Drunken Hobo

I have a 1.86 GHz Core 2 Duo processor & 2GB of RAM. I need to turn the graphics settings way down, but KSP is completely playable on my machine. Used to get a lot of crashing issues, but they've really been working on optimisation recently and it shows.

Nonsense - we already know.

Imagine Alfa Romeo made one...

Ok, due to popular demand I've edited the original post for accuracy!

A point of pedantry, but I think the "non-nuclear" part of that is redundant, as I don't believe there has ever been an accidental nuclear explosion. Indeed, the Columbia & Challenger disasters are obviously far worse than Fobos-Grunt, simply due to the loss of life. And I suppose they were also disappointing, as they badly exposed some serious flaws from within NASA.

With the demise* of China's Jade Rabbit, it seems topical to ask this question - what failed space mission disappoints you the most? For me it's Fobos-Grunt. A sample-return mission from Mars' innermost moon would have been a huge leap forward. It'd have proven that it's possible to get a spacecraft safely back from Mars' gravity well and would helped the feasibility of a manned Mars mission. But it didn't even make it out of low Earth orbit. Wasn't publicised much at the time, but for me it's the most disappointing mission failure to date. *Potential, possible, maybe, not-quite-sure-yet.

Hopefully the failure of the rover will spur China on to trying again soon. They won't take kindly to this outcome, expect their next Lunar lander to have blackjack... and hookers.

I use Stellarium. Have configured it so it shows position of the sky from my garden. Enable satellites and it shows exactly where & when the ISS will be visible, and as it shows the rest of the sky, it's really easy to tell where it'll be.

Something I've often wondered about colour - how do hawks see the world? They (and many other birds of prey) have a 4th type of cone cell in the eye, allowing them to see UV light. Do they just see our spectrum but stretched out, or do they have another colour that is inconceivable to humans? Colour blind people don't know they're colour blind until someone tells them, so I suppose it could be like that.

What if all plants & animals were proportionally bigger. Would we even notice?

What would be the point in this venture? Travelling at 0.04c & with no means of slowing down, you'd pass by Alpha Centurai A, then 2.5 days later you'd pass by Alpha Centurai B. 100 years of travelling to spend 60 hours within the system. I don't see the benefit.

Possibly SkiFree on a Windows 95 machine. The snow monster scared the crap out of me.

To be honest, I find these sorts of "outrages" to often be thinly-veiled racism. Much easier to criticise & attack a culture & society that's 1000s of miles away rather than look at your own. See it a lot with the Chinese - the BBC seems to have a particular hatred of them. Constantly vilified for their use of ivory, tiger genitalia and other such things (rightly so), but conveniently turn a blind eye to the bloodsports carried out by the aristocracy, or the history of the Royal Family's hunting expeditions. Pigs are relatively intelligent, but we slaughter millions of them. Canadians hunt seals in a brutal manner, Spain has bullfighting, UK has fox hunting, Mexico & many other countries have cockfights... the list goes on. We're also destorying stock of cod, anchovies and numerous other sea life, why do only whales matter? I'm not exactly for whaling, but to criticise it when we're wiping the Atlantic clean seems more than a little hypocritical. Best you can ask is that it is done sustainably. (And for the record, I have eaten both pig & fish today).

How would ejection seats have worked in a shuttle? You'd need to tear a hole in the roof to allow the astronauts to escape, but you'd need some pretty serious exposives to tear through the Shuttle's roof, not to mention all of the instrument panels and things that get in the way. Or am I just listing the reasons it wouldn't have worked?

A self-sustaining colony of 250,000 people in space is also a bit beyond our current technology, so I think some degree of suspension of disbelief is permissible. I don't think longer toes would be too far out of reach with current technology, although as you said, there is the ethical problem. Then again, 250,000 people have escaped Earth leaving 7 billion to die horribly, so I doubt they would share our current ethical values.

To be fair, they'd also be quite miffed about the complete destruction of Earth and the near-extinction of all known life. If planning to spend generations in space it might make sense to genetically alter the human body. Depending on the artificial gravity situation, could make humans more resiliant to space or just do something simple like give us longer & more jointed toes, as we wouldn't be doing much walking. 4 hands would be very useful.

Easy solution to the genetic diversity/eugenics idea - no natural births. Ask those being left on Earth to provide "genetic material" for the colony ship and use IVF techniques to produce future generations. Suddenly you've got a gene pool of at least several million (most people will want their genes to survive, even if they can't) and could use various screening techniques to ensure the embryos are healthy & free of genetic defects. Wouldn't be perfect, but would work to an acceptable degree.

Heat up some sesame oil, add bean sprouts, chilli flakes, strips of beef, chopped red & green peppers, half an onion & a splash of soy sauce. Fry for a few minutes & serve. That's how you wok. Why can't Americans spell anything properly? (Going by the title I kind of thought this would be a bit more surreal than most of the answers so far).

Once whilst in the pub, my parents had somebody come up to our boxer dog & put his face right next to the dog's. When she started growling at him, he tried to feed her a biscuit by holding it in his mouth and trying to get her to take it. What sort of frigging idiot does such a thing, especially to a large dog that is warning them to go away? She wouldn't have bitten him, but he didn't know that. If she wanted to, she could have torn his face off before he could flinch. Sometimes people are really stupid.

I did read something quite plausable on the same subject. I can't remember the numbers exactly, but it was something like a single Saturn V rocket launch would change the position of Earth in its orbit by 60° over a few hundred million years. The concept was to demonstrate why we can't predict Earth's orbit accurately over very long timescales, rather than any genuine fear that rocket launches will ruin Earth's orbit. If even a rocket launch can change it that much, then imagine the unpredictability caused by plate tectonics, asteroids etc.

Out of interest, how many of these people who are afraid of Wi-fi, smoke cigarettes? Perhaps the way I'd deal with it is to explain to them what "electromagnetic hypersensitivity" is, then get themselves to put their head near a router, laptop or mobile phone, and ask them if they start to feel ill/pain. They will likely say yes, at which point you inform them that the device is off, and they just invented any pain or sickness. Either they'll realise they're wrong & be open to the concept that they're wrong about other things, or they'll be so pig-headed that they're not worth the time or effort.

What's teminal velocity on Titan? Only 0.14g gravity and (with a vague ideal gas calculation) around 4-5 times the atmospheric density of Earth at sea-level. If it's slow enough they could realistically do away with a parachute altogether and just have a heat shield.

That's the thing I love about the Cold War. The Soviets nuked themselves 715 times, the USA nuked themselves 1032 times, yet not a shot fired between the two. Yeah, well done guys.

A religious war? Even a hyper-intelligent spacefaring species could be religious fanatics, and roam the universe ridding it of infidels. They could be agents of Lord Xenu, and don't like the way a certain crazy sect have been talking about him... (Apologies to the Squad lawyers).