p1t1o

Heh. A google search throws up a fair amount of new research on this topic over the last few years. Nothing conclusive mind, but plenty of hypotheses. In a nutshell, the scale is too small, and the timescales too short, for it to possibly affect brain function. BUT, if "conciousness" or "the mind" have properties not tied directly to physicality, then it may be plausible for it to play a part. As far as I know, the physicality of "consciousness", the "mind" or "soul" if you like, are extremely poorly understood, so theres room for discussion. In this case though, there are plenty of far less esoteric explanations for this kind of deja-vu to have to fall back on spooky-action-at-a-distance.

First things that came to my mind too, and theres less dangerous ways of shedding a little mass. In fact it seems unwise to be conducting demolitions near your fragile spacecraft in deep space at all, but that might actually be more accurate (cowboy operation, cutting corners, amateur hour etc.)

Im not sure if its bad sci-fi, but I was wondering about something in The Expanse. Spoilers, but very mild. There is a sequence with a small asteroid mining tug. It captures a rock (I dunno, about 20-50m across?) in a big net. Obviously they are going to tow it somewhere, and they do. But first, after having wrapped it in a net, they blow it up into fragments, within the net. Then they commence towing. What up with the blowing up? Seems unnecessary?

What kind of age group is it intended for? Is it more funny-scary or does it contain genuinely well-done horror?

A great deal of western culture is derived from ancient Rome - in fact all cultures are amalgams of various things - but how often do you talk about it? It may not be that the culture of Nostromo's world is steeped in eastern philosophy, just that eastern culture influenced their general day-to-day environment, there's no reason to assume that todays powerblocs will be the same in several centuries, perhaps in the Alien universe, India is the most powerful country in the world. For example, the question mark is derived from the Latin word "qvaestio" but we dont routinely chat about how Rome (or the ancient Greeks, or Christian/Muslim/Jewish faiths/histories etc.) have affected our culture. (Dont be all "but we're talking about it now!", you could easily go a couple of days or even a whole space voyage without it coming up ) On the other hand, maybe its nothing to do with that. Perhaps the Nostromo is just manufactured in/by India. Like a group of Americans that bought a Russian submarine, they wouldnt replace the buttons, they'd just learn what they meant.

What IS FNAF and why was it getting so much hype a little while ago? For a bit it was all over the net.

Interesting, everyday is a school day: The first word Om is a sacred syllable found in Indian religions. The word Mani means "jewel" or "bead",Padme is the "lotus flower" (the Buddhist sacred flower), and Hum represents the spirit of enlightenment. Om mani padme hum - Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Om_mani_padme_hum

@kerbiloid Cool spot. "Yoni" and "Lingha" can be considered similar to how we might use "male" and "famale" when describing things like connectors, it could be related to docking or something industrial like that.

Lets say you put a slab of metal in space, floating a long way from anything. Lets add electrons to it to give it a charge. Lets keep adding them until they start spraying off into space and let it settle to a constant charge. Lets call it one electrode of a capacitor. Lets have a similar slab from which we have extracted some maximum amount of electrons, giving it a positive charge. We can discharge the capacitor by bringing the two slabs quickly into the vicinity of each other, at some distance the charge will arc across space. Is this a hypothetically maximum-performance capacitor?

When I was a kid, we had one of these: **edit** FunFactTM: When I was a toddler I was playing with it and dialing randomly, once someone answer and it scared the ever-living blinking bejeeezes out of my tiny self. I didnt play with it again!

Think about this: lets say there IS a long-range quantum entanglement-powered connection between peoples thoughts that triggers thoughts and memories. Now watch whilst everybody on the planet goes insane at the same time within a span of several days.

That was kind of a positive factor for me, it made him a more-than-one dimensional character. He wasnt a psychopath until he was driven to it. I cant say I wouldnt have done the same thing after several years on my own in deep space. But my main memory was hearing of lots of very bad reviews of the movie, but then actually quite enjoying it. Take all reviews, for anything, with a pinch of salt, that was my takeaway.

Another film I actually enjoyed. You just have to treat movies like these as "fantasy" rather than "sci-fi". Same genre as Lord of the Rings or TRON. My favorite inaccuracy though was when the gravity turns off, what makes all the water leave the pool in the first place?

Is this going to be like a "gritty reboot" a-la batman begins? I can see that happening. Im guessing they're just gonna handwave away FTL though, I mean, cos they'd have to. or TWIST - the "Empire" spans only a single solar system. The more I think about it, the more I like the idea, even if it might start a literal civil war in some places.

You google one thing and suddenly all the ads on every site are advertising electron beam welding services... Does anyone need any electron welding because I can now recommend several places.

God that rocket is awesome, I just wish I could stand Elon.

See my response to YNM where I address that exact point.

I'd call that "plausible" rather than "practical". Its plausible that we could build an orbital colony now, but the time, expense, difficulty and danger make it impractical. Its just semantics though, either way the point stands.

Ever? Sure. It is a virtual certainty. At the very least for tourism. Practical? Well, not now, no. But "ever"? Sure at some point it will become trivially easy, at least relative to today. But in questions with such open-ended timescales, it becomes more of a question of politics (who has the right to build what where?), anthropology (will we still want to do it?) and future history (how long will the human civilisation last?) rather than science, technology or even practicality. I mean is the Burj Khalifa "practical"? Not really, by a long shot, but there were still tons of reasons to build it. And many other very practical projects have not been built for various other reasons.

If it is changing volume at all it is not due to gas gain/loss, it will be to do with temperature. Is it not a constant shrinking though, it is way more complex than that. For one, the global average temperatures are rising, which one would assume causes expansion, but weather patterns are being affected over oceans, which affects the amount of evaporation, affecting various atmospheric cycles. And the different layers of the atmosphere are not all affected in the same way, or even by the same cycles. The link between global average temperatures and atmospheric thickness is not a trivial one. To complicate matters further, apparently the sun, and its cycles, has a strong affect on atmospheric thickness as well. I dont think the question "how much has it shrank since year X" is the right question to ask, perhaps "How much has the variability of the atmosphere changed since year X". Its still not a simple question, but apparently the changes in 2008-9 were the largest since 1967, so theres a datapoint for you

If you google image search for Salyut fuel tanks, there are several similar pics referred to as Salyut helium tanks. There are parts of the world were these things come down fairly often. I think though that it is a common enough item that being so specific ("salyut 7" or even anything "salyut") is probably not possible, you cant even really narrow it down to Russian equipment unless you have more information on it. It seems fairly safe to say that its some tankage from space though, damage seems consistent with other recovered examples, and also not-consistent with other common earth-bound damage. Would be a good idea to cross reference its supposed date and location of recovery with information about what orbital tracks passed overhead at the time. If you really wanted to get proof that it is an object from space, you could have it (or part of it) examined microscopically for impact craters, or have its metal spectrascopically analysed for alloy composition (which it might be possible to match up to documentation) Here is an article about a similar item being examined by the London Natural History Museum (I dont know why its not at the Science Museum, which is next door...) http://fernlea.tripod.com/tank.html

lol I really should have seperated those two points, I didnt mean to suggest a causal link XD

Had to remind myself by having a gander at the wiki, but Niven's Ringworld had an area of approx 3million Earths. Are you going by Earth's dry-land area or total surface area?

Did you get "Lalande" from the Night's Dawn trilogy by any chance? Yup, Rimworlds have stupendous surface areas.

Rick & Morty comes to mind: "Wait for the ramp, Morty. They love the slow ramp, it really gets their [ahem] hard." Though they send up good sci-fi as often as the rest XD