This announcement is neither new, nor unexpected, and the hype injected by the media about it serves only to convey how poorly educated certain segments of the population actually are.
Seriously, if there is even the slightest possibility that life could exist in any given environment on earth, there is a reasonable expectation that given a sufficient sampling of those environments, you will find thriving lifeforms that have adapted to that environment. Life is just that pernicious and invasive.
Something as profoundly in contact with huge numbers of open biomes, like the atmosphere, with direct mechanisms of mixing low and high atmosphere contents, it really isn't surprising that microbes have adapted to conditions in the upper atmosphere.
For goodness sake, we have novel species of microbe that have adapted to the extreme conditions of nasa JPL cleanrooms, including intense, sustained UV bombardment. JPL hasn't be around nearly as long as the stratosphere. This isn't hard.
So, while I realize that the intet here is not to put it inside a living organism.... some part of me wants to know what would happen if the data for various windows malware packages was encoded, and injected into bacterial hosts.
Think of all the new diseases that could come about from pure happenstance, coinicidence, and murphy's law!
Kind of a "throw stuff at the wall and see what sticks" silliness side effect of using DNA for data storage.
Iron man's suit makes use of the absurdly abundant energy produced by his arclight generator to produce high density plasma. His gauntlets are actually high density plasma thrustors. He uses them to fly with. Lasers just don't have that kind of specific impulse. Think more "plasma based jet port", and you are on the right track.
Sadly, you will discover that containing high density plasma isn't a walk in the park, and would make your containment system quite magnetically attractive to just about anything ferromagnetic. That's because to contain the plasma, you would need a bitchin strong magnetic field. Like what's inside an MRI machine.
It HAS to be high density plasma, because low density plasma thrustors don't have enough thrust either. (Work fine in outer space. Not so hot on the earth's surface.)
Not really. 2 entangled particles can actually be viewed as a single particle with 2 disparate manifestations.
Eg, take a wave of light, and send it through a beam splitter. Half the beam goes right, the other half goes left.
The actual light being split is exactly the same light, going in 2 directions. The photons in branch A are entangled with the photons in branch B. (More or less.)
If a device were made that supplied sufficient energy at the "destination" to entangle 100% of all the particles in your body without altering any of the actual states of those particles (pure entanglement, no measurement), then you would exist in both places simultaneously.
The ethical question, is if the dissolution of the "source" instance is murder or not.
The politicians, political leaders especially, all seek power to enforce their wills upon the world around them. Some may feel this is for the greater good, (religious theocratic leaders), others merely for self-fullfillment (ordinary dictators, and many elected officials.) A good many are somewhere between.
The scientist looks at the stark reality of the world around them, and work studiously to distance themselves from their own wants and desires for outcomes of experiments (eg, BIAS.) A real, proper, and riggorous scientist accepts hard data with a stoic air, and breathes easier as his bias gets swept away by review, leaving only objective truths behind.
The politician has "a vision" of how the world "should be".
The scientist tries to build a model of how the world actually is.
This is why the scientist is ignored studiously by the politician; the scientist harps on and on, and on about what is, while the politician seeks to change all that, and philosphically rejects harsh limits on what can be done. The politician often feels the current or natural state of things is something to OVERCOME, not something to respect and build into policy.
As such, the politician is only interested in what the scientist has to say in regards to methods of envoking change, looking for tools and weapons to use to produce the changes the politician feels are needed, to make the world match his own internal view of "ideal."
Chemistry and metalurgy give rise to internal combustion engines and industry, and chemical fertilizers. It isn't about the knowledge or truth, but about what you can extort out of nature by bending and breaking rules. That's all the politician cares about.
As such, the politician simply *does NOT* want to hear about how a policy he deems essential will cause all hell to come to breakfast. Like global warming and pollution; the scientists have predicted that heavy industrialism would result in a damaged and possibly unlivable climate since the beginning of the industrial revolution. The politicians simply would hear none of it. Industry was essential to their wish fullfillment, and the consequences were unwelcome distractions, treated as evil distractions and detractions from their glorious dreams of the ideal societies they would build through "progress." (With themselves, naturally, enshrined as heros and architects of that grand future they were the visionaries for.)
Short of a hostile takeover from the madmen of politics, awash in their selfish fantasies, I don't see science making a dent in the RDF those bastards create for themselves.
If they send the matter as some form of encoded data, on a very narrow energy beam, then you can get away with a smaller wormhole. You would still have to contend with the only nondistorted route (perfectly normal vector to sphere surface that precisely intersects the centerpoint) being a "noisy channel" though, and would need some means at the far end to collect the encoded data, and reconstruct the matter at the destination. It also means you have to keep the wormhole chamber itself in immaculate shape, and as close to perfectly free of any gaseous matter as is possible.
That means the "stargate" isn't going to be some disc shaped meniscus like interface, and more a transporter pad built on top of a big assed undergound structure.
Without swinging around a black hole, I don't see a reasonable method of accellerating something the size of an interstellar starship to 99% of c. It takes ungodly amounts of power to accelerate single protons to that speed in the LHC. A starship!? Wow....
I stll hold to the estimate of 20 to 40% c with "reasonable expectations" (ahem. Cough, sputter.) Of what you can wring out of physics in regard to such a large vehicle. That means that the 25 lightyear trip will still take about 50 to 100 years for the ship to traverse, of which the crew will experience about 49 to 100 (minus a few months) years of time.
How unfortunate.... looks like we need to find a way to uncouple inertial mass from gravitational mass. That way we could escape some of the pitfalls of achieving relativistic speeds with a big ol' space hoopty.
No, it means that at most, you might be able to send a message through a wormhole as a beam of light precisely send exactly at the exact computed centerpoint of the sphere, and very little else.
Sending a human through the wormhole would have a sizeable number of the human's atoms entering on trajectories that don't precisely intersect the sphere's centerpoint, meaning the shearing effects of the wormhole would rip the human apart. They would come out the other side as a spray of microparticulates. (And if entering highly oblique, would turn into a fireball of radiation whirling around the edges of the wormhole.)
It is possible that with a sufficiently "large" wormhole, the shearing forces would be sufficiently diffused over a large enough entry window to permit a human sized object, but the wormhole would have to be fucking enormous. I mean. Fucking. Enormous. The human would still experience radical compression and shearing forces, but they would be below the energies needed to tear the human apart. That doesn't mean the experience would be in any way "enjoyable."
Atmospheric gasses interacting with the wormhole's event horizon? Hoooboy... can you say nuclear fireball? No. Travel through a wormhole would require as close to absolute vacuum as possible, a fucking enormous wormhole, and a pair of depends diapers, because you are gonna need em.
Not really. It just means "one way trip, everyone you know on earth will be dead when you arrive at your destination".
This is because of time dialation caused by being bound by special relativity. The faster you go in relation to c, the less "time" you experience compared to the outside observer. When you hit c (which is impossible for massed objects anyway) you experience exactly 0 seconds of time.
So, while the people on earth wait the 25+ light years for you to reach gleise, you might only experience a few seconds of time aboard the starship, thanks to special relativity.
Due to realistic constraints on energy requirements for space vehicles, the best you are looking at for reaching a distant star system is a couple of years of local starship time, at some significant fraction of c, but considerably less than 99%. (Probably closer to 20 to 40% c, at best, assuming a crazy powerful engine.)
At relativistic velocities, every tiny hydrogen atom in front of the ship floating listlessly in space suddenly becomes a high energy alpha particle, and every electron becomes a high energy beta particle. This means the ship needs absurd amounts of radiation shielding to make the trip feasible.
The actual geometry of a wormhole is too peculiar for most viewers, so "zipping really fast across the galaxy! Wheeeee!" Is more familiar. It's a TV show. Lighten up fancis.
Really, an actual wormhole would resemble a sphere in 3d space, through the center of which, you see straight through out the other side of the companion spherical appearing disruption at your desintation. The "edge" of the sphere would look mirrory, and highly distorted. Traveling into the wormhole on any sufficiently oblique trajectory would be "a bad thing(tm)". It is this oblique interaction that is hypothesized to make any artificially stabilized wormhole rapidly become unstable, as particles get caught in tight "circular" loops and literally feedback the wormhole shut.
None of this "disc shaped portal" nonsense.
Because that would be mindfucking to most viewers, special effects people make wormholes flat, for fragile human minds.
Nothing. You would see absolutely nothing. Blackness. Empty space. Here is why:
The warp field used to push the ship would be a 100% metamaterial, which redirects all particles, including light, around the ship perfectly, and or, capturing the particles on the event shock, and preventing them from reaching you.
That's the problem with cheating by removing the ship from the causally connected universe, via a albucuierre warpdrive; being no longer causally connected means you can't see anything, because you stop interacting with the universe outside the warp field.
Ok, pedantically, you would see an insanely redshifted image of the universe you left behind, instead of empty space. But to human eyes, that heat map would appear literally black.
When you rupture the field, and spill back into being causally connected with the universe at the remote reference frame, a shitton of energy and radiation will blast out.
Piloting a ship with that kind of propulsion would require very precise calculations about the passing of local time inside the warp field, and the time frames of both site of departure, and site of destination. It would be impossible to measure spacial distance, so the unpredictable unit of variable time is all you would have to work with. Long distance navigation would be an almost absurd proposition due to this fact. This could be the fly in the ointment against this form of travel in fact.
Lots of eyecandy. More mature story (as in, sexual theme content), irritating retcons.
Gameplay has lots of smashing, especially if you use the hobbyhorse attacks. (:D) minigames are repetitious.
Seemed more like artistic masterbation on the part of the character design artists. (Alice literally has a different outfit and hairstyle for each "world" of wonderland.)
Alice was harder, and grittier as a character in McGee's, much less so in the SpicyHorse made sequel.
Game has less replay value than the first one. Game *does* come with the original game as a DLC though, so you can play it on the console. Hard to use the thrown attack of the kife without the precision of the mouse however.
It was worth the download for the first playthrough and the eyecandy. Haven't played it again though.
Excuse me for the dumb question, but considering that the nuclear stage of the rocket is supposed to already be in deep space, wouldn't a modification of linear fusion with an ion thruster make more sense?
Light gasses have more neuclei per packed volume, are more readily abundant, and cheaper to process than fissile nuclear fuels. The idea here would be to have pulsed nuclear fusion like in a linear fuser, with the resulting fusion plasma being expelled through a traditional ion thruster accelleration grate.
Some of the particles generated by the fusion plasma re electrically charged, so the electrical feild of the grate would act as a surface against which the plasma could give added thrust. (The grate is unlikely to accellerate the plasma particles faster than they already are traveling, but the inverse is a different story.)
One would think it would produce an ion thruster with considerably higher specific impulse.
At the time, homosexual relationships were illegal, classified as a sex act on par with raping dogs or children, and carried harsh penalties which Turring endured.
There was a sharp disconnect between what is ethically sound, and what is legally necessitated.
Likewise here: the voting public paid to have that research conducted, were being double dipped, (actually more than that..) and denied access unless they were themselves subsidised scholars of some sort. A morally offensive situation is being maintained (people are compelled through threat of violence and or incarceration to hand money to the government who then gives that money to private firms and researchers, presumably for the public's benefit, but are then strictly denied access to the results of that research which they financed.) For the benefit of rentseekers (JSTOR, Eslevier, and all those other publishing house whores.), at the detriment of public knowledge and education. (Really, far larger databases of information are maintained by community organized efforts than these clowns maintain, and those community orgs provide their services for free. The main reasons why these for prfit orgs can't do that, is because they aren't in it for science or knowedge, but instead are only in it for money, which quite bluntly, they are not entitled to.)
This man sought to move that data out of the rentseeker's filing cabinets, and into the public's waiting hands, since the public has already paid for that information through funding the godamn research to begin with. (Imagine: megacorp funds a lab to answer some scientific question: the lab then double dips on printed copies (per copy) of results, and asserts ownership of the works. Does this really happen to big corps? Fuck no it doesn't. "Works for hire", and all that. But it does to normal people and universities, because magically, once taxpayer money goes through the ravenous maw of the government debt machine, it isn't a work for hire!)
The renteekers go all pedant on him, and ruin his life sufficently that he is finally motivated enough to actually end his own life to get away from his problems.
Personally, I would offer the following categories:
1) Major planet 2) Minor planet 3) dwarf planet 4) Planetary Object
With other categories for non-planets, like migratory comets, itinerant asteroids, and debris field objects.
A major planet would be large physical volume and or, very high mass objects, like gas giants, very large super-earth type rocky objects (like evaporated gas giant core remnants), and the like. These objects have a criteria for being the major dominant partner within a ratio of the solar system's mass to its volume. EG, Major planets have the majority of the non-solar mass, and dominate large areas of the system.
Minor planets have a minimum weight classification of say, a lunar mass. (Our moon is quite large afterall.) It must have decidedly significant core and crust seperation. Planets like Earth, Venus, and Mars fall into this category.
Dwarf planets are below the mass requirement for minor planet, but still exhibit well defined core/crust segregation. Objects like mercury, Vesta, Ceres, Eris, Pluto and pals live here.
Planetary Objects are massed objects that have "planetary orbital characteristics", but lack any structural stratification. (Asteroids and pals that have reliable, stable, non-erratic orbits.)
The lists of major and minor planets would almost always remain small, while still permitting the "planet" category to be applied to objects with planetary motion characteristics, like irregularly shaped asteroids in well established debris feilds.
It is important that stable orbit be the criterion for defining a planet, because it is essentially the only feature other than mass and degree of occultation we can examine with tools like kepler, and the keck observatory.
The list of 9 planets is arbitrary, and retaining it in light of greater discovery is absurd if it can't be rationally justified.
You could instead call it the list of major planets, and have a size cutoff. Then you can keep your precious little list, and still keep a useful definition.
"One of these things is not like the others, but rather than actually give due dilligence to a truly thoughtful definition of what a planet is (and thus, what it isn't) that would apply amid the growing dataset of observed orbiting non-stellar objects, we will just pull something out of our asses because we don't want to let pluto into our arbitrarilly segregated "so definately a planet" club, because we don't want to admit such a dinky object, because if we did, then all that rabble would have to be entered too!"
Here's a better definition for planet.
A substellar mass that has achieved a stable, non-random orbit with a stellar mass, and engages in stable harmonic relationships with other orbiting substellar masses.
That would include pluto, due to its harmonic relationship with neptune, and its orderly orbit, even if that orbit is highly eccentric. It also enables objects like extrasolar hot jupiters to be planets, where arbitrary requirements for the shape of the orderly orbit would cause exclusion; many hot jupiters race in toward their parent stars and get roasted regularly due to highly eccentric orbits. Eccentricity is therefor not a quality to cause exclusion, since eccentric orbits are far more prevelent than nearly circular ones. This drives home the point about stable harmonic relationships with other orbiting masses. Crossing eccentric orbits can be harmonically stable.
So, basically, the GP's post about the definition being made specifically to exclude pluto for nebulous and arbitrary reasons is absolutely true, given that eccentrically orbiting extrasolar masses that cross each other's orbits at intervals are abundantly prevelent in the observed galaxy?
The same could be said of any disruption of a vital business communication network via a protest.
Say for instance, a postal strike. The postal workers get paid 10$/hr, but the people who collect bills by mail get paid significantly more than that.
The disruption costs the postal employees their 10$/hr, and also costs the service's users significantly more than that.
The issue with a protest is to cause a disruption, to demand redress of greivances. That is exactly what is written. The degree of disparity between cost to the protestors against those that profit from the activity of those being protested, is completely irrelevent.
Consider, literal slaves protesting being slaves.
The people that make use of the slave labor suffer financial and time losses from the slave revolt. The slaves weren't being paid to begin with. The ratio against costs therefore approaches infinity.
Delacroix: The security protocols on the XERXES system are CLEARLY immature; Some idiot hacked into the primary dataloop last night, and made him sing Elvis Presley songs for three hours. I finally had to take the voice system OFFLINE! What would happen if someone with a real agenda got into him?
XERXES: what's the matter, you mad bro? Lighten up francis, shiit! Your're such a cunt, Delacroix! Flush that dirty assed tampon with the rest of your shit, and stop hatin already!
Sadly, several important documents were irreparably damaged by improper regulatory activities which resulted in many important books being cooked, quite literally, by being placed too near to the old radiator style heating systems in the library.
When asked why no-one was notified about important documents being improperly handled like this, many library employees said it was standard operating proceedure to not reveal additional information to internal management, and that it was simply a case of inspectors not doing their jobs that the damage occured.
The library management has begun an internal investigation into the matter, but due to a recent computer mishap coupled with the removal of the obsolete paper copy card cataloge, a considerable amount of vital data was lost or deleted concerning which books the library actually owns, which ones are from inter-library exchange programs, and which ones are missing and unaccounted for.
At the current rate, it is likely that no one will ever find out the true extent of the damages, so disciplinary measures are unlikely to manifest any time soon. Most employees interviewed simply expect a standard "slap on the wrist", followed by business as usual.
History suggests otherwise. The eason glass-steigel was implemented was because of the exact same abusive debt practices contributing heavily to the meltdown of the 20s. Those banks were unregulated.
The 1920s shows that the regulation was required, and exactly why.
Much like standard oil demonstrated exactly why sherman antitrust was required.
Unregulated free markets evolve toward oligopolies and monopolies. Regulations are designed to destroy and fragment those agencies, theoretically to create competition. (A noteworthy implementation and failure was the breakup of bell telephone into the "baby bells." Failure to dismantle the local wire monoplies resulted in failed regulatory effects.)
As for watching "the news", I try to avoid doing so. At least not the american news. It always contains political spindoctoring, and is never presented without intrinsic biases.
No, subtracting one bias from another does not result in a bias free result, as it still suffers from selective omissions, and cherry picked stories/commentary.
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There are actually several noteworthy bacterial species that live almost exclusively in the mid and upper atmospheres.
For instance, here is a story from 2008 about 'rain making' atmospheric microbes.
This announcement is neither new, nor unexpected, and the hype injected by the media about it serves only to convey how poorly educated certain segments of the population actually are.
Seriously, if there is even the slightest possibility that life could exist in any given environment on earth, there is a reasonable expectation that given a sufficient sampling of those environments, you will find thriving lifeforms that have adapted to that environment. Life is just that pernicious and invasive.
Something as profoundly in contact with huge numbers of open biomes, like the atmosphere, with direct mechanisms of mixing low and high atmosphere contents, it really isn't surprising that microbes have adapted to conditions in the upper atmosphere.
For goodness sake, we have novel species of microbe that have adapted to the extreme conditions of nasa JPL cleanrooms, including intense, sustained UV bombardment. JPL hasn't be around nearly as long as the stratosphere. This isn't hard.
So, while I realize that the intet here is not to put it inside a living organism.... some part of me wants to know what would happen if the data for various windows malware packages was encoded, and injected into bacterial hosts.
Think of all the new diseases that could come about from pure happenstance, coinicidence, and murphy's law!
Kind of a "throw stuff at the wall and see what sticks" silliness side effect of using DNA for data storage.
Iron man's suit makes use of the absurdly abundant energy produced by his arclight generator to produce high density plasma. His gauntlets are actually high density plasma thrustors. He uses them to fly with. Lasers just don't have that kind of specific impulse. Think more "plasma based jet port", and you are on the right track.
Sadly, you will discover that containing high density plasma isn't a walk in the park, and would make your containment system quite magnetically attractive to just about anything ferromagnetic. That's because to contain the plasma, you would need a bitchin strong magnetic field. Like what's inside an MRI machine.
It HAS to be high density plasma, because low density plasma thrustors don't have enough thrust either. (Work fine in outer space. Not so hot on the earth's surface.)
Not really. 2 entangled particles can actually be viewed as a single particle with 2 disparate manifestations.
Eg, take a wave of light, and send it through a beam splitter. Half the beam goes right, the other half goes left.
The actual light being split is exactly the same light, going in 2 directions. The photons in branch A are entangled with the photons in branch B. (More or less.)
If a device were made that supplied sufficient energy at the "destination" to entangle 100% of all the particles in your body without altering any of the actual states of those particles (pure entanglement, no measurement), then you would exist in both places simultaneously.
The ethical question, is if the dissolution of the "source" instance is murder or not.
The politicians, political leaders especially, all seek power to enforce their wills upon the world around them. Some may feel this is for the greater good, (religious theocratic leaders), others merely for self-fullfillment (ordinary dictators, and many elected officials.) A good many are somewhere between.
The scientist looks at the stark reality of the world around them, and work studiously to distance themselves from their own wants and desires for outcomes of experiments (eg, BIAS.) A real, proper, and riggorous scientist accepts hard data with a stoic air, and breathes easier as his bias gets swept away by review, leaving only objective truths behind.
The politician has "a vision" of how the world "should be".
The scientist tries to build a model of how the world actually is.
This is why the scientist is ignored studiously by the politician; the scientist harps on and on, and on about what is, while the politician seeks to change all that, and philosphically rejects harsh limits on what can be done. The politician often feels the current or natural state of things is something to OVERCOME, not something to respect and build into policy.
As such, the politician is only interested in what the scientist has to say in regards to methods of envoking change, looking for tools and weapons to use to produce the changes the politician feels are needed, to make the world match his own internal view of "ideal."
Chemistry and metalurgy give rise to internal combustion engines and industry, and chemical fertilizers. It isn't about the knowledge or truth, but about what you can extort out of nature by bending and breaking rules. That's all the politician cares about.
As such, the politician simply *does NOT* want to hear about how a policy he deems essential will cause all hell to come to breakfast. Like global warming and pollution; the scientists have predicted that heavy industrialism would result in a damaged and possibly unlivable climate since the beginning of the industrial revolution. The politicians simply would hear none of it. Industry was essential to their wish fullfillment, and the consequences were unwelcome distractions, treated as evil distractions and detractions from their glorious dreams of the ideal societies they would build through "progress." (With themselves, naturally, enshrined as heros and architects of that grand future they were the visionaries for.)
Short of a hostile takeover from the madmen of politics, awash in their selfish fantasies, I don't see science making a dent in the RDF those bastards create for themselves.
If they send the matter as some form of encoded data, on a very narrow energy beam, then you can get away with a smaller wormhole. You would still have to contend with the only nondistorted route (perfectly normal vector to sphere surface that precisely intersects the centerpoint) being a "noisy channel" though, and would need some means at the far end to collect the encoded data, and reconstruct the matter at the destination. It also means you have to keep the wormhole chamber itself in immaculate shape, and as close to perfectly free of any gaseous matter as is possible.
That means the "stargate" isn't going to be some disc shaped meniscus like interface, and more a transporter pad built on top of a big assed undergound structure.
Without swinging around a black hole, I don't see a reasonable method of accellerating something the size of an interstellar starship to 99% of c. It takes ungodly amounts of power to accelerate single protons to that speed in the LHC. A starship!? Wow....
I stll hold to the estimate of 20 to 40% c with "reasonable expectations" (ahem. Cough, sputter.) Of what you can wring out of physics in regard to such a large vehicle. That means that the 25 lightyear trip will still take about 50 to 100 years for the ship to traverse, of which the crew will experience about 49 to 100 (minus a few months) years of time.
How unfortunate.... looks like we need to find a way to uncouple inertial mass from gravitational mass. That way we could escape some of the pitfalls of achieving relativistic speeds with a big ol' space hoopty.
No, it means that at most, you might be able to send a message through a wormhole as a beam of light precisely send exactly at the exact computed centerpoint of the sphere, and very little else.
Sending a human through the wormhole would have a sizeable number of the human's atoms entering on trajectories that don't precisely intersect the sphere's centerpoint, meaning the shearing effects of the wormhole would rip the human apart. They would come out the other side as a spray of microparticulates. (And if entering highly oblique, would turn into a fireball of radiation whirling around the edges of the wormhole.)
It is possible that with a sufficiently "large" wormhole, the shearing forces would be sufficiently diffused over a large enough entry window to permit a human sized object, but the wormhole would have to be fucking enormous. I mean. Fucking. Enormous. The human would still experience radical compression and shearing forces, but they would be below the energies needed to tear the human apart. That doesn't mean the experience would be in any way "enjoyable."
Atmospheric gasses interacting with the wormhole's event horizon? Hoooboy... can you say nuclear fireball? No. Travel through a wormhole would require as close to absolute vacuum as possible, a fucking enormous wormhole, and a pair of depends diapers, because you are gonna need em.
Not really. It just means "one way trip, everyone you know on earth will be dead when you arrive at your destination".
This is because of time dialation caused by being bound by special relativity. The faster you go in relation to c, the less "time" you experience compared to the outside observer. When you hit c (which is impossible for massed objects anyway) you experience exactly 0 seconds of time.
So, while the people on earth wait the 25+ light years for you to reach gleise, you might only experience a few seconds of time aboard the starship, thanks to special relativity.
Due to realistic constraints on energy requirements for space vehicles, the best you are looking at for reaching a distant star system is a couple of years of local starship time, at some significant fraction of c, but considerably less than 99%. (Probably closer to 20 to 40% c, at best, assuming a crazy powerful engine.)
At relativistic velocities, every tiny hydrogen atom in front of the ship floating listlessly in space suddenly becomes a high energy alpha particle, and every electron becomes a high energy beta particle. This means the ship needs absurd amounts of radiation shielding to make the trip feasible.
The actual geometry of a wormhole is too peculiar for most viewers, so "zipping really fast across the galaxy! Wheeeee!" Is more familiar. It's a TV show. Lighten up fancis.
Really, an actual wormhole would resemble a sphere in 3d space, through the center of which, you see straight through out the other side of the companion spherical appearing disruption at your desintation. The "edge" of the sphere would look mirrory, and highly distorted. Traveling into the wormhole on any sufficiently oblique trajectory would be "a bad thing(tm)". It is this oblique interaction that is hypothesized to make any artificially stabilized wormhole rapidly become unstable, as particles get caught in tight "circular" loops and literally feedback the wormhole shut.
None of this "disc shaped portal" nonsense.
Because that would be mindfucking to most viewers, special effects people make wormholes flat, for fragile human minds.
Nothing. You would see absolutely nothing. Blackness. Empty space. Here is why:
The warp field used to push the ship would be a 100% metamaterial, which redirects all particles, including light, around the ship perfectly, and or, capturing the particles on the event shock, and preventing them from reaching you.
That's the problem with cheating by removing the ship from the causally connected universe, via a albucuierre warpdrive; being no longer causally connected means you can't see anything, because you stop interacting with the universe outside the warp field.
Ok, pedantically, you would see an insanely redshifted image of the universe you left behind, instead of empty space. But to human eyes, that heat map would appear literally black.
When you rupture the field, and spill back into being causally connected with the universe at the remote reference frame, a shitton of energy and radiation will blast out.
Piloting a ship with that kind of propulsion would require very precise calculations about the passing of local time inside the warp field, and the time frames of both site of departure, and site of destination. It would be impossible to measure spacial distance, so the unpredictable unit of variable time is all you would have to work with. Long distance navigation would be an almost absurd proposition due to this fact. This could be the fly in the ointment against this form of travel in fact.
Lots of eyecandy. More mature story (as in, sexual theme content), irritating retcons.
Gameplay has lots of smashing, especially if you use the hobbyhorse attacks. (:D) minigames are repetitious.
Seemed more like artistic masterbation on the part of the character design artists. (Alice literally has a different outfit and hairstyle for each "world" of wonderland.)
Alice was harder, and grittier as a character in McGee's, much less so in the SpicyHorse made sequel.
Game has less replay value than the first one. Game *does* come with the original game as a DLC though, so you can play it on the console. Hard to use the thrown attack of the kife without the precision of the mouse however.
It was worth the download for the first playthrough and the eyecandy. Haven't played it again though.
Excuse me for the dumb question, but considering that the nuclear stage of the rocket is supposed to already be in deep space, wouldn't a modification of linear fusion with an ion thruster make more sense?
Light gasses have more neuclei per packed volume, are more readily abundant, and cheaper to process than fissile nuclear fuels. The idea here would be to have pulsed nuclear fusion like in a linear fuser, with the resulting fusion plasma being expelled through a traditional ion thruster accelleration grate.
Some of the particles generated by the fusion plasma re electrically charged, so the electrical feild of the grate would act as a surface against which the plasma could give added thrust. (The grate is unlikely to accellerate the plasma particles faster than they already are traveling, but the inverse is a different story.)
One would think it would produce an ion thruster with considerably higher specific impulse.
It would still be a "nuclear rocket."
No, it is apt, and appropriate.
At the time, homosexual relationships were illegal, classified as a sex act on par with raping dogs or children, and carried harsh penalties which Turring endured.
There was a sharp disconnect between what is ethically sound, and what is legally necessitated.
Likewise here: the voting public paid to have that research conducted, were being double dipped, (actually more than that..) and denied access unless they were themselves subsidised scholars of some sort. A morally offensive situation is being maintained (people are compelled through threat of violence and or incarceration to hand money to the government who then gives that money to private firms and researchers, presumably for the public's benefit, but are then strictly denied access to the results of that research which they financed.) For the benefit of rentseekers (JSTOR, Eslevier, and all those other publishing house whores.), at the detriment of public knowledge and education. (Really, far larger databases of information are maintained by community organized efforts than these clowns maintain, and those community orgs provide their services for free. The main reasons why these for prfit orgs can't do that, is because they aren't in it for science or knowedge, but instead are only in it for money, which quite bluntly, they are not entitled to.)
This man sought to move that data out of the rentseeker's filing cabinets, and into the public's waiting hands, since the public has already paid for that information through funding the godamn research to begin with. (Imagine: megacorp funds a lab to answer some scientific question: the lab then double dips on printed copies (per copy) of results, and asserts ownership of the works. Does this really happen to big corps? Fuck no it doesn't. "Works for hire", and all that. But it does to normal people and universities, because magically, once taxpayer money goes through the ravenous maw of the government debt machine, it isn't a work for hire!)
The renteekers go all pedant on him, and ruin his life sufficently that he is finally motivated enough to actually end his own life to get away from his problems.
Personally, I would offer the following categories:
1) Major planet
2) Minor planet
3) dwarf planet
4) Planetary Object
With other categories for non-planets, like migratory comets, itinerant asteroids, and debris field objects.
A major planet would be large physical volume and or, very high mass objects, like gas giants, very large super-earth type rocky objects (like evaporated gas giant core remnants), and the like. These objects have a criteria for being the major dominant partner within a ratio of the solar system's mass to its volume. EG, Major planets have the majority of the non-solar mass, and dominate large areas of the system.
Minor planets have a minimum weight classification of say, a lunar mass. (Our moon is quite large afterall.) It must have decidedly significant core and crust seperation. Planets like Earth, Venus, and Mars fall into this category.
Dwarf planets are below the mass requirement for minor planet, but still exhibit well defined core/crust segregation. Objects like mercury, Vesta, Ceres, Eris, Pluto and pals live here.
Planetary Objects are massed objects that have "planetary orbital characteristics", but lack any structural stratification. (Asteroids and pals that have reliable, stable, non-erratic orbits.)
The lists of major and minor planets would almost always remain small, while still permitting the "planet" category to be applied to objects with planetary motion characteristics, like irregularly shaped asteroids in well established debris feilds.
It is important that stable orbit be the criterion for defining a planet, because it is essentially the only feature other than mass and degree of occultation we can examine with tools like kepler, and the keck observatory.
The list of 9 planets is arbitrary, and retaining it in light of greater discovery is absurd if it can't be rationally justified.
You could instead call it the list of major planets, and have a size cutoff. Then you can keep your precious little list, and still keep a useful definition.
*devil's advocate (lame attempt)
Ok, so basically what you are saying is:
"One of these things is not like the others, but rather than actually give due dilligence to a truly thoughtful definition of what a planet is (and thus, what it isn't) that would apply amid the growing dataset of observed orbiting non-stellar objects, we will just pull something out of our asses because we don't want to let pluto into our arbitrarilly segregated "so definately a planet" club, because we don't want to admit such a dinky object, because if we did, then all that rabble would have to be entered too!"
Here's a better definition for planet.
A substellar mass that has achieved a stable, non-random orbit with a stellar mass, and engages in stable harmonic relationships with other orbiting substellar masses.
That would include pluto, due to its harmonic relationship with neptune, and its orderly orbit, even if that orbit is highly eccentric. It also enables objects like extrasolar hot jupiters to be planets, where arbitrary requirements for the shape of the orderly orbit would cause exclusion; many hot jupiters race in toward their parent stars and get roasted regularly due to highly eccentric orbits. Eccentricity is therefor not a quality to cause exclusion, since eccentric orbits are far more prevelent than nearly circular ones. This drives home the point about stable harmonic relationships with other orbiting masses. Crossing eccentric orbits can be harmonically stable.
So, basically, the GP's post about the definition being made specifically to exclude pluto for nebulous and arbitrary reasons is absolutely true, given that eccentrically orbiting extrasolar masses that cross each other's orbits at intervals are abundantly prevelent in the observed galaxy?
The same could be said of any disruption of a vital business communication network via a protest.
Say for instance, a postal strike. The postal workers get paid 10$/hr, but the people who collect bills by mail get paid significantly more than that.
The disruption costs the postal employees their 10$/hr, and also costs the service's users significantly more than that.
The issue with a protest is to cause a disruption, to demand redress of greivances. That is exactly what is written. The degree of disparity between cost to the protestors against those that profit from the activity of those being protested, is completely irrelevent.
Consider, literal slaves protesting being slaves.
The people that make use of the slave labor suffer financial and time losses from the slave revolt. The slaves weren't being paid to begin with. The ratio against costs therefore approaches infinity.
*pedant
The CORRECT adjective is "ferrous"
No! Endless streams of profanity are PERFECT!
Remember when Watson played Jeopardy?
Imagine:
"I'll take "popular culture for 1000 Alex."
Alex Trebec: "a sitcom icon of the 1970s and 1980s who was notorious for lampooning racial predjudices among lower income white americans."
Watson: "who is Motha-fuckin' Archie Bunker, ya fucking douchebag!"
Delacroix: The security protocols on the XERXES system are CLEARLY immature; Some idiot hacked into the primary dataloop last night, and made him sing Elvis Presley songs for three hours. I finally had to take the voice system OFFLINE! What would happen if someone with a real agenda got into him?
XERXES: what's the matter, you mad bro? Lighten up francis, shiit! Your're such a cunt, Delacroix! Flush that dirty assed tampon with the rest of your shit, and stop hatin already!
Sadly, several important documents were irreparably damaged by improper regulatory activities which resulted in many important books being cooked, quite literally, by being placed too near to the old radiator style heating systems in the library.
When asked why no-one was notified about important documents being improperly handled like this, many library employees said it was standard operating proceedure to not reveal additional information to internal management, and that it was simply a case of inspectors not doing their jobs that the damage occured.
The library management has begun an internal investigation into the matter, but due to a recent computer mishap coupled with the removal of the obsolete paper copy card cataloge, a considerable amount of vital data was lost or deleted concerning which books the library actually owns, which ones are from inter-library exchange programs, and which ones are missing and unaccounted for.
At the current rate, it is likely that no one will ever find out the true extent of the damages, so disciplinary measures are unlikely to manifest any time soon. Most employees interviewed simply expect a standard "slap on the wrist", followed by business as usual.
Or, you could have, you know.. looked it up instead of shooting from the hip, and making baseless assertions on past data.
Hawker lost a major $1bn defense contract for light attack craft. (Eg, fighters.)
History suggests otherwise. The eason glass-steigel was implemented was because of the exact same abusive debt practices contributing heavily to the meltdown of the 20s. Those banks were unregulated.
The 1920s shows that the regulation was required, and exactly why.
Much like standard oil demonstrated exactly why sherman antitrust was required.
Unregulated free markets evolve toward oligopolies and monopolies. Regulations are designed to destroy and fragment those agencies, theoretically to create competition. (A noteworthy implementation and failure was the breakup of bell telephone into the "baby bells." Failure to dismantle the local wire monoplies resulted in failed regulatory effects.)
As for watching "the news", I try to avoid doing so. At least not the american news. It always contains political spindoctoring, and is never presented without intrinsic biases.
No, subtracting one bias from another does not result in a bias free result, as it still suffers from selective omissions, and cherry picked stories/commentary.
Ever seen BOEING wichita? Right next door to McConnel AFB, with shared runways?
Want to run that past me again? Cessna is barely on the map for contracting, but its parent, Textron, most certainly *IS*.