vger

Well, now we have another excuse to get corporations up there right? SPACE BOOZE!

Huh, yeah, I guess this all depends on whether or not inertia is preserved in a wormhole. The Portal game is probably right when GlaDOS said, "Speedy thing goes in, speedy thing comes out." Otherwise it probably shatters conventional physics. This would also make it impossible to use as a "space elevator." A ship in orbit passing through a wormhole to Earth's surface would be doing something like 18k mph. So the ship either needs to be able to deal with the friction of being at near surface level at that speed, or it's going to get ripped apart. The current world record for airspeed is about 5k mph. So the airstrip at the exit point needs to be contained in a near-vacuum, AND be long enough to give the ship enough room to decelerate. Same holds true for the opposite. The ship would need to reach a proper orbital velocity BEFORE entering the wormhole, otherwise it will just start falling back to Earth the moment it comes out the other end. As Teal'c once said, "Threading the needle." This also makes me think of another problem that may or may not be an issue, which is time dilation. I'd worry more for that than gravity. Time moves at a different speed on the surface than in orbit. So when half of you has already passed through the orbital wormhole and half of you is out the other side, the two halves of you are now traveling in time at different speeds. What the heck would happen there? Would that tear an object apart ala spaghettification? Yeck, so it's a transporter, with a ridiculously better range. Well, dang. There goes one of my fantasies. I'm not stepping in one then. I'm in the camp of, "If you get teleported, your consciousness dies and a clone comes out the other end."

I don't think you would even need the wormhole for communication. We'll probably figure out a way to communicate instantly (subspace) via quantum entanglement long before we figure out (if it's even possible) how to build a stable wormhole that we can use like a doorway. Good thought on the air-tight portal chambers, that was something I always felt would be mandatory, otherwise opening a wormhole would be like cracking a window in a pressurized cabin. Gravity? I don't see why that would create any issues. Unless you're thinking like the "black hole" episode of SG-1 where everything started to get sucked through the gate. A planet with enough gravity to cause that kind of a problem though would NOT be a planet you would want to walk around on anyway.

Don't know why this just popped into my head, but I suddenly want to do a realistic parody of BTTF where they test the DeLorean by jumping forward for six months, then they emerge in outerspace and discover they orbiting in opposition with the Earth. ...oops.

Crude models is fine when you're just testing a concept. But you gotta trick out your functional prototype.

Yeeeeah... Doc was sure obsessed with the details. Extra work to put in AM/PM lights.

The "future" is still waiting for that one little piece of "space magic." - - - Updated - - - Tangent 2015 where KSC has a casino.

We're all traveling in time, all the time.

I've been wearing my holographic ballcap a lot this year

It's not the 21st by Hill Valley time yet.

Considering who wrote it, I could easily see this as being the intended result, even with the film as it is. Everything after the black hole is actually his perception of Heaven (life in space, like he always wanted), and he doesn't realize it.

Ooh... I think I just found a new group that meshes well with my "Nightwish" obsession. Thanks!

"Eat recycled food. It's good for the environment. OK for you." I don't see why everyone is wigging out about station resupplies though. Wouldn't the advanced stages of life support be self-sustaining? Y'know... space gardens?

Sorry, but no. It isn't that we can't. It's that our sense of what civilization is so messed up that nobody wants to pay for it. We have the capacity to get beyond the moon. We've had it for a LONG time. We're just so stuck on outdated economic concepts that we're stunting our growth as a species. And with TIME, our capacity will only improve. R&D... there's some time-based mechanics for you. The reason Kerbals do it and we haven't, has nothing to do with technological capabilities, and everything to do with a drastically different sense of values. Though given their rate of failure, they also take it a BIT too far...

Time will tell about the difference in performance (though I presume, for a wargame, it must be pretty fast). But going purely on graphics, Space Engine can't hold a candle to Infinity. The level of detail on the planets is nowhere near that good.

Yeah, though a lot of that seems dependent upon what era of film/TV you're talking about. Respect for the mass of a ship on the part of special effects teams seems to have had a steady decline for quite a while. Generally though, impulse is traditional acceleration. Warp is more or less instantaneous. I think the only reason for not accelerating from sub-light to warp-whatever instantaneously, is the risk of tearing the ship apart.

Really if you think about it, there isn't much use for human ingenuity anymore. As individuals, our critical thinking is stunted. The only people who get much out of using their brains are thinktanks in the upper echelons of the business world, and a handful of politicians. The rest of us are just slaves who do what we're told. Sure, we can still use our minds for hobbies, and we can keep learning. But the equivalent of that in the physical is going to a gym and being a hamster on a wheel. Exercise for the sake of itself. For most of us, there is very little stimulation or reward for using our brains. Every once in a while an inventor gets lucky, but usually they just end up getting nowhere while some rich guy a few decades later gets the same idea but actually has the resources to make the dream a reality. "A mind is a terrible thing to waste. Don't deprive employers of the chance to waste your brain by wasting it before you're out of school."

"Let's cut him into little pieces and see what color his organs are!"

That all depends. You could do that with ion drives, but you wouldn't want to use it to land. Max speed and max power are entirely different things. A street racer is as fast as all heck, but you couldn't use it as a towing vehicle and expect good results.

Ironic, isn't it? If you were able to describe what the internet is, to any famous philosopher in terms they could understand, they'd probably think it would usher in a golden age of understanding and knowledge. Instead, the opposite is happening.

Are you talking about this scene? It was in the movie, "Generations," not the TNG television series. And it was ONLY the saucer section that landed after jettisoning everything else. The ship wasn't recoverable after this. Would it be possible? The shape of the saucer doesn't look sufficient enough to generate lift, but then, neither was the space shuttle, really. A more apt description comes from Toy Story. "That's not flying, it's falling with style." A lot of this also depends on the density of the atmosphere.

My phone has tactile buttons. Yep, I can send text messages without even looking at it, while everyone else is risking death when doing ANYTHING while operating one. Still don't want a smart phone. As much as I love computers, I despise the idea of being tempted to check my mail when I'm not in front of a workstation.

Just imagine what electricity would be like if it was invented today, with modern corporate thinking. We'd all be pulling our hair out to try and find devices with outlets to fit our houses. And the use of adapters to simplify things would be a form of piracy worthy of prison time.

Don't get me started. Maybe not phone related, but definitely related to the "not-serviceable except by a certified technician" era of devices. Difference between Apple and PC users. When Apple users wanted a computer in a different color, they bought an iMac in a different color. When IBM-compatible users wanted a computer in a different color, they bought a can of spray paint. It reminds me way too much of the space pen (even though the story "the Russians just used a pencil" behind it was a hoax). The space pen would certainly have been the Apple product.