vger

Sooner or later people are going to have to get over it. And not just for the sake of space travel, but for Earth as well.

I'd be hesitant to do it for this particular event, since psychology is the focus of the experiment. Still, waking up on "Mars" and finding a little green man with a squeegee cleaning the exterior windows of your habitat...

I've tried this three times now, and never had any problem testing the normal Mk-16. I get to where all the test parameters are green check marks, and I try to deploy. Nothing happens. I don't hear the parachute sound, nor do I get the "destroyed by heat and pressure" message that I would expect. The icon for the parachute turns a slightly lighter green color, not the yellow I would expect from a deployed chute. I've tried to do this both with staging and by right-clicking the part and clicking "deploy chute."

Proper attire must be worn before approaching the dome.

Sadly, I'm amazed this hasn't showed up in the game as a contract mission. However... IMO, Kerbals are asexual. They just adopt personal fashion styles that get misinterpreted as gender roles by our primitive standards. Given their lack of instinct for self-preservation, I think that if reproduction relied on male+female, they would've gone extinct before the industrial age.

So, OP, did this just come up on your feed recently? I just saw it in the past couple of weeks and then all of a sudden this discussion appears here. And yeah, if those radio communications were just ground tests, I'd like to know what the heck it was they were really talking about that just somehow got misconstrued as, "frak, why didn't we put heat shields on this thing?"

You sure it's a bad translation? The "water can think" concept, as featured in "What the bleep do we know?" was a Japanese research project.

Aye, "laser pumping" would be far less complicated, and less prone to error.

In some ways, it's just like getting to be a five-year old, all over again.

Also, taking into account the total history of exploration, our time in space has yielded an INSANELY good track record for keeping people alive. It's so good that the Grim Reaper would probably accuse us of cheating. A staggering number of human settlements in previously unexplored locations, simply died off from disease, famine, etc. And that was all on a planet where we could breathe.

I'm sure there's a ridiculously simple answer for this, why couldn't this have been accomplished with liquid crystals?

I'm just saying that if I decided something wasn't a planet, I wouldn't give it a technical name that had 'planet' in it. Neither Dwarf Planet nor Minor Planet makes much sense for a non-planet. Just come up with something new. The etymology of "Planetoid" ("Sorta like but not quite a planet") makes much better sense than "Dwarf Planet" ("Little Planet"), but nobody ever seems to use it.

And... http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/ency/article/000134.htm Personally I would have to put the risks at a much higher level in the case of Mars. With something like asbestos on Earth, your exposure is typically limited to your time in the vicinity of it. You can go outside, lose the air mask, and you're done with it. On Mars, the particles are constantly drifting around in the air. Especially for someone who is gardening with the soil on a daily basis, you're going to have a very difficult time trying to avoid tracking any dust into the habitat, especially by yourself.

.... Dwarf star?

I kinda figured they'd be leaving out some of the more recent undesirable nuances that would make Mars a living Hell to try colonizing (and I mean MORE of a living Hell than we thought it would be even a couple of decades ago). If any of the silicates get into your lungs, it's all over. Even with a really good airlock, some of it is going to get into your habitat ON your suit, and sooner or later you're going to breathe it. MAYBE if you exercised the same levels of precaution you would when being around an airborne pathogen, it would be okay. But then cleaning a suit becomes a two-person job.

Heh... have you been watching the news lately? Try telling someone, "Don't worry about it - you're still you, no matter what anybody calls you," and see how long it takes before you get digitally burned at the stake for some kind of evil. Words and labels have become the center of pretty much everything.

What I find particularly odd is the very next decision made AFTER downgrading Pluto, was to say that Dwarf Planets aren't any kind of Planet. Why a name like "Dwarf Planet" when it isn't even recognized as a sub-class of a Planet?

Planethood is becoming far too complicated. It was so much easier in the old days. You just got your certificate and that was it. Now planets and their moons actually have to do... work... and check in with the IAU every year to ensure they're still entitled to the benefits. Sign of the times, I tell ya.

Why doesn't that break relativity? I've heard the metaphor of being like you're running on a track and the track is stretching as you run, but because the track is simply "space" it doesn't count as matter breaking lightspeed. But if it's literally "nothing" that is doing this, how is it expanding? Or a better question would be, exactly WHAT is expanding?

I don't have a problem with spiders, though obviously if a I saw a recluse I'd be much less likely to feel comfortable "showing it to the door." But that's not a case of heebie jeebies, that's just an, "I don't feel like getting ill for weeks and ending up with a three-inch crater of necrosis on my hand. House centipedes on the other hand... http://animalcrossing.wikia.com/wiki/House_Centipede?file=B0060239_10593877.jpg It's even worse when you see them move. They're as fast as roaches.

We're already getting pretty close to this with real warfare. And any industry where a machine can replace a human.

This really isn't only about science though. The media does this with EVERYTHING, even things that are clearly in the realm of common sense. They make mountains out of molehills, but can't even be bothered to use material that remotely resembles a mountain.

That's what I was afraid of. I keep dreading the day when I can't look at the sky without seeing a frikking iPhone ad in the Sea of Tranquility.

You really can't attribute much to that. Communication technology is primarily only about two things. One is the replacement of human workers (which is only good news for the rich). The other is marketing, which does nothing to advance human development, all it accomplishes is selling more of the same stuff that is being sold anyway. The early internet was a true free and open platform where everyone with the skill could carve their own "home." It was an untamed frontier at the time, for only one reason. Big business didn't have the foresight to see what could be done with it. Now practically everything online only exists because of a chance that we'll click on some ad for something that we probably don't need. Without the things I just mentioned, computer tech would NOT be what it is today. Sorry, but finding more efficient ways to separate people from their money does nothing to advance humanity. And this more to the point of the original post. The EMdrive has me VERY excited, not simply because of what it could bring to space travel, but because of the other implications of such a device actually working. I've been meaning to post something similar in the science labs for a while - a bit of philosophical musing. For a while now I've been feeling like we're repeatedly hitting our heads on a cosmic "ceiling" in our attempts to climb higher up civilization's developmental ladder. In the case of things like space travel, or simply a better world where "want" can be mostly done away with, it seems like we reached a plateau. The dreams of the future that people in decades' past had, have all been catastrophically shot down. Our formulas for how the universe works paint a much bleaker picture than what our imaginations saw coming after humans walked on the moon. Energy is much more difficult to harness than we thought it would be. I read somewhere that even if money weren't an option, and we could build the ultimate warp ship, it would probably have to consume all of the energy in our sun just for a merry jaunt to the next star system. "Reality" has begun to feel like a cage to me, with bars made of equations that are far too limiting. If reality is that cruel, then there's just nothing we can do and our fate is in all likelihood, sealed. It has felt like the only way we can move forward, is if some new discovery proves that we're wrong about a WHOLE lot. Objectively, in the case of the EMdrive, it's probably a fluke that doesn't actually do anything amazing. But more subjectively, it "needs to work." Humanity needs it. Ever since science became more about math than about trial and error, we've gotten a pretty good idea of what to expect. There's almost no room left for surprises. But a HUGE surprise seems like the only thing that can save us from being trapped in our current technological incarnation. Maybe I'm just too pessimistic, but for example it seems the LHC (and think for a moment about how much that cost to build and the cost of running it), while its discoveries are awesome, isn't likely to yield anything that we can use as a breakthrough to catapult civilization forward into the future that our parents and grandparents were promised. You would also need nations foolish enough to think that using the moon as a missile base is in any way practical or better than having them on Earth. It doesn't matter who gets nukes. Everyone knows better now, and it isn't going to happen again. Only MAYBE if some asteroid is discovered containing resources that are worth more than ALL of "material X" that exists on Earth (I'm talking a rock worth a few quadrillion $ here).