vger

I'd pay to have the popular graphical enhancement mods permanently integrated into the stock game, so I don't have to worry about every single update breaking them (and then my game saves being broken by trying to fix them).

I'm personally not comfortable with sending people to Mars without going back to the Moon first. While hypothetically we'll be as prepared for Mars as we possibly can be, we're still 50 years out of practice, and probably won't have even one tenth of the equivalent budget that Apollo had.

Humans are the only ones who have done it intentionally though. I hope that by the time we've mastered interstellar space travel, we will finally be done with colonialism.

On Y2K, the "day after," I remember an incredibly surreal feeling coming over me. I wondered if the Earth had actually ended, and some advanced race had snatched us up at the last minute and placed us in a simulation to make us think we were still on Earth. Yeah, crazy. But Jan 1 felt really REALLY weird, even without such musing. On a more serious note, my feeds have been flooded a LOT lately with stories about reality possibly being a simulation. And even experiments trying to prove it.

For that, you need something that burns you, before you can make water capable of burning you.

To those who are suggesting Neotony, no, this seemed to focus specifically on changes in the brain/mind, not the rest of the body. Other physiological changes weren't focused on at all. I just mentioned it for elaboration. In Junginan archetypes, Peter Pan Syndrome is "The Divine Child." In layman's terms it was "a change of heart" throughout humanity, shifting from our primal competitive nature to something more compassionate and sensitive. One could easily call this a social renaissance, or perhaps, socialism/communism. But it was compared to children repeatedly like a mental hybrid, and was specifically described as a next-step in human evolution rather than simply adopting an alternate social model.

In that case, absolutely do NOT land on the planet to gather specimens, even if the company orders you to. Probably right. The only exception might be if they had a LOT of foresight about inevitable catastrophes and sent a signal soon enough. Which arguably is what humans should be doing right now But if we intercepted such a thing, the logical conclusion would be that it wasn't meant for us, but for someone who is part of a "community" of worlds. But then that makes me wonder, if we knew we were doomed, and we had access to some kind of FTL communication, would we start beaming a call for help over the cosmos in the hopes that somebody picks up the phone?

I thought it was also to learn about the practicalities of preventing an asteroid from hitting us.

Is this question limited to just colonization or terraforming? Seems like it might be, based on responses, but that seems nearsighted. Even with sterilization procedures, it seems like it would be very likely that some probes we've sent to other worlds, arrived there with some microbial hitchhikers who may have survived. So, we've already begun to spread life. Whether or not any extremophiles survived long-term, that's another matter.

My search-fu is failing me. I stumbled on this years ago and can't find it anywhere now. A very deep discussion about behavior in adults vs. children came up recently and I remembered reading about this bit of musing by a famous psychiatrist. I 'thought' it was Carl Jung, but the most I can find from him about the subject is the "Divine Child" (Peter Pan Syndrome) personality archetype and I seriously doubt that's what I was remembering. I also find nothing about him speculating on humanity's future. Does any of this ring a bell to anyone in or out of the field? Maybe I just credited it to the wrong person?

It's rather painful to think about just how many opportunities were missed because cartoons were labelled "for kids only" in the U.S.A. Some of those children's cartoons ended up being very deep and complex anyhow, but now after seeing some of the things that came out of Japan (I mean aside from the X-rated content ), just how much brilliant work never got a chance in the West? And now though we might be wiser, classic animation is dead and never coming back. I can still remember how miffed people got that Disney's "Beauty and the Beast" won feature film awards. Miffed enough that after it happened, animated films were given their own category, almost as if to say, "This isn't real cinema, so get in your place."

Quote "blocks" are driving me insane with this format. Nested quotes are even worse. For one, I tried replying to a message and got the quotes nested in a way that they definitely were NOT in the original message. Worse though is I could find no way of fixing the quote, which would have been easy on the old system. I can "move" a quote, but I could find no way to delete one, or a practical way to get rid of everything that it was nested inside of.

A nudist space craft is an option, but then you're going to have to spend more energy to keep the ship warm, so do you really save anything? I vaguely remember something about a way to get dirt off of certain types of fabric using nothing but high frequency vibrations. If the material were engineered right, static might be another option.

Mann was lying anyway just to get rescued, and made up the story about a habitable biome beneath the surface. Can't remember offhand if anything was said about the composition of the atmosphere while they were down there. In the grand scope of all things in the universe, there's probably a way it could happen. But even then, the frozen clouds in the film don't sit right with me. If the clouds are made of something lighter than the air around them, then why do fragments of them begin to fall after the ship collides with it? They should simply drift away and remain buoyant. That makes it even more complicated. It implies that the clouds are actually NOT lighter than air, but the molecules are clinging to something at the core which IS light enough to counter the weight. It could've been done better.

Hopefully this can be answered without it turning too political, but do we still have the security of knowing that everyone is sane enough to not be this stupid? I'm mainly thinking about North Korea as it applies to this. Their leader at least seems apathetic enough to start a nuke war if he had the capability, simply because he's already acting metaphorically like a Leeroy Jenkins character and he doesn't even have the weapons yet. One can HOPE that it is just an act for the sake of his own people who want a "god" for a leader, and to keep the rest of the world on its toes, but in our modern age of "70-virgin" cults, there's no way to be sure. Similarly, it seems entirely possible that Japan would have initiated a full-scale nuclear war if both they and the U.S. had nuclear capabilities at the end of WWII. Have we just been lucky that no nation has acquired the bomb during a time period that had a terrible mix of high volatility and sociopathic leadership? Or am I not giving common sense enough credit?

So, Universe Sandbox with better graphics?

Sooner or later, I can't see anyway that missile interception won't be cheaper than nuclear missiles, which would make nukes more or less obsolete. ICBM's need nuclear material. Interceptors don't.

While we're talking about biomes for gas worlds, I should mention that this would also give comets a way to be more interesting than "just a prettier asteroid."

Even if all of the other problems were solved, one probably always digs at me. What happens if there's a storm, or simply, the jet stream decides to center itself on top of the 'shaft?' That's potentially 300mph sustained winds. Which means your orbital platform would be like a lone firefighter trying to hang onto the end of a pressurized water hose. As for whether or not there's any point: we're quickly approaching the commercial age of space. People want to go up. A space vator would make space accessible to a lot more people, not just those with optimal health. And corporations are now seriously looking into space mining. If we can make a space elevator work, it's by far the most cost-effective to ferry equipment and harvested resources between orbit and Earth.

Like I said before though, they're not stopping the action. The whole thing is an action shot, like watching a fist fight in Matrix bullet-time. Maybe locking the camera to the hull was a bit much, but that made it easier to drive home how insanely difficult the process was. Maybe we should write a petition to Chris Nolan for a special director's cut. Then sometimes you can just go too far. It's in my namesake, so it's probably no surprise that Star Trek TMP doesn't bore me to tears. A lot of folks playfully call it "The Motionless Picture." I think it's pretty clear though that they were drawing heavily on 2001 for inspiration. I can understand people whining about the 'cloud tunnel' sequence but the rest of it provided the most realistic depiction of how these massive ships would actually move. It gave Star Trek a more believable evolution from Earth's NASA days than any other Trek project. I love the slow passes of the ship model, watching it power up, and then maneuver at a cautious pace out of space dock while tiny people on EVA's appear in the foreground. It's beautiful. It's also ironic that given its age, the ships look more realistic than they do in any of the later films.

I think half of the CGI budget got blown on the curved space stuff. Maybe they've got something now that's more efficient at it, but generally, rendering software HATES refracting light. Yeah, I see your point. Sadly, taking time to stop and smell the roses is a rarity in films these days. Which is strange, when we're living in a world where special effects are more amazing than ever. I think too many directors these days feel like it's poor etiquette to pause the action for any length of time to draw attention to an effect, as if it means they're just "showing off."

Ironically though, the film had a pretty insane running time anyhow. It's almost three hours long which puts it on the level of Lord of the Rings. That's a LONG film for something that's trying to find a healthy balance between entertaining AND intellectual. Granted anyone on these forums is accustomed to spending hours at a time planning trajectories, or just zooming out from a ship to watch a planet spin for minutes or hours at a time. We almost instinctively know how "slow" space travel is. If Interstellar had another hour added to it, most of us Kerbals wouldn't care. But the audience who doesn't eat/sleep/breathe space, they would. And let's be honest. That film was created to promote an interest in space exploration. This means ultimately it was meant to grab people who previously didn't care about space. Those of us who are already space jocks, we weren't the target audience.

Though one has to wonder if there was anything they could have done anything to marginally improve their chances. It wouldn't be the first time a shuttle re-entered with a dangerous hole in her heat shield. STS-27 did the Columbia thing, without doing the final Columbia thing. But it gets even more interesting. NASA was equally unconcerned while the shuttle was in orbit. http://www.astronautix.com/flights/sts27.htm When it was back on the ground, then they took it seriously.

A very interesting read. Best to set some time aside for it though because it's pretty long. I remember a few months ago we were talking about whether or not it'd be ethical to make a movie about a "what if" scenario. Reading this made me feel like I was watching that movie. http://arstechnica.com/science/2016/02/the-audacious-rescue-plan-that-might-have-saved-space-shuttle-columbia/

[quote name='hugix']It would be a cool movie if STS 107 didn't happen. Now it's just in poor taste.[/QUOTE] Ehh.. "Gravity" might as well be based on real events that occurred on Mir.