78stonewobble

Also I don't think it's about inspiring joe the plumber, but possibly the next einstein.

Well if Earth had allways been a gas giant moon, life would probably just have evolved to cope with the radiation. Hmmm, does anyone know of a similar visual representation... of the look of the milkyway from ie. one of the magellanic clouds?

Hmm, while I was wrong in my post above about exercise helping bones so far, I don't believe it has been established, without a doubt, that it cannot be solved completely, somehow.

No, it could actually help on the bone density and musle atrophy... But true it would be nothing more than ie. working out with rubberbands... And if you can do the same with being strapped to an exercise bike or something ... really no reason to carry expensive magnets into space.

Hmm and how many tethers would it require to microwave transmit any significant amount of power back home or elsewhere where it's needed? And wouldn't it then... possibly be better to build some kind of geothermal plants on Io?

Even if the levels are unsafe for humans, you could still live most of the time under x meters of rock and still take advantage of a functioning outside enviroment for food, oxygen production and so on.

Possibly combine with throwing suitable comets at the planet, just to fill er up?

Well, if you guys didn't have to spend so much on defence, there would be money for more of an effort. Tho I don't really foresee that becoming possible, but it would be nice. Alternatively It would be nice to see increased working together across the pond. In principle I agree, that you can do alot with robotics, but the fact of the matter is that trained biologists and geologists on the ground, even in space suits, could more vigorously survey an interesting area. And the cost of robotics increases alot if you find something that you want to check out in "detail" and possibly even bring samples back from. I say... Send robotic equipment for large scale surveying and finding interesting areas, then follow up with manned landings in the "must check" areas, so we can then be sure we get the right samples back. IF offcourse the economy and politics allow for it... As you also say, that is no rush. I do agree with the other poster that long term, the future of humanity must include living and working in space and on other planets, but again no rush, as far as we know that is. So not a high priority, but it should be a priority, to slowly work on the science and knowledge needed for that to happen. Ie. testing out the damn centrifuge at some point. Agree with the nasa and spacex thing.

Well according to wikipedia, the fuel efficiency of the Saturn V 1st stage (with rest of rocket) was just under 5 inches per US gallon or just under 4 cm per liter.

Man, those are some dorky glasses... Wall covering screens and highly improved kinect like functionality is fine enough for me. ... In regards to windows. Well, windows 7 was quite decently received and seemed like a decent upgrade from xp for most in my family and win8 doesn't have any features we couldn't live without. PS: I loathe new for the sake of new.

One thing is certain. If there ever is a breakdown like that... it should be a requirement by law for every able bodied person to do the chicken dance. Finally with less of a facebook/youtube fear.

I think most industrialised countries could do it, if they threw enough money at it, but it would become a silly exercise at some point. Kinda like most industrialised countries could develop nuclear power or heck... a nuclear bomb if they wanted to.

My point was that it was sounding like we were lawnmowing them down by the dozens... on purpose... with lawnmowers. Sure, we can do something about habitat encroachment and possibly stop eating some of the species, but climate change is a slow change (relative to us), no matter what we do and dependent on how much of climate change is actually humanity's fault and not just naturally occurring. Heck, even if we all killed ourselves tomorrow, it would take x decades, if not hundreds of years, for the damage to be undone.

700 species is 0,058 percent of the 1.2 mio. registered species, with certain estimates being 8.7 mio. species in total (others say 10-14 mio, yet others 3-100 mio). Previous extinction events are between 60 to 96 percent of all species going extinct.

Only very advanced and dedicated alien civilisations within a miniscule area of the milkyway could possibly have picked us up and if they're limited to FTL a message could be on it's way, it just haven't arrived yet. Unlikely... The universe and galaxies had some maturing to do before life became possible. First, because the components necessary for life had to be produced and spread in decent enough ratios and secondly because active galactic nuclei seems more prolific in the early universe and life probably can't develop or survive that. My personal and uneducated guestimation? Life is quite rare. Not unique to our planet, but just quite rare... I'd say between 1.000 to 10.000 places in our galaxy. Intelligent life is even more rare, because it needs the right conditions for life even longer and thus over time faces bigger threats. At most 10-50 in the galaxy. FTL is probably not possible ( sadly and makes this a boringverse ), which would make civilisations very isolated. Interstellar travel is so prohibitively expensive that organic species probably never do that too much. They might... if ambitious, establish a few backups here and there, but it will be slow and be massive undertakings each time. Even artificial intelligences might hit a brick wall in intelligence due to lightspeed and the ability to densify information... Plus I presume they would have an easy time of limiting population growth compaired to instinct based organics.

Uhm... It might just be me, but it seems that, as far as I understand it, people are mixing up a few things. Our universe may or may not be infinite in size. At most we can put lower limits to it's size from what we can observe. The chance for me to spontaniously change into a whale with a pop, in "our universe", is so small, that for all intents and purposes, it won't ever happen, due to the laws of nature being what they are and those laws of nature seem to be the same as far as we can see. So for me to change into a whale with a pop, in this universe, I'd have to move to an area where the laws of nature, would make that likely. There is a very real chance, that the laws of nature are the same all over this universe, even if it's "infinite" in size, it will just be an infinite amount of the same. However, there might also be other universes, indeed an infinite amount of them, where the laws of nature are different and human whale transmutation are commonplace.

Oh yeah I realise that, but what I meant, was more to make sure that the "testbed" could scale further of the way or all the way. Even if there are science and engineering kinks, to work out along the way. I just quickly looked up the lockheed martin thing and it's kinda the opposite thing they are doing. Keeping the testbed small to work out kinks. However then they might run into scaling issues for the last demonstration. Like polywell's and NIF. With ITER, "we" are allready spending billions to get further in the way of scaling, but still not the entire way.

Sorry, for cutting your post down, but I just wanted to comment on this part. To be fair Polywell and the NIF, has also failed to produce enough power. As far as I can see, in the case of atleast Polywell's and Tokamaks, the problem seems to be or is claimed to be a matter of scaling the devices up. ITER is supposed to do that, though I question the wisdom of not going straight to DEMO and not testing out a large size Polywell.

It might not fit, but I like it... *lol* ...

There is no inherent reason that a government project should be more expensive than a private enterprise. All things being equal it should to could be less expensive considering it doesn't have to turn a profit. That a government project is usually more expensive is due to, as you mention, shortsighted local political "appeasement", inefficient management including salary negotiation and what not, but I digress... This is off topic.

While I do hope SpaceX will have success, I don't think they will be or can be a revolution of the launch industry. The spaceshuttle showed us that reuseability isn't necessarily a blessing and can actually be a hindrance to the mass launchings necessary to brings costs down and you do need relatively high launch rates to reap real benefits of mass production. PS: Hmm for fun, I just tried calculating how much it would have cost to launch all the shuttle programmes payloads on Saturn V's... 25,7 billion $ vs. the total spaceshuttle programme cost of 209 billion $. Can that be right, 12 percent of the shuttle costs? EDIT: I don't think the saturn V numbers include research and development, which would probably raise the Saturn V numbers quite a bit... Still my guestimate would be that the Saturn V could have put the same payload in orbit as the shuttle, but at probably half the price or under.

Preumably possible, how large? I know space elevators is beyond our materials science, but how about O'Neill type spacestations?

True... I personally think people tend to underestimate the chemical rocket. I do believe that we can marginally improve ie. a saturn 5 design for use today through possibly lighter materials, lighter welds, possibly simplifying certain parts due to us being able to make them better and certainly lighter electronics and automation. Tho it might be slight improvements overall. But yes, mass production. We have never had a large og multiple large factories, just dedicated to spitting out rockets... (apart from possibly ICBM's). The global car industry has a revenue of what... like 600 billion dollars a year? Nasa, at the most had 43,5 billion. In one year... of which only some directly went to production. I still say, that the way to go, is to spend money, til we have scheduled regular heavy launches, atleast 5+ a year, for 20-50 years.

Elon Musk mancrushes?

Exploding stars in binaries can give the surviving member quite the kick, but isn't that precipitated on the exploding star seizing to exist?