Shpaget

The video of the test ride is unremarkable. All I see is a sled on rails and a linear motor. Those things have been around for decades. They are nothing new. I see no evacuated tube, or even levitation, two things that are crucial parts of this concept. Without them, this is just a train.

Internal inconsistencies are what bothers me the most. Antman, I'm looking at you.

There's a local business that repairs car windshields. Their website says: Seems we've got this covered.

A capillary action driven hydroelectric power plant. I was sure it would work.

The name of a song, when all the lyrics you know are "na na na".

I was unable to find a source that Falcon was named after Millennium Falcon. The citation on Wikipedia links to a Youtube video that doesn't mention Falcon. It does contain a segment of Musk saying that Dragon was named after Puff, the Magic Dragon, preceded by Musk admitting that he was on drugs when coming up with names. The word falcon is extensively used in every imaginable field where somebody wants to accentuate their product. Falcon 9 may have been named after Millennium Falcon or not, it doesn't matter. The origin of the name surely doesn't counter my argument that comparing barely known exoplanets to fictional planets containing extensive flora and fauna systems, weather patterns and specific moons is grossly misleading and nonsense.

I know what a quantum computer can hypothetically do, but have no clue what would I do with one. Also, I am under impression that 5 qubit computer is analogous to the first transistor computer that had less than 100 transistors and was almost useless (both due to power and reliability issues). Am I wrong? What is a 5 qubit quantum computer capable of?

Except this leads to unrealistic expectations. This is the image of Naboo I have in my mind: KOI-2626.01 Probably looks a lot more like Dune (without giant worms).

Their scripts are usually a lot better than their "live" correspondence. Once you engage them and force the change of subject, and they need to actually write a response instead of just copy/paste from script, that's when you see their actual level of English. As for the plot of the scam... it's common knowledge that in 1990 Russia was in dire need of highly trained Nigerian astronauts.

We know so little about the exoplanets I see absolutely no sense in this, apart from (for some reason) pandering to fans of a movie that has nothing to do with space or science. Nonsense.

Oh, forgot to address this... I believe both approaches are valuable. In the case of Hawking, you must admit that he has quite a handicap and is limited in what experiments he can perform, so he specializes in what he can do - think and do math. There are some people that don't like to calculate stuff and just build something to see if it works. I work with one such individual. Sometimes it's hard to talk to him since he doesn't like to do math for the projects he works on and occasionally gets stuck on some detail. Just a few days ago he complained to me that some induction coils he worked on were not performing as he hoped they would and drew me a sketch. Even though I know only basics of electronics I immediately saw the problem, because I know that induction is dependent on the angle of coil in the magnetic field. At that point he had already spend several days troubleshooting the odd behavior. He eventually figured out that if he rotated the coil he got better performance, but was perplexed by it.

Some would say that, in science, you can't prove anything. Just because the experiment you are running ends up agreeing with the hypothesis, it doesn't necessarily prove causality. You can only be a little bit more confident in the relation. At some point the confidence level is so high that the causality is taken as a fact, but a new scientific finding can alter the model. It happened before, it's likely it will happen again. Before we came up with relativity, Newtonian physics were all the physics we needed and were considered a done deal. Then came along Mr. Albert and basically told us that we were wrong.

Easily? To such extent to wreak havoc on Earth? No. There are very few known asteroids big enough to do that.

http://www.eso.org/sci/facilities/develop/4LGSF.html The site quotes the laser power as 22 W, which is a fair bit, however, Wikipedia article also states that the diameter of each of the laser beams is 30 cm. That means it would be perfectly safe to place your hand in front of it. Don't point the beam directly into your eyes, though.

It's entirely possible and, I'd say, quite likely that the images were produced from multiple stacked shots.

On short time scales, no. We're not quite sure what will happen in the future. There are several hypothesis on what will happen, depending on what turns out to be true regarding the existence and density of dark energy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Future_of_an_expanding_universe

Well, ok. I haven't played Mass Effect, so I wouldn't know, but... The perspective wasn't from orbit? From prograde LEO it looks like Earth is spinning clockwise. Anyway, Earths rotation is almost imperceptible and realistic depiction would be quite boring in a game or a movie.

What if you're looking at it from south?

Like I said, it was 20-ish years ago, but I think I did exactly that.

It may have been 20 years, but I remember it quite well. It was a perfectly clear sky, winter evening, around 9 pm. The image definitely had craters. It was not halo.

What if we include the atmospheric effects? It's a rare sight but I have personally seen the Moon rising absolutely huge (larger than my fully spread fingers at arms length, and I don't have tiny hands). It was very pale, but huge nevertheless. It was out of ordinary, the very next evening and many later evenings around the same time, from the same location the effect was not present, so I'm not attributing it to an illusion.

I've signed up. I was under impression that the Beta has already started... anyway... My referral link for the Beta invite, if anybody want to follow it is the following: https://goo.gl/qQ1z4v

In systems where the satellite has small mass compared to the parent body, usually the mass of the smaller body is discarded as irrelevant, but if you start to significantly increase mass, than yes, orbital period goes down. This is a great little tool to play around with orbits. Change mass and other parameters as you please. https://phet.colorado.edu/sims/my-solar-system/my-solar-system_en.html

Drawn to each other? Drawn by what? If you can have multiple crafts close enough to each other for them to touch (even eventually), then you might as well launch them together (as a single probe) in the first place and save quite a bit of mass by not including propulsion, coms and navigation needed for the merger.

Jupiter, ready or not, here we come!!!