-Velocity-

You don't understand why I put quotation marks around "evil communists". It is because I am stating someone else's opinion, one which I am criticizing.

1) Overpopulation- almost every other problem we are facing would only be 1/7th as bad if there were only 1/7th as many of us. There is no real plan to address overpopulation- only "evil communists" advocate placing a limit to how many children you can have. 2) Apathy/Laziness/Stupidity- go hand-in-hand with each other to make things worse. People don't care if the planet is !@#$ed up in 500 years because they "won't be alive then". They think it's funny that I advocate space travel to spread humans out so that they are harder to wipe out. 3) Certain theistic religious ideologies/attitudes. Religion can be a positive force, but it can also be a HIGHLY destructive force in the modern world, and it might just be the last straw that does our civilization in. Theistic ideologies place an intangible, invisible spiritual world at a higher priority than the actual physical world, and that's where the danger stems from. After all, consider what theistic religions can encourage people to believe- -What does the survival of humanity matter compared to the glory of God? -Why should we try to save the planet, when whatever happens will just be God's will anyway? Besides, as told in Revelations, the end of the world is coming, and we should be welcoming it. -Birth control is a sin, so let's just keep popping out baby after baby after baby... after all, if overpopulation was something to worry about, then God would have written about it in this 1400/2000/3000 year-old book. -I don't like science. Why? Because scientists try to tell me the Bible is wrong. So I don't trust scientists, and don't believe them when they tell us things. Those guys are all going to Hell anyway. -The internet is a bad thing, as everyone is learning to speak the same language (English). Everyone being able to communicate with each other, the world becoming a more inclusive and closely-knit community, that's a bad thing. Look what God did to the Tower of Babel. And I could go on and on and on. I am NOT making these up. All of these ideas I have actually heard people express! Now, don't get me wrong, religion can be, and frequently is, a force for good. I've seen it draw people together, comfort them in times of sorrow, turn lives away from evil and towards good, and build stronger communities. But when religion is used to excuse irresponsible and evil behavior it becomes a destructive force. We need to make sure that our religious beliefs do not prevent us from making the right choices!

Considering high school students have built actual working fusion reactors as science fair projects, and his reactor on the other hand has zero chance of working, I would say no. If you don't believe me about the former sentence, look up "fusor".

Use nuclear engines to do sub-orbital hops. My low gravity nuclear rover has 5800 m/s delta-V. Pretty much, I just use it to fly around on low gravity worlds with no atmospheres... though it is technically a rover, it spends most of its exploration time on suborbital trajectories.

I think the question is kinda silly. Everyone won the Space Race. The US and Soviet/Russian space programs have both proven invaluable, and both went a long ways to expanding our knowledge of the cosmos. The ESA is contributing large volumes of science too, and now even the Japanese, Chinese, and Indians are getting on board.

The one space station I built was at 2000 km. It was very easy to do rendezvous and docking up there, and you could go to high levels of time compression, making rendezvous less time consuming and tedious. It was also nice for topping off an interplanetary craft right before it went on its way. I never really saw the point of low Kerbin orbit stations, other than if you are using a crew/cargo launch vehicle that can't reach higher orbit. Another thing that was nice about the 2000 km space station was that it was rarely "night" there, as Kerbin was rather small at that altitude. Docking at night SUCKS.

I do a lot of visual observing, but I can't see myself ever really doing any imaging. If you're visual observing, then you're observing the actual sky with your eyeballs and a big light collector. You're observing how an object actually looks like from a much closer distance (especailly ifI you're at a 7mm exit pupil). If you're imaging, you're observing a computer screen. I can get far superior images just looking through the Hubble archive. I'd rather play KSP, honestly. I once observed from West Texas at the same site (roughly) as a guy who was doing a bunch of imaging with his Takahashi scopes and high quality CCD cameras. He had like $30000 of equipment. While I was in awe of the incredible naked-eye galactic vista above me, and using my scope to work my way through dark nebulae, brilliant star clusters, and tiny planetary nebulae in the galactic bulge, he was sitting there, 100 yards away behind a small tree, staring at his computer monitor and fiddling with motor drives and guide stars. He wasn't enjoying the night sky; hell, he wasn't even dark adapted! This experience taught me, beyond all doubt, imaging the sky is a totally different hobby than visual observing, and it's one I will never spend my time on. Don't get me wrong, it's a worthy hobby, but it's just SO different from visual observing. I see a lot of folks who get into astronomy and end up getting the wrong scope (like, a harder-to-use SCT or puny refractor rather than the simple and highly capable Dobsonian) because they think they should want to take pictures; NO you are not obligated to take any pictures at all. It's very common- newbies get into the hobby and buy some scope where half the cost is the motor driven mount so that they can "take pictures"- and then they never do, or take a couple and lose interest once they realize just how hard it is. They often end up regretting their purchase and wishing they had just bought like a 16" Dob for visual observing instead. It's an easy mistake to make- one I almost made myself about 12 years ago. Thank God I came to my senses and bought a big Dob! And you're also not recording true color. The true color of nebulae is not, in fact, red. Even if you were smack-dab in the middle of the Orion Nebula, it would still appear mostly greenish-white, with maybe just the slightest hint of a red or brown in places. This is because so much green light is produced by the hydrogen beta and oxygen-3 emission lines that it largely drowns out the ability of our eyes to see the red emission from hydrogen alpha, especially considering the human eye is much more sensitive to green than red light (this becomes even more true at low light levels). Ever see a 5 mW green laser pointer compared to a 5 mW red laser pointer? So yea, I actually consider all those beautiful images that show nebulae as red as "false color". The TRUE color is what we see through the telescope, and it's NOT red!

If the colors are exaggerated, it's not by much. I remember one time several years back, right after I got the mirror refigured (meaning, they improved the quality of the mirror) on my old 18" scope, I wanted to see how MUCH they had improved it. Normally, I wouldn't use a telescope in the backyard owing to the light pollution, but Saturn was visible and would serve as a good test of the mirror's (hopefully) improved figure. So, I set my scope up in the backyard, connected a big box fan to blow across the back of it (it helps thermally stabilize the mirror, setting up a smooth boundary layer), and then left it for three hours. I came back out with Saturn high overhead. Now, the highest power eyepiece I had was a 5mm eyepiece giving myself about 410X. In all my years observing the sky, I had never seen that not be enough magnification- normally, the image would break down well below 410X. But that night... it looked like I was looking out a porthole in a spaceship orbiting Saturn. Even at 410X, the image was razor sharp. I would have even seen the Encke Gap if I had simply had a high enough power eyepiece. Titan was a nice, well defined, orange orb, and the cloud bands and their colors were easy and obvious. Now, I can't say if I remember whether the cloud bands showed any blue, but I can tell you, the above image is at least very close to real color. I've observed Saturn many times before and since that one wonderful night, but I've never seen it anywhere near to that good again. I actually sold that 18" scope (quality telescopes have great resale value) for a bigger scope that was better at observing deep space objects, but the bigger scope has a much more temperamental mirror and support structure that keeps it from performing to its best potential most of the time. Some day, I gotta get it fixed... but I'm not much of a planetary observer anyway, I spend 99% of the time observing galaxies and nebulae. Anyway, the experience prompted me into buying a relatively cheap ($60), 3.5mm planetary eyepiece that has not been used at all yet. But someday, hopefully, its time will come... Anyway, NASA seems to have gotten a bit better about not color exaggerating photos- or at least, they are pretty good now about releasing "real color" images that are in fact, very close to real color.

Yea, I'd like to know this too. Actually come to think of it, even if it DID collapse into a mini black hole, the time dilation caused by moving that fast would be so extreme that the black hole would probably NOT evaporate very quickly at all.

WestAir, I might also note that you're trying to take a QM approach to Relativity (Plank Length is a QM concept), and as we know, the two do not coexist peacefully yet. So it may be that no one truly knows the answer anyway. Anyway, I figured out a way to do the calculation, and it turns out, if my numbers are right the particle would have an energy of something like 3x10^20 J. That is over 1500 times the energy of the largest hydrogen bomb ever tested. It's equivalent to 3600 kg of mass. I have to wonder whether that is enough mass, packed into the size of a proton, for the particle to collapse into a mini black hole. If so, would it? From the frame of reference of the particle, its mass doesn't increase, or does it? From our frame of reference, it should, and it might collapse under its own gravity. I'm not sure how this is resolved, I've never thought about the mass increase at relativistic velocities much. If it did collapse, it would rapidly dissolve in a burst of Hawking radiation. Finally, note that your hypothetical particle is over 6x10^18 times more energetic than the most energetic cosmic ray EVER detected. Such a thing does not exist in this universe, you can be sure of that. Edit: Just to make sure we're on the same page, this is the speed I assumed for the proton: One plank length behind a photon after the photon and proton had traveled 15 billion light years. That's about one part in about 10^61 less than the speed of light. I had a hard time doing the calculation till I wrote it out and realized that (1 - (1-10^-61)^2)^0.5 could be simplified to (2*10^-61)^0.5.

It takes an infinite amount of energy to accelerate a particle with non-zero rest mass up to the speed of light. What you are talking about would require such a tremendous expenditure of energy into a single particle that I assure you, no such particle exists in the universe. It would probably have the energy of like a, AT LEAST a large hydrogen bomb, maybe something closer to a supernova, packed into a single particle. There is just no way, natural or otherwise, to focus that kind of energy into a single particle. I tried to calculate the amount of energy involved, but my computer is simply not capable of calculating down to that many decimal places. Maybe MATLAB could, but I doubt it.

In my experience, the 5m Nova Punch tanks are useless. Nothing sticks to them. I just use a bunch of the 3.75 KW Rocketry tanks instead. You can make a nice asparagus rocket out of them, since stuff attached to the sides of them doesn't just randomly fall off like with the NovaPunch 5m tanks.

I didn't really rush to the Mun. I did manned flybys of Eve, Duna, and Jool before I actually sent my first lander down on the Mun. So it was pretty uneventful- I landed my rocket rover/lander, drove it to a Mun arch, then took off and flew back to the High Kerbin space station, transferred the Kerbal to a return vehicle that was waiting there, and landed him back on Kerbin. So I wasn't really a noob anymore when I began my manned landings program, and hence, I didn't really have any issues.

Agreed. Imagine how much cooler Jool would be if it had shadow transits.

Titan is a fascinating environment, but I think that most astrobiologists view the possibility of non-water-based life on Titan to be very low, at least compared to the possibility of water-based life on Mars, Europa, or Enceladus. You not only have to have life there, it has to be NOT BASED ON WATER, and biologists tell us that by far, water is the best molecule to serve as a solvent for life. Still, life or no, Titan is a FASCINATING body, and I'd love to see another mission head there... but not before we send another mission to Europa, however.

Yes, but the oxygen atmosphere is EXTREMELY thin, and is produced by ultraviolet light/radiation breaking down ice on the surface into oxygen and hydrogen. The hydrogen escapes very quickly, but the oxygen sticks around for a little longer time period before it escapes.

Europa. You DON'T necessarily have to drill or melt your way down to the ocean. The surface is just a few (dozen?) million years old, seeing as there are very few impact craters, so it stands to reason that the surface ice was very likely ocean water sometime in the not-too-distant past. Just collect some ice samples from near a crack where ocean water might have welled up fairly recently, return it to Earth, and see if there are any organisms frozen in it. Did any of you guys catch that paper a year or two ago that suggested that Europa's oceans could even be oxygenated? Supposedly, cosmic rays and radiation from around Jupiter could break down ice into oxygen and hydrogen, which then could be absorbed into the ocean when the ice gets subducted back into the ocean layer.

This is the what has been my desktop background for about the past year

It's not hard to picture what Jupiter looks like inside. Maybe add a slight bluish tinge to that once you start nearing the core. Must have been a pretty boring video.

I did an Apollo-style lunar mission, with the lander stored inside the rocket and behind the "command" module, and with the command module's back half hidden behind a fairing, using KW rocketry. I put the lander inside a 3.75m decoupler (the KW decouplers have a long, hollow cylindrical portion forward of the actual decoupler). On top of the lander, attached to the docking port, I placed a KW rocketry 3.75m - 2.5m decoupler. That is what the front half of the command module stuck out of. To assemble the munar-bound spacecraft, I set up some action groups (I never use staging, actually, always action groups, it's better for me). Anyway, action group 5 decoupled the docking port on the top of the lander that was attached to the 3.75m-2.5m decoupler. This freed the command module from the top of the rocket. I would thrust forward with RCS, then turn 180 degrees to face the rocket. Next, I use action group 6 to decouple the 3.75m-2.5m decoupler from the back of the command module, then apply RCS thrust back towards the rocket again. The decoupler would slowly drift off and away, the command module now fully free. Finally, I would approach with and dock with the exposed docking port of the lander. Once I was docked with the lander, I would activate the 3.75m decoupler with action group 7, separating the rocket from the lander. I apply reverse RCS thrust, and slowly draw the lander out of the rocket. Anyway, the system works real well, it's tough to get good structural stability. I ended up having to put some I-beams along the sides of the rocket to keep the thing from twisting too much. It still looks awesomely Apollo like, especially since I also made an escape tower out of one of the structural trusses, a nose cone, and eight of the KW rocketry sepatrons.

From what I remember about helium flashes though, I thought I remember reading somewhere that the helium flashes can help contribute to the loss of the outer layers of the red giant and ultimately the formation of a planetary nebula? Honestly, I'm not sure, the end stages of intermediate mass stars are very complex and I have a hard time getting it all straight in my head. The end of supermassive stars are so much easier to understand, in comparison.

No! The heat initially comes from compressing the gas down to extremely high pressures and densities (Charle's Law), and gravitational accretion. Without the heat, the fusion would never start up when it does, and probably not happen in the manner we are familiar with (maybe, the star would just explode when it reached a critical density and the first fusion reactions started, creating heat for more fusion reactions, creating yet more fusion reactions from the heat, etc, in a runaway reaction that would destroy the star). The heat in the interior of a protostar is VERY critical to getting the first fusion reactions going.

You apparently have no idea of the intense pressures and temperatures that Jupiter's interior has. The metallic hydrogen layer is apparently under hundreds of gigapascals of pressure. 101.3 kPa is atmospheric pressure; so if the metallic hydrogen layer is under 300 GPa of pressure, that's around 3 MILLION atmospheres, or 3,000 times the pressure at the bottom of the Mariana Trench. Think about the incredible pressure vessels we have to build to survive at the bottom of the Mariana trench... then multiply that pressure by 3000. Oh and I'm sure, that deep down into Jupiter, the temperature is already up to a few thousand degrees K. Ah! Here we go. I underestimated the temperature. From Wikipedia: So, in the sake of sanity, let's NOT simulate an ocean on Jool.

As an interesting aside, did you guys know that, viewed from a certain perspective, there really isn't such a thing as magnetism? It turns out you can derive all of Maxwell's equations just using Special Relativity (specifically, Lorentz length contraction) and Coulomb's Law. Wikipedia actually has a decent article on it now, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relativistic_electromagnetism, but there are a lot better websites out there that explain it better, with animations and that kind of stuff. So really, magnetism is just an emergent phenomenon resulting from electric fields and the universe making sure that all frames of reference can agree that the same events are taking place in a reality where causality travels at the speed of light.

"Static" magnetic or electric fields are electromagnetic waves with a frequency of **nearly** 0 Hz (exactly 0 Hz in the case of the true static field), so of course they propagate at the speed of light. Of course, there is no such thing as truly static electric or magnetic fields, you have to create the field or put it in place, which adds non-zero frequency content. Something that is truly static is impossible, as the universe is finite in age. When you "cut the power" to a static field, i.e., remove it, you will create a lot of high frequency content too- a true step function actually has infinitely high frequency content. That wouldn't destroy the gravitational field instantaneously. Instead, it would turn into an incredible amount of energy that would propagate outward at about the speed of light, probably (since it would probably be mostly gamma rays). But energy has mass, and thus gravity too, since Einstein showed us that energy and mass were one and the same (rest mass is just a very special form of super-dense energy). As an example, a fully charged, 150 AH, 12 V car battery should weigh like 72 ng more than an empty one (this tiny difference in mass will probably be swamped by the fact that car batteries are usually not sealed very well though). If you could create a medium that responded to gravitational waves by shifting large, dense masses, maybe, but I'm not sure. Light slows down in many mediums because the electric charges in the medium respond and change their motion in response to the electric and magnetic fields of the light. So maybe the same kind of thing could be done for gravitation, but I'm not sure.