Kryten

As I said, I don't know if ELANA supports launches for anything smaller than a 1U cubesat. In general, badly. You get outgassing and deterioration from the UV.

This is extremely heavily implied in the book. To make a direct quote;

Your reason for buying a new console is a collection of slightly spruced-up existing games?

'Assembled DNA' is a lot more than bases in the right order. To produce a viable embryo, you need properly modified histones associated with it.

My analogy is it's impossible to tell; but we know if I flip it long enough it'll come up tails half the time. That's the difference between climate and weather; short-term random and/or chaotic phenomena v. long-term trends.

We can exchange entire nuclei; there's a lot more in there than just pure DNA.

Of a new design? You're looking at tens of thousands of dollars for all the integration work, at least; this is the reason the cubesat standard and others like it exist in the first place. EDIT: Welcome to IRL spaceflight; for larger sats, systems integration costs are about as high as those for the launch vehicle itself. If you want something smaller than a 1U, the only smaller standard on the market is pocketqube; 5X5X5cm, no more than 180g. Anything smaller than that and you'd have to be carried aloft by something using the pocketqube or cubesat standard rather than directly, and that'd have to be arranged with whoever's building the main sat. Be aware the only provider of free nano/picosat launches, NASA's ELANA program, only sends up cubesats as far as I'm aware.

NROL-65 is a KH-11 imaging satellite and is currently in an orbit of 266 x 441 km, at 96.9° X-37B OTV-3 is an X-37B reusable component testing platform currently at 319 X 332 km 43.5° NROL-33 is a 'Quasar' series communications sat, relaying data from recon birds to ground stations, and is presumably currently in geostationary orbit, having been observed in a GTO at 20.1° and so on I could give the full orbital elements for all of these, but they'd be gibberish to everyone here, including me. All of this is from amateur observations, comparisons of similar launches with known data, and collation of any available official info.

Military too. There's always a lot more information out there than you might think.

Launches can be secretive, but that's not the same as secret. I can't think of a single launch where we don't know where the payload was going or generally what it was doing.

There seems to be a fundamental misunderstanding here; CO2 doesn't cause global warming, increasing levels of CO2 (or other greenhouse gasses) cause global warming. Mars' levels are constant on average. I'm about to flip a coin. Will it come up heads or tails?

Surely YTMND is the YTMND of the i-something generation? It launched the same year as the ipod, after all.

It's the actual amount that matters, not the percentage. The other gases on earth-the other 99.951%-are going to be a huge part of global warming, despite the lesser per-mole effect, simply because of how much there is of them. We don't worry about them because adding significantly would be pretty much impossible, but they are most of the existing effect. On mars, you only have CO2-more than on earth, but far less total atmosphere than on earth. Combine that with less sunshine to work with and you get lower temperatures.

What is it?

That's 95% of about half of a percent of earth's atmosphere; so the figures for actual amounts of CO2 are about 0.5% and 0.039%. Mars gets about half the radiation from the sun, and the huge quantities of other gases, even with less per-mole warming capability, really add up for earth.

Why? There's simply not much atmosphere there, and it's far farther from the sun than the earth is.

If you produce an arbitrary DNA molecule, you've got an arbitrary DNA molecule; that doesn't help you very much. You can produce viruses in that manner because viruses are self-assembling, but cellular life is anything but.

There actually was a film that was closely based on the book; the one thing that can't be said about it is 'fun'. It was mostly footage of people walking.

It does. What effects are you expecting that we aren't seeing?

The scale is the problem, not the design. An 'upscaled kicksat' would require a custom deployment system and a custom analysis of it's effect on the flight-none of these things are cheap.

If it's not to an existing standard, it will not get launched; integration of a new design costs quite a bit more than $400.

Some upper-stage engines (e.g. J-2) also use solid starter cartridges.

Religious or not would be a better question, surely? There are plenty of religions that are 'atheist'.

SimX games were developed by Maxis, not EA. EA bought Maxis, but they stayed a separate studio at a seperate location until 2004-SC4 was the last game they made. Now it's just a husk, with the IP of maxis but none of the original employees.

The tsunami deposits from chixclub were so huge they're readily identifiable today. 12k years won't do what 65g couldn't. EDIT: this isn't even relevant, anyway. The younger dryas hypothesis involves an impact on north america, not just the earth.