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> A space MMO based on this data and the exoplanet data would be insanely awesome.

Yes and no.

There are multiple problems.

The #1 problem, as said famously by Douglas Adam, is: Space is big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist, but that's just peanuts to space.

Unless you give players:

* FTL (Faster then Light) / Warp Speed ,and
* Multiple reasons to navigate around the galaxy

Exploration alone is pretty boring. One of the primary reasons EVE Online has lasted so long because of POS - Player Owned Structures/Stations, such as Starbases and Citadels

The #2 problem is: What does progression look like?
i.e. What is the end game? What do players _actually_ do that will keep them interested?

If you search for how scientifically accurate is elite dangerous you will come find that Elite:Dangerous already has part of its star map based on real star systems:

Space.com: What's unique about Elite: Dangerous' Stellar Forge?

David Braben: Everything we've got in the game is real. We've got some 160,000 star systems that are from star catalogs, and the rest are created using sophisticated algorithms ...

We've got around 1,000 systems [in the game] discovered each minute by real people, where no one has ever been before. People can equip their ship and just head out into the unknown. But that's still 0.001 percent of the galaxy that has been discovered in the year since we went live.

Elite:Dangerous even "loosely" predicted the Trappist-1 sytem.

You may also be interested in:

* Orbiter
* Space Simulator
* Kerbal space program

I haven't played those so can't confirm their accuracy.

There are other, less partisan sources of Science news than the New York Times, and I would expect Slashdot curators to favor those, since they will filter out the coal rockets and gay bans in space kinds of reporting. For example, here is space.com's take on the confirmation.

Call me paranoid and a conspiracy theorist (rarely, but when it comes things in space world governments are very duplicitous). But launch it and tell people it's lost. place blame, meanwhile the satellite goes back to being a secret.

This would fool all of about zero people who track satellites. Did you see the radar images that Fraunhofer FHR produced of China's Tiangong-1 space station coming down? See China's Falling Space Station in These Radar Images . This is with technology that is available to a civilian group, imagine the radar imaging equipment that Russia and China likely have to track this sort of thing. Ever hear of ICBM warning systems? Yeah, you'd be able to track a spy satellite no problem.

Re: "How, tell me, should a planet not only move across the orbits of several other planets without disturbing them AT ALL but then suddenly change its velocity enough to actually change its orbit? Do you have a faint idea just how much energy is necessary for something like this?"

Who says that the planets were not disturbed at all? Plato clearly states the fact that they were indeed disturbed, and further, that all of mythology is an attempt to convey this event:

"Phaethon, the son of Helios, having yoked the steeds in his father's chariot, because he was not able to drive them in the path of his father, burned up all that was upon the earth, and was himself destroyed by a thunderbolt. Now, this has the form of a myth, but really signifies a declination of the bodies moving around the earth and in the heavens, and a great conflagration of things upon the earth recurring at long intervals of time"

... then further on ...

"All of these stories, and ten thousand others which are still more wonderful, have a common origin; many of them have been lost in the lapse of ages, or exist only as fragments; but the origin of them is what no one has told"

What do you think he means by "a great conflagration of things upon the earth recurring at long intervals of time?" Plato of course had no idea what gravity was, but he appears to be describing a debris field that returns to the planet over many years. In fact, that's one very logical way to explain why cultures like the Mayans would construct calendars which far exceed the seasonal variations necessary to farm.

What I notice is that when data does not conform to peoples' pre-existing notions, they tend to just completely ignore it. Taken at face value, the following data would seem to suggest that something extremely fundamental has changed in our solar system:

"Earth and the other rocky planets aren't made out of the solar system's original starting material, two new studies reveal.

Scientists examined solar particles snagged in space by NASA's Genesis probe, whose return capsule crash-landed on Earth in 2004. These salvaged samples show that the sun's basic building blocks differ significantly from those of Earth, the moon and other denizens of the inner solar system, researchers said ...

McKeegan and his team measured the abundance of solar wind oxygen isotopes. Isotopes are versions of an element that have different numbers of neutrons in their atomic nuclei. Oxygen has three stable isotopes: oxygen-16 (eight neutrons), oxygen-17 (nine neutrons) and oxygen-18 (ten neutrons).

The researchers found that the sun has significantly more oxygen-16, relative to the other two isotopes, than Earth."

Re: "At the very least we could have seen a significant difference in temperature if the planet radiated 15% more energy than it receives."

Your expectations would seem to be wrong, but there have been additional vindications regardless:

Venus Express discovered that surface features were not quite where they should be, evidence that Earth's cloud-covered neighbour spins a little slower than previously measured ... Scientists have looked at the possibility of this change arising from short-term, random variations in the length of a Venus day, but have concluded that these should average themselves out over time.

R.A. Kerr, "Venus is looking too Pristine," Science, Vol. 250 (Nov. 16, 1990), p.912.

That 08:15 would be Chinese time (UTC+8),

breaking apart and burning up in the skies over the southern Pacific Ocean at about 8:16 p.m. EDT (0016 April 2 GMT), according to the U.S. Strategic Command's Joint Force Space Component Command (JFSCC).

https://www.space.com/40101-china-space-station-tiangong-1-crashes.html

That's missing the point. Scientists have for years now struggled to explain how to get from gravitational accretion to the planetary system we see today. And observing other stellar systems has only served to elevate the mystery. So, what would we expect to see if a foreign star was to come close enough that it actually was very much visible? We'd expect that it should shuffle the planets around in a manner which leaves us as confused as we are.

We might also expect to see something very much like this:

"Earth and the other rocky planets aren't made out of the solar system's original starting material, two new studies reveal.

Scientists examined solar particles snagged in space by NASA's Genesis probe, whose return capsule crash-landed on Earth in 2004. These salvaged samples show that the sun's basic building blocks differ significantly from those of Earth, the moon and other denizens of the inner solar system, researchers said ...

McKeegan and his team measured the abundance of solar wind oxygen isotopes. Isotopes are versions of an element that have different numbers of neutrons in their atomic nuclei. Oxygen has three stable isotopes: oxygen-16 (eight neutrons), oxygen-17 (nine neutrons) and oxygen-18 (ten neutrons).

The researchers found that the sun has significantly more oxygen-16, relative to the other two isotopes, than Earth."

More precisely, the 2015 space.com article says

At its closest point, Scholz's star would have been a 10th-magnitude star — 50 times too faint to be seen with the naked eye. However, brief flares on the star could have lit it up thousands of times brighter, making it potentially visible to early mankind for a few minutes or hours at a time, the researchers explained.

Re: "To answer the is it even worth considering question, though- of course it is. And it has been, at great lengths. And plasma physics play a huge role in even standard cosmology. They just don't play a huge role in large-scale cosmology."

Let me give you a very simple example which I hope you will recognize as an earnest attempt to demonstrate how difficult it is to judge vindications when we are not actively tracking scientific controversies.

Today, for the first time, I noticed that a couple of galaxy artists were suddenly drawing the Milky Way's galactic bulge as a pair, as if a memo went out (which I missed). I had never before noticed this, but having learned about Anthony Peratt's galactic simulation as a pair of rotating Birkeland currents, I immediately tuned into this pattern.

To somebody who has not paid any attention to Peratt's simulation, the explanation offered in a July 2016 article would seem good enough to assume the issue is basically settled:

Many disc galaxies, including our own Milky Way, have a central bulge that resembles either a box or an unshelled peanut. This bulge may form when the circular orbits of stars become elongated, creating a “bar” of stars that runs through the centre and tilts out of the disc’s plane. The combined effect makes the once-flat galaxy look like it has buckled under enormous pressure.

But, hold on just a second. This is a completely ad hoc explanation. Although I have no doubt that somebody somewhere can generate a tweak to the original galactic models -- perhaps involving dark matter -- which can explain with actual numbers why this may occur in the conventional model, the fact of the matter is that this is a completely expected feature when you are modeling a galaxy as an interaction of two Birkeland currents. -- and the choice to refuse to systematically track the Electric Universe controversy has left everybody failing to recognize that this actually vindicates the against-the-mainstream claim.

You think that's just a coincidence? Okay, let's go back a few days to the release of these new pictures from the Juno spacecraft of one of Jupiter's poles in infrared. The article states:

Jupiter’s poles are a stark contrast to the more familiar orange and white belts and zones encircling the planet at lower latitudes. Its north pole is dominated by a central cyclone surrounded by eight circumpolar cyclones with diameters ranging from 2,500 to 2,900 miles (4,000 to 4,600 kilometers) across. Jupiter’s south pole also contains a central cyclone, but it is surrounded by five cyclones with diameters ranging from 3,500 to 4,300 miles (5,600 to 7,000 kilometers) in diameter. Almost all the polar cyclones, at both poles, are so densely packed that their spiral arms come in contact with adjacent cyclones. However, as tightly spaced as the cyclones are, they have remained distinct, with individual morphologies over the seven months of observations detailed in the paper.

“The question is, why do they not merge?” said Adriani. “We know with Cassini data that Saturn has a single cyclonic vortex at each pole. We are beginning to realize that not all gas giants are created equal.”

Once again, I sprung into action because I have tracked Peratt's work sufficient to understand the inherent geometry of electricity over plasma. In his efforts to explain petroglyphs as z-pinch instab

Travel between stars is very hard, but not impossible.
If you run the numbers, solar sails should be able to get to .1c speeds when combined with laser thrusters.
https://www.space.com/9051-sol...
These technologies change the problem from 2,000 yrs to 120 yrs.
Still not easy, but not impossible.
I've seen plans for micro-spacecraft going to Promima in 20 yrs, but that isn't very useful to me.

Your links don't really prove anything, but this one does: https://www.space.com/16875-ho...

To your point the theoretical shortest distance to Mars in ~33M miles, but the planets' orbits rarely ever get that close to each other. The average distance between Earth and Mars orbits is ~140M miles, and launches use the most fuel efficient path, which [counter-intuitively] is not the shortest path. So ShanhaiBill is correct that 40M miles doesn't get you to Mars.

Russia seems ready to go up to 2028 if they find other countries to follow them.
https://www.space.com/36356-ru...

I had no need to hear the quarterly results after I saw this video.

It was crystal clear that he's burning through the cash he has hand over fist and is losing the confidence of the investors who could give him more.

It's not Elon's responsibility what you do with a flame thrower after you buy it.

Right, setting aside the promotional video that shows him holding one assault-rifle style and running toward the frickin cameraman with it flaming, tagged with "Don’t do this. Also, I want to be clear that a flamethrower is a super terrible idea. Definitely don’t buy one. Unless you like fun." This kind of mixed message doesn't even give him clear grounds to mount the (terrible under the best of circumstances) "just kidding" legal defense down the road.

I am very comfortable that any lawyer he might have ran this by would have told him he's taking on more potential liability with this than he's getting in revenue. My guess is that he's in such a cash crunch right now he can't afford to care.

Yup.

And it cost $6.5bn for a Saturn V rocket / $185m per launch. And those were 1960's dollars.

Trying to do it to win $20m in today's money (which wouldn't even cover 0.3% of the cost of how we did it back then) is a bit more difficult. Hell, just the fuel alone could cost that, or the insurance for if it happens to explode on the launchpad.

But the Lunar X-Prize isn't trying to re-create Apollo. It is more like the far less ambitious and costly Surveyor missions. The bill came in at $469 million for seven landers.

It is even closer to Lunokhod-1 but being a Soviet mission, cost comparisons are tricky (if you can get the data at all).

you may be trolling. But just in case you are merely ignorant, and have been living under a rock your whole life:

Uranium does not need water for working electricity. Like all heat engines, what is required is a place to dump the waste heat - to keep the cold end cold (relatively speaking). On Earth, that is efficiently done with evaporative cooling, but that's hardly the only way. How much water does a household Honda generator require? The nuclear sources on the Voyager space probes radiated heat directly into space. The Curiosity rover on Mars - also nuclear-powered - also uses a passive radiator.

There is water on Mars. That is the conclusion of more than two decades of exploration. (Science: it works, bitches!) Water isn't necessarily abundant (i.e., no oceans or rivers these days), but it is there. Some of it is briny subsurface moisture, most of it is ice, and some is tenuous vapor in the atmosphere. All plans for human exploration and colonization on Mars plan to make use of local water.

The same is true with the Moon: it has water. It's less widespread and abundant, but it is there. The best places to find it appear to be in polar craters that are in near-constant shadow.

They shake the shit out of it on earth:
https://www.space.com/36317-ja...

2) The price is dropping fast. My household income is only a few hundred thousand a year and I think I'll be able to take a family trip to space at some point before I die.

My guess is that this is extremely optimistic at least for an orbital flight. The Dragon is supposed to have a crew of 7 when it's operational. Musk has said the fuel cost alone is $200k, so just gas money is almost $30k/seat. The second stage which still has no technical or economically proven recovery is about 30% of the cost which would be $60M*0.3 = $18M = $2M+/seat. And that assumes the first stage and capsule are free with infinite reuse. Note that NASA is expected to pay around $150M for an ISS flight or $20M+/seat, so I've already assumed a 90% drop from the current rate. Maybe it gets cheaper carrying passengers by the busload and construction costs will drop with further scale, but I still think you're well into fantasy land doing it on a salary of a few hundred grand.

Maybe a suborbital joyride with Blue Horizon just peeking across the 100km limit, but that's going to be a much shorter ride straight up, peek out the windows hey there's space then back down again. The Lynx will give you 4-5 minutes of weightlessness on an hour's flight. Is that worth >$100k? It's a fancier vomit comet where you get your astronaut wings, but my guess is that once you have joyriders doing that in bulk we'll move the goal post to "proper" space flights. Same reason Yuri Gagarin is way, way more known than Alan Shepard. Reaching orbit is a completely different beast with a completely different price tag, SpaceX is great but physics dictates there's some miracles I think even they can't pull off. It's never going to become a mass market thing.

A prime location for a lunar [or martian] base would be inside a cave thick enough overhead to block dangerous radiation and recoverable ice/water inside.

Discovering lunar caves/lava tubes is not really news though... From 2016: https://www.space.com/32795-mo...
These are just more caves found closer to the lunar pole and hypothesizes there MIGHT be water/ice inside.

No. It's a lot easier to explore space from Earth, where we already have everything we need.

Indeed. Earth has the advantage of an already existing industrial civilization. Mars has a a rover and a slightly shallower gravity well.

But there are even more shallow gravity wells in the asteroid belt, and plenty of water there as well. A single asteroid may contain more water than all the oceans of earth.

Using Mars as a base for deep space exploration makes no sense at all.

Colonizing Mars doesn't make much sense either. We would be much better off constructing O'Neill Cylinders in solar orbit. We need to get over our fixation on planetary surfaces.

I don't know, it seems strange, especially when there's so much actual news related to SpaceX, such as the recent government audit which found some pretty serious problems with their manufacturing and test protocols ( See article here https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-12-22/top-u-s-space-contractors-cited-for-lapses-by-pentagon-watchdog, actual report https://media.defense.gov/2017/Dec/22/2001860659/-1/-1/1/DODIG-2018-045_REDACTED.PDF). On a more positive note, SpaceX's Falcon Heavy is still on schedule, and we've now seen pictures of the fully-assembled Falcon Heavy https://www.space.com/39164-elon-musk-unveils-falcon-heavy-rocket-photos.html. But apparently, out of all the important things happening, a satirical letter is what is apparently what gets posted.

That is because you live in the wrong country.
In Europe most launches make news.
And then again, you could google and find pages like this: https://www.space.com/32286-sp...

I read it at https://www.space.com/39096-in... . But that's because space systems engineering is my profession, and I keep up with such things. When I said "making the news", I mean the news sources the average public sees.

There is real value in the resources of our moon https://www.space.com/28189-mo.... Staking a claim to those resources could be a bargaining chip even if there is no real value extracted. It isn't hard to see the value. For example if there was an island in the middle of the pacific that no government had laid claim to and was later found to contain 10 billion units of natural resources but would take 1 billion units of resources to extract. Anyone with the capacity to start the process of investigation or extraction would. Others with less resources may want to partner up or even try to pay off "the first to market." There has been increased interest from Russia and China to go to the moon. Industrial races can also be good for economies as well as uniting a divided populous. Even if the Trump administration doesn't actually back NASA monetarily they may have a lot to gain by lip service alone.

He is also afraid of extra-terrestrial:

https://www.space.com/29999-st...
https://www.space.com/34184-st...

He is also afraid of extra-terrestrial:

https://www.space.com/29999-st...
https://www.space.com/34184-st...

Deliquescent perchlorate brine concentrates aren't somewhere you'd look for life, they're something you'd use to sterilize a surface

Actually, the presence of perchlorates is good news for the possibility of life on Mars.

Or, they could have it backwards. Earthquakes can change the earth's rotation. Maybe changes leading to an earthquake can as well.

https://www.space.com/11115-ja...

At least this happened with the new Merlin Series 5 redesign, scheduled for flight next year.

Exactly. That's important-- this is the next generation engine, not the one currently flying.

Some alternate sources, some with more information:
https://www.space.com/38712-spacex-rocket-engine-test-explosion.html
https://www.geekwire.com/2017/next-generation-spacex-rocket-engine-goes-flames-texas-test/
https://arstechnica.com/science/2017/11/an-experimental-spacex-rocket-engine-has-exploded-in-texas/
https://www.theverge.com/2017/...

In answer to the question in the headling, presumably he's putting it into Blue Origin. Because that's what he said he would do.

Aluminum has no such point - flexing it will always cause it to weaken (which is why it was stupid to make Curiosity's wheels out of aluminum).

Reading the article and consulting NASA information about the Curiosity mission does not support the assertion that the wheel design was in any way "stupid".

According to the article you link to the (many) components of Curiosity were not tested to destruction but were tested a maximum of three times the expected mission life without failing. Curiosity was never intended to last "forever" but to last for its two year mission life which involved an 8 km trip to Aeolis Mons, its mission target. With a three-fold mission life testing program this suggests that the rover could be expected to last up to 6 years and travel 24 km before failures would likely end the mission, but anything over the original mission specification is gravy. Curiosity has now traveled 17.5 km.

Again, according to the article, what they have observed is cracks in two treads in one wheel. Test data indicates that when there are three cracked treads the wheel is at 60% of its service life. Currently there are only two, so it is at less than 60% of its service life. But let us suppose that it is at 60%, then it should be good for 29.2 km, i.e. for another 12 km, which is over three times the planned mission. But since it is only two treads, it should be more than that. What's more this is only in one wheel so far, and Curiosity can travel on five good wheels, so the service life limitation from wheel wear is likely to be quite substantially more than another 12 km. By then lots of other components will have exceeded their 3-fold mission life testing and be candidates for failure.

In short the wheels seem more than adequately spec'd and tested for the mission. It is unlikely that they will end up the cause of mission end, which in any case will be well more than three times the original planned mission. Putting 100 km wheels on Curiosity (for example) would simply have driven up cost, reduced the weight budget for some other items, all without meaningfully extending the mission potential life.

Even at a thousand times the cost of other methods, that would still be quite useful.

While there are a myriad of factors which go into selecting the proper material for a design, the general criteria that steel is best at is strength per unit cost. If you can pay more, more exotic materials like titanium, tungsten, chromium, or amorphous ("glass") metals are stronger per unit volume than steel. If you need lighter weight, aluminum and magnesium tend to have more strength per unit mass. If you need temperature resistance, niobium, molybdenum tend to be better. etc.

That said, a 2-3x strength increase is just huge, and could upset some of the generalities I listed above. It's been a decade since I delved into materials science, but a 2-3x stronger steel could displace both glass metals for strength per volume, and aluminum for strength per weight.

The latter would have serious implications for the aerospace industry. The big drawback of aluminum (other than relatively low melting point, which isn't an issue in subsonic flight) is that it has a fatigue limit. With a steel structure, you can design it so that repeatedly flexing it no longer causes it to weaken. Aluminum has no such point - flexing it will always cause it to weaken (which is why it was stupid to make Curiosity's wheels out of aluminum). Fatigue failure of aluminum has been the cause of numerous airliner accidents, from the original de Havilland Comet, to Aloha 243, to JAL 123 (greatest loss of life from a single aircraft accident). It's why pressurized airframes are retired and destroyed after about 75,000-100,000 flights. If 3D printed steel has a higher strength per weight than aluminum, it would revolutionize aircraft design.

Only if you define "won" as "got there first." The Japanese "won" the race to high definition TV, but all the HDTV standards today are based on the U.S. HDTV standards. Why? Because the Japanese version of HDTV was analog - that was the quickest way to transmit HDTV signals in the 1970s. The U.S. HDTV program didn't get started until the late 1980s, right around the time digital signal processors were rapidly improving in performance and dropping in price. Consequently the U.S. version of HDTV was digital, and compressed digital HDTV signals turned out to be much more practical than analog for HDTV.

Likewise, as a long-term solution to repeatedly getting things into space, rockets are not very efficient. The U.S. realized this soon after WWII and was gradually working on a series of experimental planes to fly into space. It mostly abandoned that approach after Sputnik turned space access political, turning it from a marathon into a sprint.

Now, 60 years later, after the world has invested trillions of dollars into rocketry R&D, we've seen the writing on the wall and are gradually shifting research back towards much more economically practical hypersonic flight. That is, what the U.S. was already doing in the late 1950s. Imagine where the technology might've been today if we hadn't been distracted by a political "space race." Maybe we'd already have 1 hour flights between North America and Europe/Asia. A moon base (the biggest impediment is the cost of getting materials into orbit to establish a base - rockets are damned expensive). Maybe even a Mars base (again, high cost of fuel for a Mars mission due to rockets being damned expensive). Who knows.

The same thing happened in computers. In the 1950s-1970s electronic transistors were a lot easier to make than optical transistors. Consequently everyone took the easy route and poured R&D into electronic transistors. That worked fine - computers were doubling in clock speed every 2-3 years - until about 2000. That's when we hit a brick wall. Current leakage in electronic transistors goes as something like the square of frequency, and it turns out about 4 GHz is the practical maximum. Beyond that, the power losses and cooling requirement make higher speeds impractical. The fastest Intel processor in 2002 was 2.8 GHz. Since then, we've only been able to push (mass-produced) clock speeds up to about 4.2 GHz. A 1.5x improvement in 15 years, compared to doubling every 2-3 years. Optical transistors would have no such limitation since it relies on quantum photons instead of lossy electrons. But because we dove headfirst into electronic transistors, our level of optical transistor technology is decades behind electronic transistors. Meaning nobody wants to spend much money on researching optical computing even though its future potential is much greater than electronic computing.

Sometimes the quickest route isn't the best route.

Right on the number, wrong on the "not all of them recoverable". That number is the "proven reserves" of coal.

I gave the total recoverable number simply to give some perspective on the IPCC prediction of 1000 ppm under their high emission scenario. That prediction requires extrapolating 20th century carbon emission growth until 2100, which is economically utterly implausible, no matter how many additional reserves we discover.

"Prediction is very difficult, especially about the future," according to Niels Bohr.

However, they don't label this a prediction, they label this as "here is the high emissions scenario." The question "what happens if current trends continue" seems like a reasonable thing to ask. If I were looking for something to call their prediction, I'd look at the middle of their many scenarios, not the most extreme one.

But, by the way, why should "current trends continue" be "economically utterly implausible"? It's not economically implausible now, why does it suddenly switch to being implausible?

Bottom line, however, is that the comment subject is accurate: "Runaway effect? Nope" is right on the mark. "Slow but real increase in temperature over a time scale of a century" is more like it

No, the bottom line is that people keep misrepresenting IPCC predictions as being "established science", when they are a mix of a core of "basic science", and (I quote you) "feedback loops that are much more complex and less understood",

As you pointed out very clearly in your previous post, the current IPCC best estimate of climate sensitivity, 3 plus or minus 1.5 degrees per doubling, is pretty much identical to the one-dimensional constant-humidity model of Manabe and Wetherald. The only "feedback loop" is the assumption of constant humidity, which I don't think is particularly "complex and less understood."

predictions about poorly understood "effects of government action", and economic forecasts that assume that by 2100 we extract and burn the equivalent of all known fossil fuel reserves.

There needs to be a name for this logical fallacy; it's similar to strawman, but not quite identical. Basically, you took a whole array of different scenarios put forth by IPCC to look at the effect of all sorts of different possible things that could happen, you took the most extreme one, and you say "look at their prediction! It is absurd!". That wasn't their "prediction". That was their analysis "here is the result if this one particular scenario takes place."

On top of that misrepresentation comes even more fear mongering by famous scientists warning of runaway greenhouse effects (examples of which I quoted).

The one famous scientist you quoted was Stephen Hawking. He's not a climate scientist. He has said all sorts of silly things, among them that we should be afraid of aliens, AI, robots and nuclear war. What Stephen Hawking is afraid of is not really terribly relevant to climate science; if you want to know about climate, I'd listen to climate scientists.

The "slow but real increase" that you refer to and that basic physics tells us about is of sufficiently small magnitude not to warrant concern or intervention

That's a judgement call. I don't even disagree. I'm annoyed at people attacking the science beca

What's up brah? https://www.urbandictionary.co... Also, there's a comet diving towards the sun. https://www.space.com/33651-co...

https://www.space.com/22391-re... the nasa DC-X did the first boost-hover-land cycle in 1993. Nasa proved it could be done but tech was not advanced enough to take it further.

Maybe he didn't have a PhD, but at least...

He earned his bachelor's and master's degree in astronomy from the University of Kansas

https://www.space.com/19824-cl...

So, according to you, people who contribute to science and math must have a PhD?

A terrible place for a telescope. It is not gravity free, the electrostatically suspended lunar dust is a serious hazard, and if working in the infrared the lunar surface emission is a big problem. The only scheme floating around for telescopes on the Moon are quite speculative ones of dubious value (like this one).

I'm a bit confused here. As far as I recall. The first trip to the moon did not require an earth orbit. They just timed it to reach the moon in it's orbit. THEN the orbiting around the moon began as they neared it.. Now that I researched it. It did require 1/2 an orbit around the earth because of lack of escape velocity. So you get half-off on this discussion. https://www.space.com/26572-ho... 2nd picture down.

SX has launched 43 times with 1 launch failure ( and a partial ).

Huh? What are you talking about? SpaceX failed in its first three launches. You can hardly call that "only one launch failure (and a partial)".

I admire that: the best way to push the boundaries is to fail, and then learn from the failures. But learning from the failures means: don't pretend that failures didn't happen.

Even it you meant "Falcon-9" and not "SX", you can only count "1 launch failure" if you ignore the one that exploded on the pad. That was only a year ago, so you'd think people would remember. https://www.space.com/33929-spacex-falcon-9-rocket-explodes-on-launch-pad.html

So, two out of 44 failed-- that comes to a demonstrated 95.5% success rate, very close to what the AC said, "that the average reliability of orbital rockets historically sits currently at 94%."

If you want reliability, go with Atlas-V. But you will pay for it: moving up from 95 percent to pushing 100% costs a lot.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/checkpoint/wp/2016/03/23/why-the-most-maligned-rocket-in-the-world-is-also-one-of-the-most-reliable

An asteroid buzzed the Earth at 50,000 miles away last year.

https://www.space.com/33891-newfound-asteroid-buzzes-earth-2016-qa2.html

LOL.

Clearly, you didn't even try to read https://www.space.com/11536-moon-microbe-mystery-solved-apollo-12.html?

"The claim that a microbe survived 2.5 years on the moon was flimsy, at best, even by the standards of the time," said John Rummel, chairman of the Committee on Space Research (COSPAR) Panel on Planetary Protection. "The claim never passed peer review, yet has persisted in the press -- and on the Internet -- ever since." [Coolest New Moon Discoveries]

The Surveyor 3 camera-team thought they had detected a microbe that had lived on the moon for all those years, "but they only detected their own contamination," Rummel told SPACE.com.

I still don't see how humans and CO2 are causing warming on Mars. https://www.space.com/33001-ma...

It's dangerous to look at the sun directly when it's almost eclipsed, because the overall brightness is low enough to not trigger a blink reflex.

https://www.space.com/37199-so...

I hope people are careful. It is very easy to damage one's eyes looking directly at the eclipse, or thru inferior filters. Check this link out for proper protection.

https://www.space.com/36941-solar-eclipse-eye-protection-guide.html

Welding glass filters may work - but one needs to get the right shade. "Only goggles made for electric arc welding can be used to observe the sun, and they must have a shade scale number of 12 or higher. Shade 13 is ideal for solar viewing, but that shade is typically not sold in stores, Fienberg added."

Your Google Fu is weak. Pay attention to the Youtube video where you can watch Charles Bolden, NASA Chief under Obama, state unambiguously that he was directed to reach out to the Muslim world to make them feel good about their contributions to science and engineering.

"FWIW, the closes planet of this type is "only" 4 light years away."

https://www.space.com/32546-in...

Might be able to get there in 20-30 years then 4+ years to get the data back to earth. If we "magically" had 'starshot' technology ready to go (we don't). Besides, I'm unsure we have the ability to send something that could transmit meaningful data across 4+ light years.

Here's the NASA link: https://exoplanets.nasa.gov/ne...
and here's the space.com story, with more details: https://www.space.com/37242-na...

Irritates the crap out of me that Google is probably building this "balloon" in MY hangar at Moffitt.

Yeah, it was better back when NASA ran the hangar and used magic owl-dodging aircraft.

I'm pretty sure that when someone leases your hangar for decades, it's a bit disingenuous to call it YOUR hangar.

Why? Really, Why are you wondering? it is fucking Star Trek. One of the most famous media franchises on the ENTIRE PLANET.

A fucking RL astronaut wore a Voyager uniform on the International Space Station......a FEMALE astronaut. http://www.space.com/29161-ast...

The fucking Dalai Lama has visited the set.

ST:TNG is on RIGHT NOW on BBC America, episode that first aired 27 years ago. When I first watched ST, the oldest episodes were only 8 years old.

There have been games both tabletop and electronic inspired by and based on Star Trek ever since 1965. I personally play Star Trek Online on the PS4.

Star Trek has had MANY novels based on the various series...and some NOT based directly on the series, but showcasing OTHER vessels.

This is a franchise that has lasted 50 years. It survived the Animated Series, The Motionless Picture and the trainwreck that was V and You are wondering if anyone will watch the show? That will be able to be seen in 190 countries?

What is wrong with you?

It's idealism vs. pragmatism. I don't care what ideology you have; new companies like SpaceX are vastly undercutting NASA and its traditional private partners (Boeing, Lockheed, etc).

A public space program gets funded because people think it's a good idea.

A private space program gets funded because it actually is a good idea (return exceeds investment).

The problem with manned space exploration is that it's generally a bad idea. And I don't say that from a public vs private space exploration standpoint. Just ask anyone in NASA about the manned vs. unmanned exploration budget division. We get much better bang for the buck with unmanned exploration. Just look at a typical list of NASA's greatest missions. The only manned mission on the list is the moon landing.