MBobrik

Wrong. because gravity drag loses are biggest near launch/landing position and decrease with speed. But on the way up your mass starts high and decreases and during landing your mass starts high and decreases. So you will spend more time in high gravity drag during ascent than during descent. This can be very significant for small craft with low TWR.

Aerobraking mountains because that's where you have to aerobrake when you want to land back on KSP.

Judging from my admittedly limited experience, it is quite simple - use turbojets - spam ram intakes. 7 per engine will allow you to gain orbital velocity just on jets. - don't forget to throttle down to avoid flameout. It is counter-intuitive, but it allows you to climb higher and thus fly faster even if you decreased the thrust - if your apoapsis is still in the atmosphere when you have to fire the rocket, fire it without shutting off the jets. You will get speed boost and thus more air allowing you to fly on the jets longer. - don't forget action groups for the jets and the rocket.

Confirmed. I slowly descended and landed some 300 m from it but I didn't see it sparkling from the distance like it used to.

. Actually, this is not the case. Today, technology, the chief example of it, the internet, is mostly used to communicate, and to do all sorts of group activities, and thus is actually drawing us closer together. Hell, I know people who met their future wife playing some MMORPG. . . Empathy and stuff won't go the way of human tail unless we cease to be a social species ( which is impossible, we are already too adapted to social lifestyle to even survive as solitary animals ) . . Actually, I don't think that our capability to understand truly long-term consequences has evolved to the point where someone could do that. Not even the brightest minds in the world together are capable to understand what effects will a certain trait have say 100 000 years down the road.

. First thing. Evolution is SLOW. For example, a gene that causes humans to be able to digest milk even as adults emerged a few thousand years ago, it is clearly advantageous, yet the evolution did not finish spreading it through the entire population yet. Second thing, we already have means in place that reduce evolutionary fitness of undesirable behaviors. You can't reproduce very efficiently when you get say 30 years in prison. And if you think about more basic stuff, like, for example compassion, or conscience, this stuff was produced by the evolution itself, so it most probably is advantageous and thus gonna stay on its own anyway.

. what if they will be needed even more ? . . Is it actually more efficient than super intelligent with emotions ? I don't think so.

Custard Donut (In Space), do yourself please a favor an download one of the many simulated evolution/artificial life programs that are on the internet, start it, and watch the creatures evolve. There is no man behind the curtain. No thinking involved. All it is, is exploration of the genotype space via random mutation and (of course non-random) selection of the best variants. The ancestor of those orchid looked and smelled only very vaguely like a wasp. Enough to fool only the most horny and stupid wasps. This first similarity was largely accidental( and, as pointed out above, insects recognize their mating partners via far simpler means than the more brainy vertebrates, so it is not particularly hard to stumble upon something that accidentally pushes the right buttons in male wasps miniature brain ), but the natural selection picked it up and from each generation the ones which more resembled a wasp had higher chance of reproducing. So over thousands and thousands generations its shape and smell slowly converged to imitating a female wasp. Trying out permutations of shape and smell surely happened, but this way only an infinitesimal fraction of the vast space of all possible shapes and smells had to be explored to find a near-optimal solution.

this is how the Neil Armstrong memorial scenery looks like now gorgeous, absolutely gorgeous.

. If we have enough warning, only a small nudge will be necessary. It will, however be a lot easier just to ignore it and leave the future generations to suffer consequences. Ground launched orions, diverting the asteroid bynuclear pulse propulsion ( aka nuking the crap out of it ) would be necessary only if we spot it almost too late or if it is truly of a gargantuan size. . In the first case we wouldn't most probably respond and start building quickly enough. . The latter, well, there are a lot of people there who loathe anything nuclear enough to rather get an asteroid dropped on their heads, than to allow hundreds of nuclear airbursts. And also a lot of people who view the humankind as a horrible parasitic disease of the planet, and would never allow to pollute it further just because the bipedal cancer wants to avoid its long-needed removal. . Then of course, as I wrote earlier, there are people who wish for the world to end so they can enter their paradise and see the wicked burned( read anyone else ). And there are also people who are so greedy and/or lazy that they will rather delude themselves ( and con and indoctrinate anyone else ) that nothing is happening, than having to do something or lose even cent of their money. And the majority of the ruling plutocrats are like that.

I think we could, but we wouldn't. A large part of population would be all "yay apocalypse, jesus/mahdi/messiah/whoever is coming" and another large part would go into asteroid impact denialism. And those two together would jam any attempt at averting it.

why bother with street lighting ? give everyone night vision goggles for free. on the long run it will be cheaper and more energy efficient. + we will get rid of all the light polution. Astronomers around the world will praise us

. thus making the whole humbug prone to being blown upon first complex debate about something.

what if we are just a computer simulation? . Nothing. Business as usual. . It got basically no consequences down there. Simulated flame burns simulated flesh as good as the real thing. simulated animal deprived of simulated food will die a realistically simulated starving death. discovery of the formulae the simulation uses to compute simulated atoms is as important as discovering those in real world ... etc. Even the eventual meddling of its creators has a real world counterpart, because even the real universe might be just a part of a larger thing inhabited with meddlesome intelligences ... . The only difference is, that in a simulation, we might accidentally find a bug that either allows us to take control of the underlying OS, or crash the system and wipe ourselves out of existence (not really, just cause the operators to restore the simulation database from backup and fix the bug).

Actually, it is only 83 % of your orbital velocity. boost to escape velocity minus arbitrarily small amount, wait till apoapsis, reverse, wait till periapsis, decelerate. you paid 2*(sqrt(2) - 1 + arbitrarily_small_amount) which is roughly 83 % of your orbital velocity.

The point is moot because you can't get faster than light without something like Alcubierre Drive at all. And with Alcubierre, all incoming particles will be shredded by the warp bubble you are traveling in.

Depends on against what it is to be used, though. Against bald assertions of impossibility w/o any argument ? I think it is OK. Against a well reasoned case supported by tons of evidence, it is clearly wrong/fallacious. example : A : "perpetuum mobile is most likely impossible because < a lot of advanced physics >" B : 'they said that about the moon landing too.' is fallacious. . but A : "manned mars mission is impossible (w/o any further justification)" B : 'they said that about the moon landing too.' is OK

. tools that get buried won't erode.

Plenty but not all. And it takes just a single one. Left plenty of evidence like stone/bone tools and animal bones bearing tool marks, though. the only way a sentient species could go undetected is to be wiped out before having a chance to spread out of its birthplace.

It is very hard to completely miss a global civilization. And we went from simple tools to a global civilization in a blink of geological time. So the hypothetical ancient intelligent species would have to be extra-ordinarily unlucky to arise just a few tens of thousands of years before a mass extinction wipes them out so that they don't have a chance to spread around the globe. Extraordinary claim requires extraordinary evidence.

Then we would find their stone axes. And some huts buried under landslides, flood deposits or pyroclastic flows. And we would find their skeletons in positions that suggest deliberate burial.

Yeah. And never build anything nor lose any tool nor leave a wrecked vehicle that can fossilize outside of a narrow subduction zone. That would require knowledge of plate tectonics and intent to hide itself deliberately from the fossil record. And they would have to start with this before they first leave the subduction zone with tools. Which is impossible because they couldn't learn about plate tectonics w/o worldwide geological research.

Stone tools can last as long as any other stone = indefinitely.

Opposite approach works too. Start when Kerbin is in the ascending/descending node. Just be sure you get the alignment right because, like it happened to me yesterday, even when you get an encounter, you come in thundering at 5km/s excess speed, and most ships don't have spare 5 km/s like mine had.