 times smaller than Earth's to accommodate for the smaller radius. I bet this would have some unexpected effects on impact ejecta, even when you disregard material properties other than density (like tensile strength and what not). With the same amount of energy, your rocks don't go up as fast as on earth, but they also don't have to go as fast to reach orbit. Or is that one of those things where everything cancels out and you end up with the same result... Let's see, assuming the same size and energy a rock in the ejecta will only get 1/10th the speed it would get on Earth. But orbital speeds are only a factor of 3-4 lower than for Earth, not 10 times as low. So less chance for ejecta to reach orbit I would say, a lot more is going to fall back. And of course Kerbin also has a relatively thick atmosphere for its size further slowing down the ejecta. But in absolute terms it's thinner than earth's so the impactor is slowed down less (although that's probably negligible at the typical speed of a comet). We also have to keep in mind that most things in the Kerbin system seem to have a pretty high density, so the impactor likely would too. I wonder if Kerbin could have even formed a moon in the same way Earth presumably did. You'd need a lot more energy to get all that material in orbit, at which point you'd probably just smash the entire planet to pieces and create an asteroid belt like we have beyond Mars. I fear this is beyond the 'back of a napkin' level, anyone from NASA around who can simulate an Earth-like moon-forming impact on a planet with 1/10th the radius and 10 times the density?

Kerbal Engineer has an orbital period readout with millisecond precision, that helps a lot. I put 3 sats evenly spaced in orbit, then use that readout and minimal RCS puffs to equalize their orbital periods. They'll be good for hundreds of years without corrections. If there's a few meter difference in Pe/Ap of the orbits it doesn't matter, as long as their orbital period is the same Although useful for RL communication and positioning systems, geostationary orbits don't offer any advantage over non-stationary circular orbits in KSP because all antennas are omni-directional (as long as you don't get so low that the horizon starts causing large line-of-sight cut-offs). I personally prefer setting up my triangles close to the SOI edge to get maximum ground coverage and minimal relative drift. What matters is their spacing which is as much of a hassle for geostationary as non-geostationary orbits. Again, the orbital period readout is very useful for this (but it can be done with the base game time to Ap/Pe readouts and some simple calculus too of course). Assuming you release your sats from a single ship in the intended circular orbit, just retrograde burn 2 of them until their orbit is 2/3rd of the initial length, and circularize one of them after 1 orbit and the other after 2 orbits (MechJeb can do this automatically with the resonant orbit function). Then fine-tune using RCS or engine set to 1% thrust until their orbital periods match as close as you can get it and Bob's your uncle, a near perfect triangle for near eternity.

I was aiming at genetic monocultures, hence the banana example. There are dozens if not hundreds of different rice cultivars. Even then crop protection is a major headache for rice because of monoculture in the agricultural sense, with a lot of research going on (and fortunately progress being made with combining crops as well as combining it with fish 'farming', which is pretty clever IMHO). And that's for a staple food of which many varieties exist and which is primarily grown by small (in modern western crop-growing terms: absolutely tiny) farmers, so arguably one of the 'lesser monocultured' staple foods out there. You can't really compare the present day agricultural practices to those of even a few hundred years ago. When there's only a few hundred million people on earth, you can throw away a plastic bottle or drop a mercury thermometer once in a while without destroying entire ecosystems. With 8 billion not so much. Scale changes a lot of things that we once took for granted, and that includes rice cultivation. Edit: Just wanted to add, anyone interested in a great future dystopian sci-fi novel tackling the subjects of global warming, rising sea levels, post-carbon energy and genetic monoculture I would recommend to read The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi, winner of both the Nebula and Hugo awards for best novel in 2010. I was going to say it's definitely in my top 10 best of the last 10 years until I looked up the wiki link and once again was confronted with how time flies, so let's say top 12 of the last 12 years

True, but that's only a bad thing if you think in terms of the length of a political career. Over the long term, monocultures = no productivity at all. Just look at the Gros Michel, and the Cavendish doesn't seem far behind that example.

I like to think I keep up to date on my internet memes, but until 2 weeks ago I never heard of this Mr Beast. When I did and had a look at a few of his videos, I wondered the same thing I always wonder about 'personality' centered YT channels. But hey if he gets the good message out there, he's got my blessing Still, the usage of land that has already been earmarked for natural regeneration is a big issue. It makes sense of course, no land developer is going to give up his high priced and prized land, bought to build a mall or houses, for a bunch of trees. If some well meaning charity asks a mayor of a city if he has some land to spare for a tree planting action, the mayor is going to say "Sure, we weren't doing anything with this piece of land anyway". That really needs to change before we get anywhere. Planting trees instead of letting them grow naturally doesn't really help all that much, even when done sensibly and responsibly (although that's still a lot better than the picture I posted).

I am a firm believer in chaos theory My deep space network looks like a kid with green, yellow and red pens and a ruler went to town on a blank sheet of paper. I typically put 3 relays around any planet in a regular triangle, (near) equatorial, a ways outside the orbit of the furthest moon, plus 1 or 2 in a polar orbit, these ones typically inside the orbit of any moons. But the strength of my network mostly comes from the interplanetary relays. I occasionally send up a batch of 4 or so and put them in various Kerbol orbits, at inclinations up to 30 degrees, and any planetary transfer booster I use that won't be crashed into its target gets a relay antenna and is left in whatever Kerbol orbit it ends up in (it's not waste if it has a function). Asteroid scanners also get a relay antenna. At any time I will have several high power relays above and below the plane, covering the higher latitudes of nearby planets and moons. It seems to work, I've literally never lost connection with any vessel in my current career game.

Technological carbon capture and storage is very expensive and at the current levels of technology not effective enough to make much of a dent. However, there are some clever people thinking up low tech ways, like https://geobites.org/carbon-to-carbonates-capturing-co2-with-rocks/. Of course the good old 'planting trees'* is another low tech method. Capturing carbon is something the earth has been doing for a long time through various means, we can leverage those means if we're smart about it. Technology is not necessarily always the best solution, and it's unlikely we'll find a 'silver bullet' solution, progress will have to come from a variety of methods. * A big problem with almost all of the current tree planting actions is that the land used for this is typically land that has already been earmarked to 'naturally regenerate'. So instead of a beautiful natural forest we get regular mono-cultures like this: As much as I like to see more trees, that is obviously not a good way to go about it. The same field would have been a lot more 'healthy' if it was just left alone for a while. And of course, planting them on one side and cutting them down on the other just as fast doesn't help much either. If we want more trees, we should probably stop cutting them down before we try to plant more.

Save Jebus. Trivial.

Superman and Supergirl are not human though.

I was made to understand their superpowers were limited to telekinesis and flight. The ability to work together as one with other humans from a plethora of different cultures and backgrounds was never mentioned . In general, power makes people bigger egomaniacs, not smaller ones. Most superhero comics and films do a good job of ignoring this of course. In the real world, a 'superhero' would just be a supervillain whose goals happen to align with yours.