78stonewobble

This theory is about the interacting solar winds for massive stars and while it may be related to, it's not necessarily the cause of mass loss in massive stars or supernova impostor events.

Nice find and I must admit that the Eta Carina and it's surroundings (also further) is very interesting to me too. Here's a link to a few nice pictures if anyeones interested: http://thethoughtstash.wordpress.com/2012/06/12/space-scenery-carina-nebula/

Ah, thank you for the reply. How about reentries from some of the imagined much longer missions, that would presumably take the capsule even further away?

They added the music to cover that up. Uhm, out of curiosity and sorry if this have been mentioned elsewhere, does the Orion capsule skip a little out of the atmosphere, before diving in again? Like Apollo?

Haven't they also found ... simple ... organic molecules in nebula and / or newly forming starsystems? Comet life might be impossible, but I wouldn't completely rule it out.

Well, even IF miniaturization allows for all current satellite types to be launched by a laser launch system (an impossibility btw.) it would eat up what? 30 launches a year? For a complex designed to launch thousands of satellites / payloads a year. That system would be an even bigger waste than the ares or SLS, could possibly be, especially considering that you would still have to have an assortment of other rockets, for payloads too big for the laser launch system. Rockets are fine for now imho. and they will be fine enough for initial expansion into space, if mass produced on a scale necessary for expansion into space.

To the middle part: Could the disproval of hawking radiation then lend credence to the possibility of black holes leading to daughter universes?

True, it looks exactly like my KSP, uhm from when I began playing... It never happens now... Ahem *cough* ... So what really went wrong with this one? o.O The engines gimbal like crazy? EDIT: Nvm. was in the youtube video. "The preliminary report of the investigation indicated that three of the first stage angular velocity sensors, responsible for yaw control, were installed in an incorrect orientation. As the error affected the redundant sensors as well as the primary ones, the rocket was left with no yaw control, which resulted in the failure. Telemetry data also indicated that a pad umbilical had detached prematurely, suggesting that the Proton may have launched several tenths of a second early, before the engines reached full thrust." Not that different from installing the probebody upside down... It's a nigh direct translation into ksp right?

Haha, nah I don't have glory aspirations... Highly prefer asphyxiation to incineration... Well, for cause of death... Afterwards it doesn't really matter

Well there's a very fine line between awesome and darwin award.

Because if you're gonna spend money on crazy people, medicine and therapy is the most relevant use of money.

I must admit, that I'm getting a wee bit hyped as well. Have been looking up new horizons periodically over the years. PS: Yes, I know it's beyond silly, but I'm crossing my fingers for Charon to be a mass relay. More seriously... I've been curious on how similar or dissimilar it's gonna be to Triton and other icy moons, since I saw the voyager pictures of those.

Pft... thats just speciest and generalizing... Not sure we'd want to hang with them then. *lol* It sounds like that scenario of 2 people liking eachother (or disliking for that matter), but never having the nerves to tell the other one that and nothing changes for either of them. PS: It doesn't make alot of sense. We are absolutely no threat to their homeplanet with our current level of technology and even if, in the future, we develop that kind of technology, they could ... just not tell us, their homeplanets location (remote contact with no possibility of capture). And while we can be mean to eachother, we don't seem spitefull enough to search half the galaxy for someone who has never done us anything.

Not every child has access to puppies either (especially so for puppy hurting children), that should be fixed before allowing people to unneccessarily upgrade their electronic devices, but that does seem like another debate. More on topic: I think that it constitutes an unncessary risk of contaminating mars, but running the experiment with an analogue to the martian atmosphere has merit. Algae is fine for some things, but if we, in the future, want to stay for a wee bit longer, people are gonna need a bit more varied diet, also for psychological reasons. PS: It might get more support had it been lettuce genetically engineered to taste like bacon.

Well I allways wondered that if "they" can cross interstellar distances and presumably "cloak". Why can't they or won't they cloak completely and instead just drop small hints about themselves? And if small hints are ok, why not just land and have a cup of coffee, try the drive in and so on? ... But I do find Unidentified Flying Objects a pretty interesting concept, IF you cut out the huge jump to the conclusion of aliens. Secret planes are interesting and so are the possibility of rare or previously unknown physical phenomena like sprites.

That does seem a bit overly "negative" (or "positive" dependent on your view of alien life). Considering that we just about only have some decent knowledge about planets in the solar system and just about only knowledge about the existence of planets of a few relatively nearby starsystems (out of 100-400 billion stars in the milkyway alone). IMHO. we don't have enough information to conclude that life is a practical impossibility. My personal "conclusion", so far, is just that... Life is possible, as evidenced by the Earth, but whether it's relative commonplace, relatively rare, rare, exceedingly rare or just 1 random fluke (practical impossibility elsewhere) would be a guess so far.

Bodyboarding a heatshield down? Ultimate awesome?

Well for supplying the station... it could just be a dummy payload module of different weightclasses and sizes.

It's not entirely an unreasonably assumption, since it is based on the tolerances for the only life we know. That might not be the whole story tho...

Alternatively skip that and go with a comprehensive legal waiver?

Mjello, let me start out by saying that I do like career mode, trying to discern which contracts I can do and which ones are beyond me and my current capabilities, let contracts inspire me to try new things, trying to balance science with money and reputation and so on. Great stuff... but I can also foresee that I might tire of having to grind contracts or might not want that in all my games. My suggestion is, and I'm sorry if it has been allready suggested, is the ability to add the features from career mode to the science mode, without them mattering. In this way, I can have a game, where I don't have to worry about money or rep, but can still choose to try to optimise rockets with respect to money. And still have the contracts inspire me to go to X, with Y and do Z. Personally I think that would be a great intermediate choice between the science gamemode and career and could possibly help players learn the features without it being frustrating.

Seems like a good idea to me. I also missed a few, until I noticed this.

Pretty much what I wanted to say. Tho ie. 15 minute lag doesn't matter much to ie. facebook, if you discount the chat functions.

Well, I do know it's tiny on a planetary scale, but just look at pricing estimates for building ie. a highspeed train between LA and SF. People don't wanna move easily and it's hard and expensive to appropriate it. It would need to be a big empty area. In any case I tend to think nuclear is the most appropriate option in well developed industrial nations. It's us that can make that work as safely as possible and the energy density of nuclear fission makes any mining, refining, transport, handling and disposal less of a megaproject.

Well I'm no expert. 24 mio hectares is about the size of the entire United Kingdom and this is just for the electrical production. If you want the heat too, I certainly would coming from Denmark, it's about 7x times these numbers, using this method. I pulled the numbers from this and related articles (50 MW plant): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andasol_Solar_Power_Station It's in Spain, so somewhat more efficient than putting a plant in ie. the UK or Denmark. Presumably fresh water IS best, since it would be less corrosive to piping and so on, but whether it's necessary I don't know. The molten salts, are supposedly produced in the same ways as fertilizer (afaik) and if calculated that right (quite a bit ago), diverting the entire worlds fertilizer production to a project like this would get enough salts produced in 20-30 years. However that would presumably leave alot of people starving, which offcourse is another way of solving the entire problem, but if we only use 5 percent of the global production of fertilizer, it would take hundreds of years to produce enough. Again feel free to check my math, because I sure as hell isn't sure of it. Pumping water uphill does seem like a better solution, but it is highly dependent on geography and can be dangerous, since dams can and do collapse. If the geography isn't there... It becomes a mega project by itself. Yeah, the water vapor is tiny compaired to what evaporates from the ocean, but it is replacing co2 production and there, supposedly, water vapor is a much more capable greenhouse gas. So a plant like this would be adding to global warming, but whether it's alot or nothing, is beyond me, at this very early hour. The reason I picked this plant is because it was both plant AND storage (well 7.5 hours worth of storage). I'm still interested in knowing the enviromental cost of producing that many photo voltaic panels on such a scale, deploying them and maintaning them indefinately. If anyone has any ideas... While I do think a project like this could be possible, it is a mega project and there are other difficulties. Supplying the entire world from one megaproject in ie. Sahara (or perhaps 2-5 places world wide)... Would be awesome, but think of the cooperation needed and the infrastructure and how many contries would be entirely dependent on the goodwill of other countries, because they could cut the cables at any point. Think about how we need to scale it up often, to accomodate the parts of the world that want to live like we do (and who can blame them for wanting to?).