78stonewobble

I could easily imagine that reusability would become a liability if smallish budgets only allow for few and rare launches (ie. around 4 launches total with 6 months to a year between). It can make sense if there's plans to launch often over a longer period. I haven't voted because I haven't seen how either performs and whether any of the guesstimates hold up.

All of that would be awesome... If it works as advertised and that I want to see before I believe it.

Couldn't we, theoretically, just design some electronics that can work at venusian temperatures and higher?

On monday? I hate teasers... -..-

Or wind or solar company... Or greenpeace...

Hmm well I found another forums discussing it: http://www.rocketryforum.com/archive/index.php/t-16927.html To quote from one of the posts: EDIT: Does sound like alot of work though and maybe not entirely relevant to the OP's question, but it just popped up.

Wasn't there someone making solid rocket fuel out of used tires too?

Well KSP taught me it should have lots of struts. The mass effect series taught me that the reason to go to space is to have physical relationships with aliens, so that rules out uploading ourselves to computers. Beyond that I'd say something fusion powered, simply because I can't quite see the alternatives working. Matter/antimatter, blackholes, wormholes, stargates, warpdrive and whatever... They would be nice offcourse, but I just don't see them working.

All that good and decent stuff... After I've irradiated that neighbour that for months now have been trying to learn to play the guitar, sometimes for hours on end, and haven't.

Well I never claimed it would be cheap and space mining is probably a requirement for any serious usage of spaceborne habitability on this level. Developing space mining and production would be another highly practical development. However, the alternative to spending time, energy, money and lives on this is... in the long run... extinction.

I'd say that we could atleast get "started" on the generation ships, by building one or more o'neill cylinders or something similar. I would think that alot of the technologies developed for that would be transferable.

Well it's still an interesting "technological" limit for space travel, especially if we wanted to go with the "only send embryos" route (raised by robots at destination).

Yeah... and anything mechanically advanced could probably weigh as much as proper shielding would anyway. Still, if it is a manned ship, we might come to the conclusion that we would not be able to trust conventional computer to endure everything and we might send along some kind of mechanical helping device as a sort of backup. Even if it's just a glorified calculator. Just like even in this day and age of GPS, sailors, soldiers, pilots and so on are still trained in alternative ways of navigation, in the event of emergency.

Personally and subjectively. I have no problem with animal testing (or voluntary human* testing for that matter) if it advances our scientific knowledge or is necessary to guarantee the safety of "stuff" in our every day life. On the other hand I find it rather ridiculous the amount of animal testing that goes into something as silly as beauty products, but I'd rather that people voted with they're wallets there and simply stopped spending that much money on it. * I'll even go as far as saying that any animal/alien/plant/AI that displays a human level selfconsciousness, must be willing participants in any experiments that they go through. PS: I find it silly to run morally amok on these issues since none of us would be here if it weren't for hundreds of thousands of years of killing other humanoids, lesser animals and billions of years of animals killing eachother. Heck, doesn't even chimpanzees trade meat for ***? PPS: All these principles are equally applicable to the world of kerbal.

That's the one. I just wouldn't exactly call it "… the unmistakable imprint of another universe beyond the edge of our own."

Afaik. it's eksponential?

I think there was atleast 1 scientist who interpreted certain evidence in the microwave background as evidence for interaction with another "universe", but I think it was largely ignored. I seem to remember it as being as a rather sought interpretation of the data.

Ah, thank you for the link. It's a very far gap from ... might develop cataracts 30 years later to... you cannot fly through the van allen belts without dying tho. *lol*

A little curious about the Apollo astronauts displaying symptoms of radiation poisoning? Do you have any more information on this?

Haha... Thank you for posting that one. I loved how... down to earth (no pun intended) he was at explaining and with a good sense of humour too.

In this thread. http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/40866-When-Gimbal-Lock-Is-A-Bad-Thing/page6 We could go for a mechanical computer.

As far as I understand it the cosmic microwave backgrounds differences and similarities are explaines as microscopic effects "blown" up via the process of inflation. I have no idea how it would look if that process had taken place elsewhere in the "universe" and the big bangs we're more like ... pfft... matter creation events with or without inflation. Being somewhat oxygen deprived right now... If these lesser big bangs occurred at random in the universe and sufficiently close, then we wouldn't observe the redshifts associated with universal expansion. Matter would be flying left and right and together. So presumably they would have to happen so far away that they couldn't affect us or be observed anyway?

Well obviously I won't be around to see if it worked. Yeah it is... I guess the assumption is that it will be easier to "reinvent" a microscope than it will be to "reinvent" a computer around whatever dataformat they could have picked. Just look at nasa's problems finding an actual machine to read tapes from the 60's.

In regards to one. Wouldn't the camerahousing itself provide adequate protection against most radiation and particles, since most are of relatively low energy?

On the other hand I can't really blame the public for not exactly trusting the authorities to err on the side of caution in allowing "stuff". http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Registration,_Evaluation,_Authorisation_and_Restriction_of_Chemicals To quote from the rationale for this: That number had apparently risen to 143.000 chemicals in use in the EU. Personally I'm alot more worried about the effects of some of these chemicals than I am about most electromagnetic radiation. Except UV rays, but I suspect my indoorsy geekyness protects adequately from that and I don't live in a basement so count out radon. None of that really compaires to the risk I'm volunteering for via smoking though...