WestAir

Would it be possible for mankind, with current technologies, to displace the Earth from its orbit? Could we use constant, continuous Hydrogen Bomb blasts on one point of the Earth, relative to its orbit, to push Earth off its orbit? What about manufacturing giant rocket engines and turning them on at the right moment, once a day, for decades? Could we even create giant ion engines and just let'em rip for a few hundred years and do it? If the answer is no, then could we at the very least change the Earths rotation speed with today's technology?

Once I saw "DC-10" and "Failure after V1" I thought of American Flight 191. Had to edit my post once I actually took a moment to read the link you provided. After this discussion I'm going to remove good reading comprehension and communication skills from my resume.

PakledHostage, I met a lady who was friends with a guy that died in a similar crash where the pilots continued AFTER V1, rather than rejected. From what I've gathered, the engine separated from the aircraft on this other crash after V1, the pilot correctly continued the take-off at Vr and accelerated to V2 speeds then climbed at V2. Unfortunately the engine tore with it a hydraulic line that caused the SLATS to retract on the same (left) wing. It caused the stall speed of that wing to increase to a speed above V2. The left wing stalled, flipping the aircraft up-side-down and causing the crash. I also heard the stall horn or stick shaker was INOP for whatever reason and did not alert the pilots to a stall event. EDIT: Here's a question that brings us slightly back on topic: Does the temperature of the air affect the stall speed of an aircraft?

If that's what PakledHostage was saying, then I misread his comment. I swore he wrote "loosely defined as the speed at which they can safely takeoff after an engine failure." My bad for misreading PakledHostage' post. It happens to me a lot. EDIT: As an additional aside, and at the risk of misreading someone again, that would be Vr where you lift off, irregardless of the critical engine failure. You'll just want to reach V2 within a set amount of feet after wheels up. Sometimes it's 15 feet, usually 35, I've also read 50 on a pilot forum I visit.

As a complete aside, the airspeed at which you can "safely continue a takeoff after an engine failure" is V2, not V1. V2 is usually refereed to as the Take-off safety speed in SOP's. EDIT: As far as V1 is concerned, I've always been told it just means "Take your hand off the thrust levers and don't touch those brakes" once you reach it.

That's offensively horrible. How dare you even think of such a thing without considering the Kerbal-School-System is always next door to the bacon factory. I don't care about the children but no one nukes bacon. As for me, I usually leave my spent stages wherever they're spent. Interplanetary orbit is most common. Some are in orbit of Jool/Duna, and others are in random orbits around Kerbol. I really don't put any effort into retrieving anything, even Kerbals. They knew what they signed up for.

Why didn't they hit the self destruct button once it veered off into the horizon?

I have no idea what anyone is saying, but I'm amazingly intrigued.

Space Warfare is practically impossible anyways. There's no way one orbiting body can target and hit another orbiting body if both have fuel and the capability to change trajectories almost instantaneously. As for invading a human settlement on Mars from an Earth-fairing nation - also impractical. Any civilization that leaves Earth will most likely be safe from the threat of war and invasion - at least from the "outside".

Perhaps, but I would be extremely hesitant to consider a mouse brain an adequate comparator to the many different lobes of the human brain that has mastered oral communication, among other things. Let's take yourself, and a person who speaks only Spanish as an example. Because of what we've learned from association (Pavlov's dog, anyone?) we know that whenever someone shows YOU the letter C, the letter A, and the letter T together you're going to think of a cat and picture a feline. The synapses in YOUR brain are hard-coded and wired to associate those letters (from the bundle of neurons that learned language and communication) all the way to your memory of animals (from the bundle of neurons that remembers what a cat is). Your Spanish friend does not have the same neural connections. At all. And because any successful telepathy technology MUST be able to communicate one simple idea (a cat) to two individuals, it must be able to read and interpret the trillions of synaptic connections your brain has already created, analyze it, then correctly transmit it to the 2nd person in a decoded format their unique synaptic web can comprehend. Nightmare doesn't begin to describe the challenge here. You'd need a computer that could literally translate every neural connection of multiple brains at the same time, decode and decipher information, then re-assemble those messages in formats the receiving brain can comprehend. With computer technology that good, the human brain might as well be obsolete in comparison.

Today to the far future: Fossil Fuels. Then, further into the future: Last remaining Fossil Fuels. Then, immediately following that: Horse and Chariot.

But what if instead of machines becoming this end-of-all entity that decides the fate of humanity, what if we simply continue to allow mechanization to replace us in our work and duties? One day we'll build a computer capable of following complex ideas like law. Imagine if, far into the future, an AI (arguably sentient, but that's beside the point) is put onto the Supreme Court of, say, Switzerland. Let's say the argument for doing so is that the machine is capable of processing logical thought, understands law, and is completely incapable of the downsides to having a human Justice (It's void of greed, fatigue, being bought out or serving to special interests groups, and can be designed to always vote in favor of the people). In the above scenario, it's obvious an artificial Supreme Court Justice would be more fair and honest than a human justice, and if it can do the same duties reliably, why wouldn't we then replace all the justices? Why stop there - we know that Wall Street is crawling with greedy, selfish, lying people who often give their attention to company shareholders and family/friends than they do the workers and people that invest time, money, and energy into them. When computers become complex enough, it would certainly be feasible to replace bankers and CEO's with honest AI who couldn't care less about greed or special interests. In fact, an AI being the head of companies or countries might be the most altruistic move an advanced society could undertake. However, the question remains: What happens to humanity when its realized that our inventions can do everything we can do only several hundred thousand times better? How would our service-based monetary-spun society run when jobs are outsourced to mechanized workers and free time begins to drastically overshadow the circulation of wealth?

I was at the airport food court in line at a Wendy's yesterday when I overheard a passenger say something along the lines of "Flying isn't that hard... by 2020 we'll all be flying Drones across the country." and even though he was absolutely wrong (I doubt even China's lightning-fast aerospace industry can design, build, test, and certify a pilot-less commercial airliner in 6 1/2 years) it got me wondering: If our entire reason for mechanizing an industry or workforce is based on the ease of doing so, and it's extremely easy for a machine to do any non-leadership-centric job, then what will happen to mankind when we invent the first computer capable of sentient thought ala Commander Data from Star Trek? Surely they can do any job - leadership or otherwise - better than any human can. What I'm asking is what will happen to mankind when we invent a computer that can do everything better than us, including but not limited to inventing better computers?

That's disturbingly awesome.

I don't believe getting into space is part of the OP's question, because obviously an airliner would never make it to space. Let's assume Boeing had a factory in LEO and they built a 744 and pushed it out of the hangar doors, fully pressurized at one of the commentators 13,000 feet atmospheric pressure. I'm not sure about the 747-400 series, but I hear the Airbus 320 and newer families have a "ditching" button that will seal all of the various valves and ports and holes in the fuselage. Let's also pretend our space 747 has that, and the crew push the button to try and maintain cabin pressure. What happens next? Let me be the first to say "dunno" - I want to think the fuselage fails, because nothing ever seems to go right on an airplane when I fly one, but I digress.

Fun Fact: Did you know most horizontal stabilizers (the wings on the empennage) are upside-down? Not all of them - a lot of sports and acrobatic aircraft have symmetrical wings (In fact, most acrobatic aircraft have both their main wings and the horizontal stabilizers built with perfect symmetry on the top and bottom.) In those aircraft, all that's needed for flight is a positive angle of attack, inverted or otherwise. Airshows would be boring if Bernoulli had his way.

I always wondered about that line of thought. Everyone says how "rare" and "impressive" it is Earth can sustain and create life. "If just one variable were different life wouldn't happen."; I often hear how we're just the right distance from the sun, etc etc -- and now you're saying the same thing about our Universe: That the laws of physics are just right for it to allow life to exist. That any miniscule change to those physics would render it impossible for us to exist. I have a retort to that thought. Pretend that when the Big Bang happened, the laws of physics turned out differently. Let's pretend that the weak force turned out stronger than the strong force, and that electromagnetism never propagated at C. With this change, the molecular bonds that allow life to exist would be impossible to construct, and life would never happen. No one would be around to know that life never started. Therefor, I suggest our existence isn't nearly as spectacular as we assume. The prerequisite to knowing we exist is existing itself; how can that be miraculous? The Universe has had life-bearing potential for > 10,000,000,000 years. Even if it is miraculous, it certainly can't be considered impossibly rare. Not when, given the size of just the observable Universe alone, there are likely Billions of life-bearing planets out there. I just can't accept the idea that the circumstances leading to our existence is rare, let alone surprising.

K^2 actually works in the field of physics. For all intents and purposes, his words should hold just as much weight as any other professional scientist.

Mars has gravity. They can even bring P-90X with them to stop muscle atrophy.

Wow. I didn't even know IBM - or anyone - had the capability of moving individual atoms around like that. In equally stunning video, here's an interesting video with light moving in slow motion: These videos are out of this world.

Fluid filled bubbles id assume? Or would it just boil?

Most everything I post in this forum is pure speculation and often incorrect, but this one time can confidently say "Noone knows." Human psychology shows most of us to be creatures of habit and on some level predictable, but our behaviors can be modified and changed both at will and against it to become extremely unpredictable. (See Pavlovs Dog). To say a computer can't have a human brain because any simulation is simply synthetic I personally belive is a cop out. A simulation of that magnitude would become a emulator, and I will say that personally I would view a perfect emulation of a human brain as the real deal. Why not? It can do everything the real one can and it would have all of the same handicaps and quirks.

Yup. It seems like without a drastic change in funding and infrastructure, this century will be as amazing for space enthusiasts as the 17th Century was. Mars and the moon seem just as far away as ever.

Won't, in the case of Earth and Luna, the moons distance and the Earths spin one day reach an equilibrium where the Moon stops drifting away and the Earth stops slowing its spin?

He's saying that a water planets plausible average temperature comes in the form of a J-curve where the margin of maintaining 0-15C isn't the same, in terms of stability, as 85-100C. Because as the temperature passes, say, 30C average, the evaporated water vapor creates a compounding greenhouse effect that actually increases that number substantially with no measure of stability. At least, that's how I read MBobrik's response.