Kryten

That 'nobody expected creatures to be able to survive without light' is simply one of the factoids that gets regurgitated in textbooks and popular science articles without anyone checking it. It's like 'the basic tastes are mapped to different parts of the tongue', or 'nobody could explain how blackbody radiation wasn't of infinte power before quantum physics'.

That you're not addressing science, you're addressing the pop-culture caricature of science. I should probably say now, before you start waffling on about light or pressure any more, that the actual requirements (or so 'science believes') for living organisms are; 1) An oxidised species to act as a terminal electron acceptor 2) A source of energy; either complex carbon(/silicon), an electrochemical gradient, or radiation 3) A source of carbon to produce various organic molecules required for life. Hypothetically silicon could do instead, but no other molecule is likely to be versatile enough 4) Water, or hypothetically other solvents 5) An environment where the various molecules would be stable. This would depend on the exact molecules utilised.

That's complete nonsense. We've known about lithotrophs for a lot longer than we've known about deep-sea vents. Some of them simply live in soil.

Rockets don't tend to scale that neatly, because things like propellent tanks can only be so thin. The smallest orbital rocket that's actually been tested was ~1kg to LEO for just under a ton, but that was air-launched from a supersonic aircraft. An amateur rocket group (Civilian Space eXploration Team) broke the Karman barrier in 2004, and John Carmack's group send a rocket to 90+km before running out of money. Obviously you need all of the right licensing, but it's not restricted to e.g. traded companies.

This isn't social studies, this is a scientific question. If 'the media' 's interpretation differs from the scientific interpretation, it doesn't mean anything other than that the media has messed up a bit of science reporting yet again.

Extremophiles change nothing. They simply live in more extreme environments, there aren't any that lack e.g. need for phosphorus or a terminal electron acceptor.

Multiple nuclear reactors have been launched without anything like this, without issue. One suffered a launch failure, and the only reason anyone even noticed was the US was closely monitoring trace radioisotope levels for nuke test treaty enforcement.

No it doesn't. TL;DR: the original researchers could only test the cell fraction (from centrifugation) that included DNA, RNA, and a few other things. Direct analysis of purified DNA shows no arsenic.

Although Ares I was part of constellation, and was responsible for most of the cost overruns.

Don't conflate us being dependent on them with them being dependent on us. All common GI tract microbiota organisms have non-human hosts (and usually non animal habitats), except H. Pylori, and H Pylori isn't a commensual.

It's really kind of a mess. The definition in actual use by taxonomical workers differs between the group being looked at; microbiologists use 97% or under similarity results from DNA hybridisation, which would put humans and chimps in the same species if applied to primates. In animal groups it is simply a certain level of phenotypical difference (that level differing between orders), be that difference morphological, behavioural, or sometimes genetic.

There is no consensus on a standard definition of species, true, but there is consensus the fertile hybrid definition doesn't work. Just look at cats again; as well as the ALC-domestic hybrids, we also have second generation domestic-seval, serval-caracal, and domestic-jungle cat hybrids. Care to find a single source that puts all of these in the same genus, never mind species? Canis includes more than C. lupus; C. lupus, ethipoian wolves, golden jackals, and coyotes can all interbreed to produce fertile offspring.

There's an engineering margin. If you go beyond the engineering margin, you die. That's going to be the case for any kind of heat-shield, just replace 'eating through the entire shield' with 'melting' for non-ablative ones.

He says that since neanderthals and cro-magnons interbred, they're not separate species. Except species are simply defined by a certain level of phenotypical difference, the same as taxa at all levels. This is why, say, domestic cats and asian leopard cats are classed within different genera-despite producing fertile offspring consistently enough for F2 hybrids to be commonly sold as pets.

If this was true, 'if humans evolved from apes why are there still apes' would actually be a major problem. If non-production of fertile hybrids was actually used to define species, we'd have maybe two species of small cat and three of canids. Your definition has not been seriously used in taxonomy for a long, long time.

Nobody else can see video either, given none was ever released, or quite possibly made in the first place.

No ancestor of the Soyuz was ever designed to be mobile, even the R-7; the longest journey they've ever undergone is the journey from the assembly building to the pad. Horizontal assembly is used because it involves lower facilities cost, makes transport cheaper (think shuttle's transport crawler V. pretty standard trains for Proton and Soyuz) and makes the rocket easier to access.

It should be noted that '2000X' is probably a theoretical value. I can't imagine being able to actually see anything above 500 without immersion lenses.

Do you actually have any knowledge of genetics that's not from Jurassic park? Look at the Pyrenean ibex, no 'hydribs' there.

Really, 'bringing back' species is only really possible for recently extinct organisms anyway, due to degradation of ancient dna. Yes, we might be able to get dna from neanderthal bones, but it's not and will never be enough to reconstruct an entire genome. The only (sub)species that has actually been resurrected, despite multiple attempts, is one that snuffed it in the distant depths of the year 2000.

Then why are you saying things that are provably wrong? The A1 was developed at the military facility at Kummersdorf by a group headed by Generalmajor Walter Dornberger, after von Braun had left VfR. Find me one source that says otherwise.

Angara is a replacement for the converted ICBM launchers, Zenit, and Proton, but not R-7. Proton causes politicial problems with khazakstan, zenit causes politicial problems with ukraine, converted ICBMs will run out, but there are no issues with Soyuz and so no reason to replace it. The russians don't like to fix what isn't broken.

Please stop posting about things you know absolutely nothing about. The VfR was funded by the military, and the all of the aggregat series rockets were produced by a wehrmacht research group.

They wouldn't, which is why they didn't. You're givng specs for a fully fuelled VEX-1 vehicle, and this one wasn't anything close to fully fuelled. The plan for this specific test was 300m apogee and 800m downrange distance. Bear in mind this is a pressure-fed rocket, it's probably going to have a minimum fuel load required to actually ignite the engine. Pressurisation and ignition did both go well.

The mosaic is made up of pictures where the sun is as close to directly overhead as possible. Close to the poles, the sun will barely pass over the horizon at any tine, leading to areas of permanent or semi-permanent shadow, which end up on the mosaic. The shadows are what make them look deeper.