Stargate525

I think I'd prefer detonation on the pad to a re-entry failure, myself. But yeah... I wouldn't waste 200 million simply to be the first civilian to do it. I'll wait another ten years, pay less, and do it in more comfort.

Maybe a bit tangental, but quarter-scale models are important for practical effects. If I recall rightly, quarter scale is the smallest you can go while still having fire/explosions look correct on film. So in some instances (maybe not nowadays as much), you'd have a quarter scale model specifically to destroy it.

If you look at that stat, it's hectacres PER PERSON, not overall. The US is higher because we have a much lower population than India or China, despite them having more total cropland.

I'm not insulting those regions. However, you cannot argue that sociopolitically and economically, these countries look more like 40s and 50s US than 2016 US. Using South America, the continent has one country, as far as I can see, that's making their own branded cars. Only one (a marcopolo bus) I have ever seen or even heard of. In any regard, the production of those home industries is massively outstripped by American and European manufacturers (Brazil only just matched the withered US home production last year). In short, those regions are packed with factories turning out the product of companies that were fifty years ago turning out product in Europe and the US. They are HEAVILY manufacturing and raw materials-based. The traditional first-world countries are not, and have not been for close to 30 years. You're assuming a perfectly rational consumer. We aren't. Efficiency is not our primary goal. We will buy a less efficient car because it is more comfortable, or made in a specific place, or looks better. We will choose food that's horrible for us because it tastes good. We will drive hours past a store to go to the one where we like the cashiers. We will purchase the quick fix that will break in a year instead of paying twice the cost for one that will last twenty. Your mistake is equally common, and more detrimental to your argument. Computers can't predict the economy (economists will argue with you on that one, by the way), because we cannot predict irrational behavior, and the economy is influenced by quite literally EVERYTHING ELSE.

You've made the correlation for me. It's easier to warm that single cow (a single transmitter) than the thousands you'd need in a tower. Sure, you lose a little on the power, but that's more than made up for with less networking bandwidth, ease of repair, and the centralization of the device.

They don't disappear, they change. Instead of car traffic you have elevator traffic. If you've ever been to a convention or large gathering with a hotel (or some badly designed hotels on checkout) you know what I'm talking about. You're still talking about forcing air up several kilometers, something we currently simply don't do. And you have more ducts, actually, because there is more space that the air needs to be delivered TO. One base station which covers everyone in a 1-5km radius, or a wall antenna on every floor. I know which one I'd prefer to wire. Citation needed. There will be less loss from surface area, maybe, but the support infrstructure for it outside the building will be many orders of magnitude bigger. And why would it be radio silent at all?

IIRC building up is less about vertical support (the foundations are because big cities tend to be built on horrible places for heavy structures, like swamps or coastline), and more about wind shear and horizontal motion. Lateral motion is handled very well by buttressing (as the buttress is actually keeping the thin walls from bowing outwards beneath the roof), and like I said, you also get the benefits of additional window space.

Actually, couldn't you theoretically make a skyscraper the same way we used to build cathedrals? The outrigged skyscrapers are the main tower's flying buttresses. Increases window space, and allows for massive buildings without being a giant windbreak. You might be able to sell them if you paired them off with factories. Massive building built by a 1st world corporation with included grocery, medical clinic, retail sectors, school, fire and police department, with modern housing for the workforce of the entire kit. But then you get into the whole Company Town issue we had with mining towns in the US, but condensed into a nominally self-sufficient building that could withstand police attempts to breach it, if they wanted. And they would no doubt be seen -arguably rightfully so- as United States outposts. Political nightmare if they're funded by anyone who could actually afford it.

I know this. But the industrial revolution happened over decades in waves that rippled outwards from England and Germany and the Eastern US. This coming change may happen in as little as five, at once across the majority of the world. think mobile phones, but if each of those 3.5 billion also displaced a job. That's what you're looking at.

We're both outsourcing and automating. We don't have the manufacturing jobs because we are both a) replacing the line with robots and b) legislating that a line worker be paid 50-60x more than the same-skilled line worker in a foreign country with laxer laws. The world is seeing explosion in the middle class because Asia and South America is largely where we were in the 1940s. What's happening here is going to happen to those countries in 30-50 years, and will happen to Africa when and if that mess ever gets sorted out. We're buying their stuff because it's cheap, but we more and more unable to employ ourselves, which removes those people from the consumer pool. Your first paragraph is true for makers; a more efficient mill will make more flour. However, that does not increase the demand for flour. Prices drop. Your miller can't reduce the cost of the mill, but they can fire one of his mill-runners, thereby maintaining his profit. In a normal, healthy economy that's okay, and the mill-runner will find a different job. But we don't have a normal, healthy economy. Replace the mill with the self-driving car and drones. You'll see full adoption by the transportation industries as soon as the public allows it, let's say 5 years. In five years, you've eliminated 80-100% of all jobs whose primary job is driving: truckers, cabbies, chauffeurs, deliverymen, mailmen. 4 Million jobs gone in 5 years. Where are they going to go? Their skill is obsolete. you've removed that cost on your products, yes, but you've simultaneously taken a cudgel to your consumer base. It's happened before where rapid technological innovation has stagnated and killed an economy, and it's not a guarantee that it recovers. media content creation is being heavily attacked by traditional media or being subsumed by it. Follow the attempts to pass more stringent restrictions on copyright and fair use law for that story. It's not more efficient, it's advertising delivery. Access to information does not magically create profit, especially when the majority of the country is an employee, not an employer.

Which is very bad. That leaves the only jobs that don't require significant specialization and training the ones that require human adaptability and risk. Miners, janitors, farmers, loggers, fishermen... The reason the middle class is vanishing is because there's nothing intrinsically human required in the middle level manufacturing or office positions that can't be done better by a robotic arm or a sufficiently-developed spreadsheet. If you take the humans out of SELLING the stuff as well...

The jungles of the Amazon, the majority of the African heart, Australia, the ranchlands of the Midwest, Siberia, the Andes, the Himalayas, and the vast majority of SUBURBAN WISCONSIN beg to differ. You simply aren't looking. I could go on a long rant on the idiocy of treating CO2 like we treated HFCs, but that's only tangentially related. You absolutely can force someone, and that's what would be required. You'll have to purchase and demolish 90-99% of the entire global housing market to make this reality. People will not sell to the government if they know their house is going to get destroyed and either turned to fallow or put into the footprint of one of your megastructures. You will have to use Eminent Domain, en masse, to force them out. Because 80% of our economy is retail services and transportation. You will quite literally crash the entire planet's economy if you remove all brick and mortar stores from the USA. It's currently happening, and anyone who knows what markers to look for should be terrified of the self-driving car. You mean 'agreement with your mindset.' I'm educated, and I disagree with almost every conclusion you're making. You don't waste much time shopping, unless you're inefficient at it. 2-3 hours a week, tops. Listening to your views, I'm -very- curious what you do for a living, if you don't recognize the impact removing the retail job sector would have.

They're twenty years long because that's the length of time for a person to go from birth to child-rearing age. With a few exceptions, they're arranged so that a parent and child are in subsequent generations. How your parents were raised affects how YOU are raised. The idea that a generation should be shorter is silly, and an outcropping of the idea that just because tech generations are short that everything else should be. Generation borders are fuzzy, yes, but the political and social landscape doesn't change quickly enough for anything shorter without major upheaval events. That's why the boomers are a static generation; kids born to WWII vets after the peace. It's also why it lasts 18 years (18y.o. veteran at the tail end of the generation is 36, at the twilight of their childbearing years in most cases). Honestly, the millenial generation should be set ending at September 1998; anyone with memories of a pre 9/11 world and a society without a fetishistic devotion to 'national security.'

You could theoretically be immune to immense temperature, but vulnerable to actual combustion/oxidation in an atmosphere. Just saying.

Mine is the unrealistic depiction of hacking and computer infiltration: any computer problem is a hack, viruses are common, people can gain access to any computer that is on anywhere in the world... Mainly because people believe them, and then I have to deal with them at work.

Had a random thought, and am hoping to get some input from the sciency types around here. If I had a universe where KE=.5mv instead of .5mv^2... what would that look like? How would things behave differently?

Yes... And unless you're building a two dimensional tower, the circumference(distance around the whole thing) cannot itself be 100 meters. If it's a perfect circle, you're looking at about 100 feet from one side to the other. As I said, smaller than the WTC.

100 meter CIRCUMFERENCE? that's a building less than 100 feet on a side. That's smaller than the WTC towers were. That's why you break it into villages. Everything you need daily has to be within that 500-1000 person bubble; transit outside that sphere needs to be rare.

That's actually another very good point. It's still FAR more cost-effective to build outwards, because globally we're still at a population density of 120 per mi^2. For reference, that's about as dense as Kentucky.

World War II is done. Point blank. Berlin is within the operational range of our strategic airfleet from the US, and the Germans don't have anything able to catch, climb to, or in some cases SEE them. Japan has the same solution, no nukes needed. Decapitate the leadership and let the Japanese wail ineffectively against the remnants of whatever's in port of the Pacific Fleet (the German politics of the time would be much more ameniable to surrender). US manufacturing explodes as we're suddenly the only country able to produce modern drugs, plastics, and electronics. The global recession gets worse worldwide as an audible sucking sound comes from the contiguous 48 states which draws all the free currency into the country. After that... it depends on which side of the culture war wins; if the rest of the world becomes more like us, or if the US is pulled more in line with social thought of the 1950s and 60s.

I am aware of the notion that property taxes are in fact rent and that you can't own property whatsoever. I personally find that argument to be reductivist and silly. And what the hell does the volume of my street have to do with anything, much less how many people you interact with on a day-to-day basis?

Two major issues with building arcologies and similar mega-cities. We're still very much tied to ground. Many peoples' life goal is to own a house and property. Even if you buy a condo, you don't truly own the space; you're at the whims of the ultimate owner of the building. Similarly, no matter the draw, you're never going to get environmentalists and naturalists to live in there. It's a nightmare for introverts and claustrophobics. Secondly, we're not designed to live in societies where we interact with thousands of people a day. Todofwar mentioned it above. Our brains can only hold about 150-200 people as actual people. The rest are objects with moral tags attached denoting them as 'potential people.' It's why everyone is a bit racist/sexist/nationalist. They're mental shorthand to classify the other 7 billion people on the planet. This is biological, not societal. The irony of the megapolis/archology is that the best way for them to work would be for it to be divided into near-autonomous cells of about 300-500 people.

This. A thousand times this. You had the organization with the Romans, but you need a critical mass of burghers and merchantile drive in order to spark an industrial revolution; China never got one because the population's demand for goods never necessitated a drive to find more efficient means of doing things. Greece had a railroad on 600bc, and understood the motive power of steam by the first century. They never put the two together because... frankly, they didn't need to. Their population was too spread out and generally low to derive a benefit fitting the labor input.

Hold on a moment. The reason we've found a lot of stars with that configuration is that a fast, heavy planet close into the star makes it wobble more perceptibly than an earth-sized one. It's a self-selection bias based on one of the ways we find planets. The biggest problem with the drake equation is that all of its inputs are guesses. I skimmed the beginning of the article, but I personally couldn't wade through the broken English.

Seriously? Why?