Seret

For your second question all its asking for is to find a formula called the Poiseuille Equation that contains an R4 term. Which the standard form of that equation does. Its also called Hagen-Poiseuille, and volumetric flow rate is normally expressed as Q, not R.

As a business plan that's so vague that it's essentially this: No one disputes that there are large dollar values of minerals sitting around in space. It doesn't simply follow from there that it would be profitable to mine those minerals right now. After all, there are plenty of mineral deposits here on Earth that are uneconomical to extract, and that's with costs that are much, much, much lower. If they can make it work, then good luck to them. They'll make lots of money. Sometimes it takes a crazy idea to break new ground. But most of the time those crazy ideas just eat a lot of investors' money. I'm told VCs count themselves lucky if more than one in ten new businesses they back make any money.

A friend of mine came to the (not entirely irrational) conclusion as a child that the trees actually caused the wind. Because whenever it was windy they were thrashing about...

Pretty high, considering there's usually several thousand people online. I wouldn't be surprised to get a couple of people a day.

Have to say I agree 100% with Nibb31. Don't believe the hype. They're looking to relieve investors of their money, of course they're going to make things look rosy. Whether there really is a buck to be made remains to be proven, let alone a trillion of them.

This. You can't just upgrade an integrated system like this piecemeal. No point having a super-strong durable arm if it's just going to result in your shoulder and back getting quickly injured. Robotic arms already outperform humans in terms of precision, strength and repeatability. Even if they also gained our dexterity and sensitivity then there's still not a lot to be gained by grafting them permanently to a human. If you required a human in the system it would make more sense to go with teleoperation or an exoskeleton. Chopping off healthy limbs is extremely unlikely to be acceptable to most people.

This is pretty much the only time I every visit someone's profile. So easily done.

Soft drinks or mixers, depending on the context.

Surface finish is no better than a casting in many cases, too. Additive manufacturing does solve some problems, but it can't (or rather shouldn't!) be used to make anything you can think of.

Which version of a gene is preferable is also situational (sickle cell springs to mind). Hence the need for diversity.

3D printing is cool, it's at least as important (and quite similar to) the development of the CNC machine. But don't get sucked in by the hype, journalists generally have no clue what they're taking about.

Yep, lobsterman in full effect. They're a national embarrassment

I dunno about that. The older generation really didn't think anything of getting sunburned. My dad (born in the 30's) used to work outdoors all the time without protection, and has suffered the consequences of it in terms of mini skin cancers in his old age. Just look at old photos of WW2 in the desert (Desert Rats, and just look at these DAK idiots). The problem was serious enough that getting sunburned had to be made a chargeable offence under military discipline laws. I think before people were aware of melanoma they were actually pretty careless. I don't know when actual sunbathing became fashionable, but people did used to strip off when working in hot weather.

Yep, if divide the amount of stuff in the universe by the amount of nothing you end up with a number so close to zero you might as well call it zero. Therefore, we don't exist. QED.

What makes you guys think that cyborgs would require any less medical support? People with prostheses and medical implants today require regular maintenance and monitoring. Meat is self-repairing and amazingly resilient. The fact that most people's bodies last for decades with a very light maintenance regime puts most machines to shame. If I maintained the machines I'm responsible for in my working life as casually as we maintain the personnel I'd get sacked because they'd all be broken.

That picture you linked to shows a society using concrete and steel to make buildings, with an electricity grid and able to work with metals cheaply enough to use them for street lighting poles. The clothes appear to be synthetic fibres, so that means a confident grasp of chemistry. That's a fully modern society to me. For a bit of a clue just look at the various civilisations scattered around the globe prior to the modern age. Jared Diamond wrote a good book called "Guns, Germs and Steel" that investigates how and why some societies advanced more quickly than others. A lot of it is about access to resources (minerals, livestock, plants, etc). If a medieval society were transported to a world where they didn't have easy access to metals it's not hard to imagine they'd struggle to progress. Just look at the Polynesians all the way up to about the 1800s. They had a socially well-developed society which on the bigger islands (Hawaii, New Zealand) had developed into a feudal system, and they had some very sophisticated technologies (long distance navigation) but their society was stuck using stone and wood for tools and weapons. They were a medieval society stuck with stone age technology, and it's hard to imagine them getting past that point easily. So whether the society would progress to modern standards or would be stuck at the same level as the Polynesians or the South and Central American civilisations depends entirely on what resources are available to them on this new world. Would they have the right plants for agriculture and forestry? The right animals to domesticate for beasts of burden and transport? The right metals to make tools and weapons? In our own history these have been what gave some societies the ability to leapfrog ahead of others.

I grew up deep in the Southern Hemisphere, where we had the ozone hole and you could get sunburn in 15 mins. As a result I've got a deeply ingrained instinct to find shade when it's sunny. Slip, slop, slap was pummeled into us as kids. Now I live in the UK, where as soon as it's sunny all the office workers run down to the nearest park and strip down to their underwear at lunchtime to try and catch some rays. Nutters. However, in answer to the OP's question: it gives you a tan, which helps you get laid. End of story.

If we didn't have these stories we'd make up new ones to be scared of. People in the Middle Ages had goblins and werewolves, today we have Slenderman and the Greys. It's just your natural self-protective instincts misfiring. For our ancestors imagining that the funny noise in the woods at night was something awful about to eat your face conferred a survival advantage. We may be urbane, but we've still got all that wiring in our brains.

That's actually the coolest phone on the market right now Nibb31. Er, sorry to undermine your thread.

Lol, that's setting the credibility bar pretty low.

Sounds dangerously sensible.

Seems to be Der Grossman ("the tall man") and I can't see anything about it other than on Slenderman spook sites. Trotting out historical precedents is a pretty common way to prop up scary stories. Besides, just because people have been talking about vampires for ages doesn't make Buffy the Vampire Slayer any more credible.

Hong Kong isn't a self-contained ecosystem. If it takes up it's whole island the atmosphere remains breathable. Crucial difference. Ok, so let's imagine a city had grown so large that it's hinterland covered the whole surface of the globe. The ecosystem is likely to already be under severe pressure, any further urbanisation would seriously erode quality of life and economic output of that world. If this is a civilisation that's confident moving stuff around between the stars then further urbanisation would just occur on the other worlds, where there was less friction to it. It's not a matter of tech level, we don't do things because they're technologically possible, we do them because they're economically or socially advantageous. Just because a civilisation could establish a planet-wide city doesn't mean there would be anything driving them to do so. Especially when they have other much easier solutions available. Now, I assume from your login that your a big Star Wars fan. Cool, so am I. But it's not real, and most of it doesn't make any actual sense. But hey, that's the cool thing about fiction: it doesn't have to.

Well, they wouldn't be doing nothing, any more than they were doing nothing for the first nine years of Apollo. The primary objectives of the Apollo mission were largely political, not scientific. Seen from that angle it was very successful, and you could argue that it was one of the things that drove the Soviets to pursue foreign-policy goals that were above their ability to sustain. Soviet desire to try and match US prestige spending hastened their empire's collapse. The robots we were able to deploy at the start of the 60's when Apollo kicked off were quite rudimentary too, so manned exploration at short ranges made sense from a science point of view. If Apollo had not happened I'm quite sure that by now we would have replicated all of it's science findings robotically, probably at substantially lower cost. It's a bit false to try and view Apollo through the prism of modern space exploration though. Priorities were different back then. Manned exploration was prestigious, and big expensive programmes were in vogue. "Faster Better Cheaper" characterises the modern approach, where we send more, smaller missions that are allowed to fail due to being unmanned. It's turned out to be very effective. Just look at all the amazing stuff coming in from the planets almost daily.

The difference being the the presence of London, or even all the world's cities put together, doesn't pave over all arable land and inhibit the biosphere's natural cycles that keep Earth habitable. Large cities are feasible, planet sized ones aren't. Cities do require hinterland, once a city has increased so that its hinterland takes up the whole remainder of the planet it's reached its maximum size. Suggesting that the hinterland is located on other planets is just bonkers economically. Look, Star Wars is cool, but most of what's in it makes no sense and is just done for spectacle or as an homage to the movies George Lucas watched growing up. You just have to take it all at face value.