WestAir

One thing is for certain, we'd certainly have people there by now. There would probably be more reality TV shows from the surface than scientific documentaries, though.

RIP to the pilot and speedy recovery to the other.

My i7 laptop can handle 1 MK1 pod on the launchpad. My PC (tower) can handle about 200 parts before the yellow goes from blinking to solid.

Xkcd seems to disagree.

Just about to say this. If you're going so fast the distance to the furthest galaxy is less than an inch from the nose of your ship due to length contraction, then the width of the earth is probably going to be smaller than the planck length at this crazy velocity. From your perspective, events on Earth can't possibly affect you - right?

I imagine that if you're going so fast that from your perspective it takes less than a minute to travel from Earth to the nearest Galaxy in the observable Universe, and at this speed you "fly into" Earth - It's safe to say that you'll just go through it. You might blow the Earth up and set fire to Venus and Mars in the process, but the planet certainly won't stop you.

My bet would be on the noise or visible light as opposed to invisible EMR.

Correction noted. I wholly meant "Most of Earths existence " and not "Most of the Universes existence " but failed to catch my error.

If we really want to get technical, we've been alive for most of those billions of years in the cells of parent organisms. If you could rewind time and follow your body back to youth, you'd follow a trail of cellular division that really goes all the way back to the first few single-celled organisms billions of years ago. This thought game really gives meaning to the term "tree of life"

Even still, from the most basic of basic observations, each new "unique number" is still unique. If you kill the one that's been around 25 years and replace it with a sudden reincarnation - it might hold the same information, but the original "line of succession" is dead. Anyone following that "unique batch of information" since day 1 will agree that it died. It's gone. It should be given a funeral and burial service. It doesn't matter if there's a replacement standing by to give the funeral service - it's still dead. What you're saying is akin to suggesting that if all 7 billion people on Earth were actually total replica's of the same unique brain (all clones with the exact same memory and information), that we could commit genocide in the billions and really never kill anyone, because that person is "still alive." I disagree. A death is still a death. 1 brain, 1 life.

You can't say sleeping is like death. I almost always remember my dreams, and I almost always have 3-4 different ones a night. Besides, this is about that last feeling you get when you die, like being warm or cold or hungry or thirsty. All these things you can process, comprehend and experience. Can you experience the death of your brain, or does it all end too soon for you to ever experience it?

"Screw KSP, I'm going to go break stuff with this metal arm."

I would be more comfortable on a US Jetliner only because of the horrible politics and bureaucracy involved. This week a coworker of mine decided not to fly because a turn knob on the autopilot panel that toggles the autopilot's altitude selection from 100' foot intervals, to 1000' foot intervals, was stuck in the 1000' foot spot. He could only chose between 1000' foot intervals of autopilot altitude control. Now, he COULD have just flown to a desired altitude in-between thousands (like 4,500) and then selected ALTITUDE HOLD, but instead he chose to have the flight and the 3 flights after that one cancelled, and had MX take apart both autopilots. The guys in the Operations Control Center were beyond pissed. They tried to get another crew in there too, but the pilot always wins in the US. Nobody: Not the government, not your boss, not the dispatcher: NOBODY can tell a pilot here to fly a plane even if what's broken isn't even important. Had this been Tel Aviv, Air India, or Emrites airline, I guarantee the guys would have flown all 4 legs no questions asked. These subtle differences make US air travel a hassle (can you imagine how many people were delayed from the cancellation?) but so much safer. This is all just my opinion of course. I'd never cancel a vacation to Dubai just because I have to fly Emrites. If anything I'd be thrilled.

To start: Religion is strictly prohibited from these forums and this thread. In the same way an outside observer can never actually witness their friend fall into a black hole, is the brain also never actually able to perceive or experience its death? Out of the billions of people who have died, have any of them actually been able to "perceive" their death? I always imagine the brain like a compute that computes stimuli. Information comes in like: [Timestamp: 21:59:20] Left Arm is hot. Reflex initiated: Retracting left arm. Looking left to determine proper response. Visual cortex reports: Metal Pipe we tried to touch is glowing red. Thought: "Man that's hot!" To continue this, death would leave nothing to compute. [Timestamp: 21:59:20] Visual cortex reports: Parachute not opening. Thought: "This is gonna hurt..." Looking down to determine altit- [sPLAT] As you can see, there's never any comprehension of death. It happens, and the brain is never able to analyze it. It's never able to say "I've died" - that never comes. Is it actually possible for us to perceive the stimuli of our deaths, or - from a certain point of view - do we never die?

I personally agree. A felony is overkill. I have a hard time seeing anything short of turning off the runway lights on approach as being "hazardous" to my visual approach. The most distracting thing I've ever encountered during night flying is the confusing jungle of city lights when approaching cities like Vegas, San Diego or LA where the runway disappears into the mix. The truth is that US Aviation is so incredibly and remarkably safe that the last fatal major US carrier to crash was in Queens,NY in 2001: over 13 years ago. We've had foreign carriers and regional airliners crash here, and we've also had that US Airways jet crash in the Hudson with no deaths, but outside of those we're in the safest (period) era (period) ever (period), and in my professional opinion a laser pointer has no chance, at all, of disrupting that trend.

Would the advent of advanced nanorobotics and artificial neurons change the outlook on the feasibility of cryonics?

My opinion is in the minority (because it's never happened to me) but I feel like laser pointing an airliner should be a misdemeanor. I say the same for people who come on the ATC frequencies with a home radio and clutter the line with profanity. It's childish but I can't see it causing me to crash my airplane. Again, I'm deeply in the minority with that opinion and I suspect I might change my mind after I fail a medical exam due to eye damage.

I think you've encountered the part of physics that makes it so difficult for the common person to understand.

In regards to free will and cognition: The sum is greater than the whole of the parts. You could argue deterministic principles that would suggest free will is the result of some chemical balance or programming within neural cellular biology, and that cognition and free will don't exist, but I disagree. On the MACRO scale of things the end result is still free will. Just like we're unsure what effect gravity has when we get down to quarks and fermions, it's highly possible free will and cognition break down at the cellular level and become building blocks. That doesn't invalidate the very real, very obvious in my opinion, end result.

Question: If an organism or agent existed, capable of super omnipotence: The ability to create and destroy anything from the smallest of quanta to the largest cosmos, unimpeded by any higher force or plane of existence, could it be said to have free will? Or would it, too, be in the grey margin some commentators place the human brain within?

To 78stonewobble, With regards to the human mind, a machine that is programmed to ignore its programming isn't necessarily exercising free will.

Haha. I remember that joke from Kindergarten.

I've lived from the West Coast to the East Coast, and one of my jobs keeps me in earshot of something like 65,000 (new) Americans every day. Never have I heard the word "centrifical" force.

No windows 9?

That is the single most amazing thing I've read learned in a while.