78stonewobble

Which is basically what kerbiloid calculated... But is it actually impossible to add enough atmosphere to keep surface livable for eg. thousands, tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of years? Even if actually adding so much atmoshere and/or continiously replenishing it is practically impossible.

Shpaget only suggested that on average in a population men are more likely to take risks, which afaik. is pretty well proven and can partially explain eg. that more young men kills themselves in car accidents than women. Which is not the same as saying that eg.: All men take risks, no women take risks, no individual woman can take risks, no individual man doesn't wanna take risks and everything else that could be erroneously be read into that... It just means there is a general statistical difference... a slight inclination... and there is nothing wrong with that. And as others pointed out... The current class of astronauts is only a testament to current recruiting policies. For evidence of the "inclination" of the populations on a whole you need to look at eg. applicants per X number of qualified men and women. That would actually suggest, all other things being equal, a lot of female privilege these days.

Over hundreds of millions of years to billions of years? Yes... But we could possibly settle for tens to hundreds of thousands of years of settlement. ... Even if it is practically impossible to do and/or just a silly investment of ressources as compaired to orbital habitats / mars / whatever.

Well I haven't really been keeping up on planet discoveries, so that might be the case. I was just going by the arguments against.

And what if you settled for something like a 2-3 km. earth altitude equivalent?

Or just that where the solar system formed was somewhat rare in gases, but rich in rocks? So possibly unlikely, to very unlikely, but not completely impossible?

Well, that depends on how fast an eg. 1 atmosphere... atmosphere... would escape to space and rates of replenishment.

Finally! Some action over the blanket in the milkyway.

True, but the depiction of that age is supposedly done rather well.

A little curious, considering average collision speed (whatever that is), how massive an object does it take to create a global magma surface? It seemed like... on the video, that the impactor there, Ceres sized (?) wasn't quite big enough to do that.

You do have a point that it certainly should be easier to get right these days with CGI, tho I am one of those who prefer models or actual props. Say what you will about Pearl Harbor... I love that cork scene. I get what you mean tho... I do watch alot of trek and I can barely go a quarter of an episode before saying: "No, that's not how XYZ works!"... but I still love it to bits... I guess I'm just better at ignoring it or not letting it affect my enjoyment as much. ... For supposedly decent representation, though it certainly get's some things wrong... I like Master and Commander.

To me, the question seems a bit silly... No offence OP. We can go into near infinite detail in this one: Oh people were shorter back then, you can't use tank Y as a stand in for tank X (even though there are no surviving tank X's), that ship in the background seen for 1,2 second is modern, that thing didn't happen or that thing did happen, but to a different person at another time, that unit didn't exist and so on and so on... And offcourse a very accurate movie, can make a dumb mistake whereas even a less accurate movie can get something right. Personally I'd say... if I want historical accuracy, I should watch documentaries... Movies, to varying degrees of historical accuracy, try to tell stories. ... Doesn't mean we can't discuss technicalities and details as much as we want, but I just don't think it's reason to get worked up about.

1. That is certainly true... from that perspective. 2. That depends on the range of the population. 3. Sure it is, they are also consuming ressources at a prodigious rate, to generate that kind of wealth either through production or having a gazillion employees, selling to a gazillion customers and inflict more bodily harm than most, through eg. work injuries, work related illnesses and so forth. 4. One could make the same argument for your idea to put all in NASA. 5. The US currently have an unemployment rate of around 5 percent... Sure not all of the employing 95 percent are paying much themselves in money, but they sure are paying other people's bills... through their work. There are very few, if any, in the forbes 500, whose riches entirely stems from and only from, what they themselves can do in a day.

A point tho... money isn't really the problem. The priority of the majority is... If something is important or just deemed as such, people and governments will find the money for it. The problem isn't spending other people's money, but spending other people's money on the wrong thing? Maybe instead of going to the extremes of either side... There is a middleground... Eg. doubling or tripling that 1 percent for space exploration, while keeping the other things going... to the net result of... everyone paying a little more and/or receiving a little less. ... More generally on the topic... Well, in the very long run, humanity (or our descendants) either go to space permanently or that is where the future ends for us... In the short run... There is, as far as we know, no asteroid hurtling towards us... Tho I do believe that is something we should be rather be prepared for, but apart from that, we can all agree on that we do have alot of problems at home.

The spacestation? I think that would introduce too many errors, from astronauts bumping around, drag (the ISS isn't that high), earth gravity anomalies (?), heat flexing and warping and what not...

Then you'd just be expected to save people going into the water...

I'm sorry if this has allready been suggested... but in regards to fitting 2 kerbals in a small space due to helmets, couldn't you arrange them to lie/sit opposite eachother?

I think the thrust was much much worse than an ion engine, but much better than a pure photon drive. If I remember correctly.

At one time I got a good deal on trying out a glider and while the winch up was quite fun, my stomache was glad the pilot didn't spend too much time diving steeply aiming at a seagull. He was trying to demonstrate, that if you get too close to birds, that they're rather elegant at getting out of the way. They simply fold their wings and dive out of the way... How close to zero-G that is I don't know, but it was pretty cheap... Can't remember the price right now, but certainly under a 100 $ by far. Not free, but pretty cheap...

I can't blame Elon Musk for wanting to sell the launch of 400 or 4000 satellites... I wonder who will be buying tho... Iridium went bankrupt tho?

Actually... Combining with the same human error factor and people fall off windmills and the wings do fall of windmills. Which is why windmills kill people at a rate higher than nuclear power. And it's gonna be alot of people and enviromental damage, from production and maintenance (which also has hazards for humans and the enviroment) of windmills, if we are gonna scale windmills up to supply the entire planet with windpower. Add to that, the requirements for energy storage. ... The alternative to nuclear power and associated risks, isn't just powering the world with solar plus wind plus storage (which, again, has their own giant human and enviromental consequences)... The other alternative is doing token efforts with solar and wind, while we are still using coal, gas and oil... The UN estimated at some point that global warming is gonna cost 5,000,000 lives a year, through indirect consequences, from 2025-2050, or 125,000,000 lives total. For comparison, a high estimate for the deaths associated with Chernobyl are 5,000... In other words... We would need 25,000 Chernobyl sized meltdowns over 25 years for nuclear power to be as bad as what we've been doing sofar.

Wouldn't it be more fitting to say that the Falcon Heavy and SLS are rockets without a customer and/or market? They do have a "mission" / purpose... it's just noone has bought it yet...

1. I'm not focusing purely on the energy density. My point is that if we have to dig for raw materials, transport them and through that transport energy, uranium will require the least digging and transport. 2. Wind and solar energy has massive problems. Wind kills more people and I presume once you start installing solar panels on every rooftop and have to maintain those, people are gonna fall off those roofs. You didn't take that into account, when you only mentioned price per kWh, which is not useless, but not the whole story. 3. Yes, those are problems with nuclear power. I'll estimate it will still take up less space than Tanzania tho... 4. I agree, that requires solving... However breeding reactors afaik. greatly reduced the amount of nuclear waste did they not? 5. I do believe renewable energy does have their uses and places... It would be silly not to exploit it in the "good areas" and areas where there is no built up electrical infrastructure. Might as well take what we can from truely sunny, windy and hydro optimal places, but I don't think it's prudent to try and put it everywhere. 6. I'll call it a bubble... At some point we're gonna have so many windmills and solar panels that the income per electricity produced is gonna bottom out... 7. But there is no reason to go half assed either... by not knowing what kind of damage it will do to the enviroment by producing enough rawmaterials to produce so many solarpanels and windmills, to supply a significant proportion of the worlds energy needs, then maintain them, replace photovoltaics as they degrade, the storage systems and so forth. We need more information... People were complaining about coal strip mining, well if you replace those with stripmining for rawmaterials for solar panels and windmills and possibly much more of it... Then, sure we've cut out particle pollution, acid rain and co2, but we're still repeating the past mistakes, to a certain degree. 8. I would take thousands of years of non co2 emitting nuclear over a minimal investment in solar and wind, which still makes us have to have conventional powerplants as backup. In any case I see fission as a stop gap measure til we get fusion. 9. Consuming a gigantic amount of ressources for solar and wind powerplants, putting a gigantic amount of co2 into the air for building, transporting and maintaining them and generate gigantic amounts of waste from that... is also handing the future generations a problem. I'd say overall... waste from nuclear ... while dangerous... will be alot less. 10. Yet, you argue for solar power, like you have the answers to the questions from those, you don't... 11. I certainly can have made a calculation error, but if I remember correctly the Spanish plant I base those calculations on are from a relatively hotter geographical area and thus it uses more water? 12. In the table you provided, there are several cases, where nuclear uses less water or none at all. If we are gonna power the entire world, which takes alot, especially into the future, with more people having higher living standards, then we need to look at that critically. 13. I certainly might have made mistakes. I used the Andasol plant, because it was an example of a solar powerplant using troughs and having energy storage for night time, is relatively modern and a commercial plant. Possibly there are some local geographical or enviromental factors that make it consume more water than others would. Or the numbers here are wrong: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andasol_Solar_Power_Station 14. And more generally... However, if my numbers are correct and considering my mathskills, that is a big if... Then it goes to show that powering a significant portion of the worlds energy consumption through solar- and possibly wind-power and associated energy storage, is gonna run into bottlenecks in regards to production of rawmaterials like possibly eg. plastics, silicon and potassium nitrates. And I don't know what the enviromental consequences are of scaling those productions and the production of solar and wind up to megascale project size, which it is... Sometimes doctors kill the patients, even while trying to save them...

At the very least we will have gotten a silly insult out of it... *goes off to call people "big fluctuations, nothing else"* :D

No and I'm not gonna tell the x number of billions of other people in the world, who hasn't had it as good as us, they can never have that, to the cheapness that is coal.... We did...