WestAir

In that case, there could be a missile heading our way right now to end our threat to interstellar civilization. A preemptive strike to ensure we never have a chance to become a threat. A small rock launched at .8c would pretty much ensure our destruction; they never have to set foot on Earth or leave their home planet to do it.

I believe there are a lot of alien worlds out there with semi-intelligent to intelligent to hyper-intelligent life. I also believe the distances involved here (on the order of thousands of years just to exchange photons) makes any communication, or even mutual understanding, an impossibility. Humanity exists now (in our relative view of the Universe). To the alien sentience on the opposite end of the spiral arm, the radio boom of the 20th Century won't happen for another twenty-seven thousand years. So imagine they pick up our garbled transmissions, learn everything there is to know about us, and shoot back a reply. 27x2=54. So in the year 56,013A.D we'll get a reply back from these people. How can anyone even begin to suggest humanity (in any form) will be here in 56,013? The only alien societies that communicate are ones in the same star system from different planets in the Goldilock zone, IMHO. Cross-System communication is done through observation only.

Possible. The giant tsunami of liquid mantle and city-block sized shrapnel will destroy you, however. If you manage to evade the billions of ship-destroying debris, note that the thermal radiation, gamma rays, etc al will probably kill anything and everything in, under, around or above Earth - probably as far out as the moon. Your liquified, dismembered wreckage will be slung out into space, and I imagine it'll probably come back in a few months and land in the lava pile anyway.

According to some scientists involved with the $550,000,000 USD Kepler Spacecraft, there may be a drastic prevalence of Earth-like planets in our Galaxy. Like any knee-jerk reporter would do, CNN's Brad Lendon posted the findings to the main webpage of CNN.com, found here: http://www.cnn.com/2013/11/05/tech/innovation/billions-of-planets/index.html?hpt=hp_t2. So what do you guys think? If we take the dubiousness of the findings as concrete fact, and if we take the estimation of 170billion+ Galaxies in our observable Universe to be fact, that potentially means 1.7 trillion "Earths" within our observable Universe. On the flip side, there are many intelligent scientists who can argue that we may be the only current life-bearing planet in the Milky Way due to the risks involved. Thoughts? Edit: Changed title as a nod to Carl Sagan upon request.

I feel like any colony (even ones below bedrock) on Earth would be torn to shreds. The video on page 3 to 4 clearly shows the entire crust being lifted PAST low Earth Orbit. Entire continents were thrown into space, some of which became small lunar-esque satellites. If the entire surface of the Earth is raging at temperatures hotter than the surface of the sun, and the crust is thrown into orbit, what chance does a Fallout style Vault-Tec Vault have even a "mile" down? Two miles? Ten?

Let's be absolutely clear here: There is zero possibility of a 2013 society moving a dwarf planet out of an impact trajectory with Earth. That established, our efforts must (and I'd assume will) be made to move our ecosystem (The food chain we rely on, from the bacteria we desperately need to the algae to what have you) from Earth to elsewhere. The easiest location would be in orbit of a planet like Mars. [i would say Earth, but the debris field would tear a colony station apart). Remember, it's far easier to modify and control a space station colony than it is a Mars or extraterrestrial colony. We'd have a LOT more space and volume to work with that we can expand on. We don't have to worry about storms and geographical errors. The Delta V required to do anything with the colony is tremendously small compared to a planet colony. It also has the same downsides: Hazardous environment (Vacuum, radiation), lack of available resources (water, oxygen), etc. The problem is easier maintained in a station, however. As such, were I in charge of Earth's Survival Plan when Moho is first spotted, I'd put all of our resources into constructing a super-modular station in orbit of Mars, and focus all future I.S.S research on how to keep the food chain alive in a small, controlled, high-radiation zero-G environment. Health risks are a mute point when your 3 realistic choices are: Mars, Mars orbit, or Lava Planet A. [Earth]

Party like its 1999, because we're screwed as a collective ecosystem.

Because a Neutron Star can induce *noticeable* frame-dragging, and has its own photon sphere, and can be centimeters away from falling within its own Schwarzschild Radius [meaning some of them can have ~10 Solar Masses], I figured the difference between a stellar black hole and a neutron star was unimportant to the discussion on causality. K^2 corrected me a page ago, long before your retort.

I'm sorry, but I don't configure the error in her reasoning. Everything this woman said was absolutely factual. Factual in her head, I mean. She reminds me of a chemistry professor I had who'd present techno-babble nonsense like "Newton was so intelligent he wrote one book called The Principia - to this day noone knows what it all means." and stuff like that. I always wondered what the mental process was that had people believe and re-tell extremely improbably facts.

IIRC, even the Concorde warped in length during each supersonic flight. One video I watched showed a pilot demonstrating this by showing the camera crew the engineering panel. On the ground, the panel was touching the wall so closely it looked connected. In flight, the aircraft had stretched sufficiently enough for the pilot to put his hand between the panel and the wall. And they weren't even going that fast. I'd hate to imagine what type of warping occurs at Mach 5.

How can causality be taken seriously, then, if it's violated by something as natural as a rotating neutron star, or by the natural expansion of space on a global scale?

How does space expanding faster than C not break any rules of causality? I know Galaxies grow further apart faster than C, which means that no information can be exchanged faster than C, but it still seems like a breakdown of causality. If it isn't, would space *contracting* faster than C violate causality? If Galaxies converged at speeds faster than C, information could be exchanged between them faster than a photon could propagate. This is one part of relativity I do have a hard time understanding.

The United States spends more on its military than the next 26 countries combined. The entire worlds military capabilities, collectively, would not be enough to even invade the US. There was a very interesting article on the very subject earlier this year by one of the US Military Generals who said that while a "World vs US" scenario would succeed in forcing the US defeat (In other words, ruin its capability to mount an offensive), the rest of the world completely, 100%, lacks the capability to even land ashore. There aren't enough Aircraft carriers and amphibious warships outside the US to break through a US fleet and reach shore. An invasion through Mexico would be met with the worlds largest Tank and artillery base which happens to be in Texas. Long post brought to an end, the scenario of "enemies invading and bombing the nuclear plant" is impossible if we're discussing a US invasion, and every country with nuclear plants is an ally of NATO or the UN - again making such a scenario extremely unlikely.

People are terrified of radiation. At my job I have coworkers who are absolutely terrified and feel vilified about TSA's body scanners. They tell me how the radiation is going to give them cancer and how air crew should be exempt from them even when not on duty for safety reasons. I *want* to tell them that the TSA body scanners use radiowaves, which are non-ionizing radiation and aren't powerful enough to knock electrons out of their DNA. I *want* to tell them that joining me on a flight from Vegas to Phoenix is giving them a REAL ionizing, health-hazard occupational radiation dose of about ~20µSv (just about the same dose of a chest CT scan), and several hundred thousand times more sieverts than the TSA body scanner. Then I realize that explaining the electromagnetic spectrum, or photons, neutrons, alpha particles or sieverts and their different effects on the body is a mute point because no one will listen because they've already made up their minds about its risk to them. So I don't. EDIT: I feel like this is the same problem the Nuclear Community faces.

Long rockets flip over and always want to explode. Fat rockets always make orbit just fine.

I've done: 1. Landing on Minnus 1. Landing on Mun 1. Landing on Duna I'm not even half way through the tech tree, just far enough to get my first docking port. This is something like 10 flights in. Maybe I'm not doing things right, but I find science rather tedious to net. At this point my only option to get new science is to go to new planets and return; Space Stations and whatnot are almost pointless in comparison, and I kind of wish they [and aeroplanes] could net you science in mid-game.

I'm just the messenger for what's happening in game. The pointy end with the parachute is always aggressively forced prograde when I re-enter, despite SAS trying to hold the heavy, round end prograde. At about 35k and 1500m/s it'll flip all its own.

How are you guys doing this in Career Mode? Without the Deadly Re-entry heatshields available at the beginning, how are you returning samples from the Mun without destroying them? I re-enter with THREE 40km "skips" through the atmosphere to bleed me off with the last pass showing a periapsis of 35km. That gets me to a 2,200m/s re-entry speed when I start the real descent. At that speed, everything but the capsule itself explodes. [Temperatures will easily exceed 1400C], and because control surfaces aren't available during early science tech, keeping the vessel pointed round-edge-down isn't possible. [The forces of re-entry will always point the pointy end of the capsule, and as a consequence the parachutes, prograde] Long post made short: I suck at Mun-Kerbal returns. What am I forgetting?

Nice one Rhoark. To tell the truth, 80% of my crew have been burning up because of Deadly Re-entry and F.A.R. With no struts, or controllable airfoils to keep my ships facing the right way during re-entry I've been spinning into disaster. At least now I can put heat shields in and stop my early research from exploding.

I went back to space center and didn't get any of the science I collected for orbiting, eva'ing, etc etc then transmitting it before attempting a 2200m/s re-entry with Re-entry heat and F.A.R. Everything exploded about 2 min after submitting the [3] data's successfully. Went back to the Space Center to try again with some next tier stuff I should have earned from all the science, to find I still only had 18 science like I did before launch.

I learned that with career mode, having Deadly Re-entry and F.A.R both installed make for a difficult startup. You can reach 80km, but getting down in one piece is implausible. You also don't get science if your vessel is destroyed, even if you submitted data. Luckily I still have 10 kerbals left to kill before I need to hire more.

Shows what I know.

I'm almost positive A is the answer you're looking for. I'm fairly certain attitude control systems keep our satellites facing Earth during their orbits. As an aside, I'm also fairly positive KSP provides "real physics" in this regard.

Hypothesis: Medical science will eventually, given enough time (decades, centuries, what have you) become sophisticated enough to make aging and death from the process of aging an antiquated concept. If, given the elimination of age-death, a colony ship were created then, how would that change your opinions on such a ship? If 200 years of age were just "meh" to people in the future, and a Journey across the stars was "just a way to alleviate boredom."?

If by human related you mean pilot related, that could be slightly unfair. A vast majority of pilot related incidents (or accidents) are the result of other failures, somewhere, that took the pilot out of the norm. For instance, if a crew encounters a failed glide slope system on the approach to landing that crew is now in a situation not normal to them. If they lose situational awareness and crash into a mountain, sure it's pilot error, but the mechanical failure of a glideslope system must also be taken into account. I've rarely read of an accident, aerospace or otherwise, where a professional crew of pilots, astronauts, what have-you, ruined a perfectly good craft by sheer 100% human error. There's always something unusual going on preceding it. In this case, a very cold night before launch was the unusual, non-human event that contributed.