andrewas

380TW is 1/458 of the solar energy currently received by Earth's surface. We can probably forget about that compared to the energy that will be radiated from the hot gas that surrounds Earth. Also, whether or not Earth would survive if enveloped in Sol's red giant phase it doesn't say much about another planet. It could have been bigger to start with, or been right on the edge of the star after expansion. Or perhaps it was in an eccentric orbit, and spent only a brief period within the star until its orbit was circularized by drag and it started to spiral in.

Or, a simple reflector. They know where and when its launching, so they can tag it immediately and track it till it comes down.

Google for weather balloon regulations in your country, theres probably a procedure for it. It may be intended for scientific research rather than Joe Average who wants to send a camera to the edge of space for fun, but you could probably apply for permission easily enough if you wanted to. The important part is the time and location of launch, and you are required to ensure the balloon is visible to radar. That means air traffic control can identify it, track it and direct traffic around it if necessary.

There was a species of fungus that developed greater concentrations of melanin, allowing it to derive energy from gamma rays. I dont think they know the exact mechanism yet, but it does grow much more quickly when exposed to radiation.

There's no question that EMDrive produces thrust, but we don't know how. It is not violating conservation of momentum, or physics is broken, so where is the momentum going? We can't really stick one on a probe till we answer that. We could put up a technology demonstrator and verify that it works in orbit, but that still wouldn't tell us what it's using as reaction mass which we need to know to put it in a real spacecraft.

You're also advertising that you have something to hide, so everything you have will be under greater scrutiny. And given the travel times for any spacecraft that doesn't have a drive exhaust you could see from alpha centauri, there will be plenty of time for the enemy to locate the craft who's departure your decoys masked. The only time stealth in space is viable is when the enemy has no idea that there are hostile spacecraft to look for.

We had a city killer in Chelyabinsk - it airburst and the shock smashed ever window in the city. Thousands of injuries, millions of dollars damage, and if it had impacted intact it would have been about 500kt, easily enough to erase a city from existence. A couple of years later, no one remembers it.

Actually, no. The Declaration is longer than 3200 characters. Every single 3200 character subset of it will be on a page somewhere, but the odds on two pages with parts of the declaration occurring in sequence are remote. The original Library of Babel contained every possible book, this site merely contains every possible page.

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Yes, its procedural. The clever bit is that the algorithm is reversible so you can find any given text in the library - but you won't find anything useful, and if you somehow did, you wouldn't have any way to know if it was actually useful or whether it was only one of the near infinite variations of the text you wanted.

Which is why sensible aliens will build things closer to Halo than Ringworld.

Or if you stick a probe into the PSU itself. Which still shouldn't shock you since those probes are well insulated, but you'll definitely have a broken meter and/or PSU afterwards. Make your measurements from a spare molex connector. While you're in there, take the time to make sure all the fans are spinning, check that none of the heatsinks is clogged with dust, and reseat all the cables and components aside from the CPU.

Could be a power supply failure - measure the voltages, you should get 12V between yellow and black, 5V between red and black, the tolerances are 5%.

The trunk is unpressurized, its contents are not taken aboard ISS, they are grabbed by the station's arm.

Thats a consequence of the current drive towards thinner and lighter. They sacrifice precious battery life to save a milimeter of thickness, what chance does a keyboard have? That said, you can buy cases with keyboards, so its not a total loss.

Try this one:

We have detected planets around neutron stars, which was unexpected because the supernova should have blown them all away. Some are thought to have formed from debris left from the original star system, others may be captured from other stars, I think one is thought to be a star which had its outer layers removed by the supernova of its partner, leaving a planetary mass remnant.

The seasons are primarily caused by the Earth's tilt. Earth's orientation does not change throughout the year, only its position relative to the sun. On one side of the orbit, the north pole is tilted away from the sun. Six months later, the north pole is tilted towards the sun. The formed gives us northern winter, the latter gives us northern summer. So, yes, the length of seasons will change with Earth's orbit.

You're looking at the neat square holes, which were deliberately included in the design. But if you look closer, you'll see the damage. On the front left wheel, there's a hole above the square holes, and a visible hole on the back side of the wheel. The damage may not seem all that bad, but testing shows that the wheels will fail at less than half the rovers expected lifetime if they don't take care to avoid bad terrain and otherwise mitigate the damage. And losing even one wheel could kill the rover, the damaged metal can rub against the rovers cabling and cause a serious failure even if the wheel itself can still be driven on.

In that case, you'd hope for a more informative error message than 'the application has requested the runtime to terminate in an unusual way'.

No, a thin film of water will evaporate before doing much good. Depending on what the object is made of, that might leave nothing in the chamber to absorb the microwaves, which can damage the oven. You need to the objects surface to 100C for a few minutes, which means you need a substantial amount of water.

You can't communicate by quantum entanglement. But we dont need to. Everyone agrees on a time signal, and uses that to translate between their own systems. No one has to live on universal time, it's just an intermediate, so unless someone is already broadcasting a suitable signal, we can just use a convinient pulsar.

You keep asserting that a machine cannot create a machine if equal or greater complexity, but have not provided any evidence of that. To my understanding, the only limit on the complexity of the product is the data storage of the creating machine - and we can easily store a complete description of a machine with less complexity than the machine itself.

The thing is, we know how to build every component of that printer. We can list all the machines needed, all the resources we need. Do that for all the components in all the machines needed to produce the printer, and you eventually wind up with a set of machines that can replicate the entire collection. That's the basis for a von Neumann machine. It doesn't need any magical technology, the hardest part will be automating the whole process and creating a control AI sophisticated enough to recover from problems, adapting to shortages of certain resources, and deal with everything that is normally left to a human crew.

True for biological organisms that evolved in a world where less complex organisms were already there to prey on. I don't think you can generalise from that to self replicating machinery