K^2

You wouldn't really want water. Actually, any polar molecules are useless at these temperatures. Life is a delicate balance of bonds that are strong enough to hold things together, yet weak enough to be pulled apart with the right enzymes. Take DNA to cryogenic temperatures of Titan, and you couldn't replicate it no matter what sort of complex chemistry you throw at it. The bonds are simply too strong at that temperature, and anything that could pull them apart freezes. On the other hand, Titan's temperature is just right for non-polar solvents, just like Earth's is just right for polar solvents. And hey, look at that, we have methane lakes there with environment that's just perfect for harboring life at these temperatures. Now for the finer points. Right of the bat, we are dramatically limiting the kinds of compounds we could possibly use for life on Titan. Is that a critical problem? No way to know, but I'd bet this is the sort of thing that would increase amount of time needed for life to evolve. So will temperature, by the way. There is absolutely no way of getting around the fact that metabolism on Titan is going to be painfully slow. Meaning a long time, by Earth standards, between generations of anything living. Means evolution will be very slow. On the net, I would certainly say life there is possible. Conditions are right, and all the signs we expect to be able to detect of potential life are there. But as Nibb31 says, without getting a lander there that's dedicated to life search, we aren't going to find out. That said, I think discovery of life on Titan would be by far the greatest discovery of human kind. If we find life on Mars, it'd take a lot of work to prove that it doesn't have common origin with Earth's life. So even if we know that life exists her on Earth and either does or did exist on the Red Planet, we'd still not be any wiser about life out there. If we find life on Titan, we'll know with absolute certainty that life evolved independently on two very different bodies in this Solar System. This would tell us beyond doubt that we are not alone in the universe. That in fact, it is filled with all kind of life. So even if we consider life on Titan to be rather unlikely, we owe it to ourselves to check, because if it's there, we need to know.

More like programming paradigms and compilers must be different. Which, in certain circles, they already are. The programs are larger, yes. But that hasn't been the bottleneck since 8bit days. And the operating systems, compilers, and libraries are written by "someone else", which has always been the case. The responsibility is then on the programmer to know how to use their tools, which, again, is nothing new. Whether you are a GPU programmer or a cloud compute programmer, it really comes down to learning techniques for efficient computation by thousands of machines, as well as limitations of your particular hardware. And yet again, that's the same thing as learning to program efficiently on any hardware that came before. And this is the direction everything is going. To utilize a typical off-the-shelf CPU efficiently, you need to keep 8 logical cores (typically 4 physical cores with hyperthreading) busy, which means running at least 8 threads concurrently. Ditto consoles, but 6 threads is the magic number there. So even if you aren't programming for GPU or clouds/clusters, you still have to know how to do things in parallel, and we're simply going to see more of that. My prediction is home operating systems and C++ standard supporting massive parallel computation by early 2020s.

And if I need to compile code, render CGI, or compress audio, I honestly don't give a crap if computer got faster, or if my tasks are now parsed between a thousand of them. If I can compile in minutes instead of days, that's good enough for me.

I have one tiny correction. While true anomaly is often used as one of 6 orbital elements, it's not a constant of motion, so if you look at orbital perturbation theory, it's more common to see T - time of periapsis. It is a fixed quantity for any orbit, so it's one of the constants of motion. And difference between current time t and time of periapsis multiplied by 2 pi divided by orbital period gives you mean anomaly M, which can then be converted to true anomaly. This is typically how you'll see orbits treated in most textbooks on orbital mechanics.

You cannot communicate via entanglement. If you are ever stuck with a thought experiment involving entanglement, switch to Many Worlds Interpretation. You are guaranteed to get the same result as any other flavor of QM, at least, as far as observable data is concerned, but entanglement is entirely intuitive in MWI. Measurement by Bob of particle B puts Bob into superposition of Bob+ and Bob-. If he later meets Charlie who made measurements on C, Bob+ will be talking to Charlie- and Bob- to Charlie+. Naturally, they'll conclude that their experiments are correlated. How can they not be? Putting entanglement into that frame of mind also makes it obvious why you can never use it for communication, but why you can sometimes use it to enhance communication. Various quantum encryption and teleportation schemes are examples.

Man, I even had an idea to try out, but their license agreement prevents me from being able to use it.

Measuring Hawking Radiation very close to Event Horizon could be useful. There are some unanswered questions about Cosmic Censor that this could bring light to. Although, if we actually have a warp drive, we could make a lot of these measurements on the warp bubble.

That is an irresponsible attitude. KSP brings up a lot of scientific curiosity in younger minds. And I'm really glad that this forum has a science section for these who seek knowledge to be able to find it. But that only really works if this place has some structure to it. Otherwise, it's going to get flooded with pseudo-scientific nonsense that will only make understanding things difficult. It's absolutely true that this isn't the purpose behind KSP forums, and perhaps not even that behind the game, but it's a great opportunity to make the world a little bit better, and it'd be irresponsible to treat it as just part of a "chatty game forum."

"Stable" is a subjective matter. A black hole that's "only" a few million tons would take decades to evaporate. And if you only need one for a few days, you can get away with almost reasonable mass. Of course anything that could be made at LHC energies will only just last long enough to detect.

The effect of dark energy is likewise minimal, simply because at galactic scale, acceleration is pretty much negligible. Yes, it'd be much harder for us to predict exactly what the impact of dark energy is, since we don't even really know how it's distributed for sure. But either way, it's not going to have a measurable effect on the structure of galaxies.

Size of a galaxy is function of its mass and angular momentum, neither of which change with space expansion. Hence the galaxies flying apart, rather than getting larger. This does mean that galaxies experience a type of stress from expansion, but all that's going to do is shift the equilibrium size a tiny bit.

The above is essentially accurate. The only thing I can add is that if you narrow the task, and build a highly-specialized quantum computer, you can sometimes dramatically reduce decoherence problems. D-Wave Systems QCs are a good example of that. They run a Quantum Annealing optimization algorithm with up to 512-qubits. This is pretty much junk for general computing, but problems that can be solved by simulated annealing, such as some very interesting machine learning problems, are absolutely perfect for it. And a single QC chip can actually compete with a small supercomputer cluster when limited to these sorts of problems. It also costs like a small supercomputer, sure, but the main expense of running clusters is actually power consumption, and that's where QCs win hands-down.

These are typical altitudes where relative humidity peaks. It all depends on weather conditions et cetera, of course, but generally, humidity levels off at about 10% once you reach ~15km, while temperature and pressure continue to drop, leading to a very fast drop of absolute humidity. All of this means that you have a sweet spot for condensation trails at about 10km, where air is both cold enough and humid enough to facilitate their formation.

Yeah, it's obviously some sort of an intelligent agent making distinction between being passively carried by a vehicle after being placed there by someone who is "worthy" as opposed to anyone "unworthy" trying to displace it by whatever means. So if you want to lift it, you have to convince it that you pass some sort of a mark. Given that we are trying to bypass its natural tendencies, that means tricking it. Whether it's some sort of a consciousness that has to be tricked or merely a very complex algorithm doesn't really make a difference other than in details of implementation. The solution is still going to be more of a psychological or game-theoretical one than a technological one.

The only thing that suggests proton decay as an actual thing is Supersymmetry and some branches of String Theory. None of the other predictions from either have panned out. I'm sure you can see where I'm going with this. While people are still doing experiments trying to detect finite lifetime of a proton, absolutely everything points to it being a stable particle. Which means catalyst or not, it's not going to decay. The fact that it is so does point to some very interesting broken symmetries, and some people get really upset when a fundamental symmetry is broken without an obvious reason, but just because you want an unbroken fundamental symmetry doesn't make it be so.

But then you die without even seeing the Moon up close. The only reason I'm calling re-entry mishap a best scenario is because you'd be dying with your trip complete, and not just blowing yourself up on the launch pad for no good reason.

Blast is a definite possibility. So is asphyxiation or an electrical fire. And all of these are more likely to happen on the way to the Moon than on the return leg. I guess, the best possible catastrophic scenario would be a re-entry mishap, but Russians haven't had one of these in a very long time. You might still think it's worth the risk, but people who start multiple multi-billion corporations tend to know when not to take them. P.S. To be fair, the odds are much better than 50/50 here. We're probably not even talking Russian Roulette odds. I would estimate something on the order of 10% is the real risk. But it's not the sort of odds you let your life ride on.

Inclinations will matter a lot for some bodies in KSP. What you really want to do is project a great circle corresponding to real terminator onto a map. I'm going to edit in a brief walk-through on how to handle this in general.

Back in the day, trial and error. Mostly, with scale models in a wind tunnel. I mean, you have an estimate from empirical data and thin airfoil theory, but you always had to refine it with actual trials. These days, computers are used to simulate CoL dynamics on a virtual model long before it goes into a wind tunnel.

For one-off measurement, assuming butchering isn't an option, your simplest method is going to be submerging limbs one at a time and measuring displacement and weight reduction. If you have access to an MRI machine, you can get very good estimates on local tissue density and simply integrate over the limbs numerically. If you need to do this a lot for a given species, you are far better off constructing a model based on simple measurements you can quickly take. Of course, these will require a whole bunch of empirical measurements in advance. The advantage here is that you might be able to get your empirical data from carcasses, where difficulty of measuring a weight of a limb is determined by how good you are with a bone saw. Otherwise, you're back to the first two methods for constructing your empirical data.

Sorry, I've been busy throughout the week. Do you still care about getting this to work for non-zero inclination, or did you ever only need this to work for Kerbin? Solar days on moons can get pretty complicated in general, but if all of the inclinations nearly match, id est, most of the rotations are nearly in the same plane, they work pretty much the same as for the planets. Except the orbital period you care about is still that of the planet, while sidereal rotational period is taken from the moon. The general formula is TD = 1/(1/TS - 1/TO), where TD is solar day, TS is sidereal rotation period, and TO is the orbital period. This assumes that all of the rotations are in prograde. If one of them is retrograde, flip the sign of corresponding T. Likewise, if TD you get is negative, sunrise will happen on the "wrong" side of the moon/planet.

There are several ways to do this. Lets start with a simple question. Do you want an equation for the curve that marks terminator itself, or do you want to tell for each pixel on the map if it should be drawn light or dark? Also, which projection are you using for the map? Simple equirectangular projection or something like Mercator?

Gas giants of Jupiters' size are of sufficient density for ignition. They just don't have enough gravity to confine the matter once it reaches sufficient temperature. Which means that even if you manage to ignite sufficient fraction of the atmosphere for a chain reaction, what you'll get is a miniature nova rather than a sustained burn. You could make a pretty warm gas giant by messing with composition and making sure it can sustain nuclear reactions at lower temperatures. Kind of like an even cooler version of aforementioned brown dwarfs. But if you make a gas giant hot enough to have sufficient light output to qualify for a star, it will quite simply evaporate. If neutronium is metastable, at least in chunks, it might be possible to make a tiny little star with a neutronium core. It wouldn't be a gas giant, of course, but an objects in its own class. A neutron star remnant. I shudder to think of the sort of event that could create such a thing.

With the quality of vacuum and parts being used, not really doable. This would be a good test if this was done with the right hardware. But I'm not aware of anyone spending enough money on these tests to do this. Honestly, I think we're waiting for someone to come up with a good theoretical explanation that both explains the thrust and provides potentially practical benefit to the device. Then we'll see proper tests being done.

It's the same thing, honestly, just from a different coordinate system. But it's a good illustration of why it's such a big problem. If you bring massive propellant, the extra energy comes from kinetic energy of stored propellant. If you don't have propellant, well, then you're violating conservation of energy. Unless E = pc, and it's a photon drive. But that's where it goes back to 300MW/N. Topological constraints are fun.