The mirrors are likely actively cooled. Putting an active cooling system over an entire airplane would be prohibitively expensive and extremely heavy, and would make you stand out quite clearly on infrared.
I do think the ship models in the original Star Wars movies were more convincing, perhaps *because* of their natural imperfections, but I wouldn't expect to see a return to that style of effects in the foreseeable future.
IMO, the thing that makes a lot of CGI ships look less "real" is that the designers seem unable to resist adding "flashy" bits and all kinds of wiggly moving little details to them--details that serve no purpose and that you wouldn't expect to see on a "real" ship, but are there just to make said ship look "busier" and therefore flashier. When you're using scale models, you can't do that.
I think one concept that keeps coming up is to mount it in the F-35. As I understand it, the plan is to use the B model (STOVL one), remove the lift fan, and put a turreted laser system there. The power take off shaft from the engine (which used to drive the lift fan) would drive a generator to power the laser.
Depends on the state. In Georgia, for example, it is generally accepted that you can openly carry a rifle or shotgun without a license, since the law doesn't prohibit that. Carrying a handgun (open or concealed) or concealing a rifle/shotgun (if you physically can, anyway) is specifically prohibited, unless you posess a Georgia firearms license (functionally, a carry permit).
Of course, concealing a knife is still illegal, even if you do have a GFL. People legally carrying handguns have been arrested for having a knife in their pocket.
If the government insurance is as good as the private insurance but cheaper, what's the problem?
Thing is, it isn't. To provide equivalent care, and in the absence of other changes, simply changing who cuts the check doesn't change the actual cost of the care. Remember, there's no such thing as a free lunch--the cost will remain about the same, the only difference will be who is paying for it. And simply saying "make the government pay for it" doesn't make it cheaper.
The problem is cost. The bill does not solve that problem.
In 36 years in this country neither I nor anyone I know of has ever been shocked in that manner. Yes it's conceivable and I'm sure someone has done it somewhere but it really just isn't a problem.
I've done it trying to plug things in in the dark. Hit one prong with my thumb and the other with a finger. That is a very odd, wierd, and slightly painful feeling, something like whacking your funny bone but without the pain part.
That already exists. Cruise missiles, and to a lesser extent, smart bombs. Leave the launch platform, fly a preprogrammed route, blow up when you get there.
And that's pretty much what the first generation of full-autonomous UAVs will be. Their job will be to fly into a given volume of space (possibly during a particular window of time) and release pre-targeted GPS-guided bombs. They'll then return to base. Essentially, it's just a cruise missile with a reusable airframe and some ability to detect and react to (ie, dodge/decoy) threats.
I'd expect the next step to be ones that loiter and attack immediate threats (SAM targeting radars, for example). Such a thing already kind of exists; modern anti-radiation missiles like HARM and ALARM can be launched in a preemtive mode; they fly up and wait for a radar to come online, then dive down on top of it.
I doubt that a full-autonomous AI that seeks out, identifies, and attacks its own targets independently will be in service any time in the forseeable future, though.
TELLING someone to think and behave a certain way tends to not work very well, unless they're exposed to vaccination-like scenarios where they can make mistakes and adapt (without the dying and maiming part).
Too many people forget this part.
It's easy to sit there in the comfort of your computer chair and talk about how one should react to various emergencies. It's easy to sit there and say "well, this is what you should do, it's only four steps, how hard can it be?" But unless you sit there, and practice it over, and over, and over again, it's all just theory.
Take a look at how the professionals do it. Airline pilots, for example, don't just get a basic "here's how this airplane works, now go fly it" kind of training. First, they spend a couple of weeks of book learning and going over normal operation of the airplane. Then, they spend quite a bit of time in simulators where the instructors throw every problem they can think of at them, usually several at once, in bad weather. A sim session might have an engine failure on takeoff, followed by an electrical fault, loss of primary hydraulics, and instrumentation failure. Oh, and a simulated medical emergency. And it's dark, with thunderstorms and windshear on the approach. The crews get used to handling such problems and will rehearse the actions to deal with them. Even low-time private pilots get put through engine failure drills on a regular basis.
Astronauts do the same thing, though they spend even more time in simulators. Go read the stories about some of the sim sessions for Apollo and Shuttle training. See how many times the crews simulated aborts, malfunctions, and all that. See how many times they "died" in the process. Very, very interesting.
Look at a special-ops or SWAT team. They spend hours practicing with their weapons and dealing with simulated malfunctions like jams and misfires so that their response is instinctual. You don't want to be sitting there fiddling around trying to figure out why your gun didn't go bang when rounds are flying at you--much better to run through the clearing drill real quick, and if that doesn't work, you transition to a backup.
The average person doesn't get this kind of training when getting a driver's license, or even in driver's ed. Mechanical failures like a stuck gas pedal or loss of brakes are extremely rare in modern cars; it's quite possible to drive for years and never experience a mechanical problem with the car. Even if they've been told what to do in a classroom setting, the lesson doesn't really kick in until they've handled it in a car under something approximating real-world conditions. And if you take someone, even someone with a decent understanding of how a car works and several years of driving under their belt, and throw a sudden problem like a stuck wide-open throttle at them, they're most likely going to get a massive adrenaline dump and freak out for at least a second or two until the rational part of the brain kicks back in. And even then, any response isn't "instinctual"--it is learned, whether by reasoning or through practice.
Don't get on an airliner, then. Quite a number of them are fully computerized (flight controls, engines, brakes, wheel steering, etc) with no mechanical backup.
Slashdot user C: Did it ever occur to either of you that (a)the same technology we use to colonize other planets can help fix climate problems on earth, and (b) trashing earth is not a prerequesite for space colonization? Indeed, running conservation and colonization programs in parallel can help preserve earth rather than destroy it! That's why you go out and colonize, specifically so you don't have to use up all the earthbound resources.
You're really over-thinking this. The point is that GP seemed to be questioning why people (in the US, at least) associated socialism with the Soviet brand of communism; my suggestion was that it was the Soviets themselves who made that association. I'm not making a detailed political and economic analysis, just pointing out that if you walk around long enough saying "I am a socialist republic", people are going to start associating that with you.
But that doesn't fit the quote nearly as well:) And by "strong" I mean those who are willing to make the push and do the hard work to get out and make it happen, rather than the "meek" who sit back moaning about it being hard, or evil, or irresponsible, or refusing to look outside of Earth as if they're within a magic bubble which we have been divinely ordered never to leave.
So yes--the stars will be taken by the strong, intelligent ones.
I think it was during the 50s McCarthyism when Socialism somehow got equated to Communism
I think the "somehow" is neatly explained by the translation of CCCP (Soyuz Sovetskikh Sotsialisticheskikh Respublik), which becomes "Union of Soviet Socialist Republics".
The Soviets constantly referred to themselves as both socialist and communist; is it any wonder that people associated those terms with them?
I'd suspect this blind loyalty is due to two things.
First, a lot of people seem to be raised and indoctrinated with a particular viewpoint even as young children. From a young age, they're told repeatedly how bad the "other guys" are, and told what they need to believe in. Rather than develop their own views based on experience and reason, they're basically told "here's what you're supposed to think, now justify it".
Second are the people who develop their own opinion on one issue, find the party/group that supports it, and then blindly supports the rest of those views without even looking at them.
Frankly, I'm sick of all the partisan bullshit in this country. We have representatives being lambasted for representing the views of their constituents instead of marching the party line. We have people expressing virulent hatred for people of the "other party" when they can't even give a reasonable explanation of an issue to begin with--all they know is the filmmaker/talk-radio host/community organizer/pastor told them it's bad, and by $deity, that's what they're going to believe.
This is the US we're talking about... everyone focuses on "ideological purity" and trying to get everyone to fall in line to one of two self-contradictory world-views which are theoretically "owned" by the major political parties. Terms like "progressive", "conservative", "liberal", etc. are essentially meaningless; nobody agrees on what they mean, and the usually-accepted general definitions just don't really make sense in light of the other definitions of those terms. Anyone who doesn't toe the hard end of the party line is branded a "traitor to the party" or a "_____-in-name-only", even (or especially) if their constituents support them on that issue. This blind party-first mentality is so bad that party A could propose items straight out of the platform of party B, and yet party B would still oppose it because they didn't put it out themselves.
There's little to no rational thought involved in US politics, especially at the individual citizen's level. People are generally either indoctrinated by their parents/peers to hold blind alleigance to a given party, or they hold a strong view on one belief, choose the party that is popularly believed to support it, and then just kind of fall in line with the party line. Very few people really sit down and examine multiple separate issues; the entrenched two-party system and winner-takes-all voting systems virtually eliminate any real choice from the system.
Unfortunately, the majority of the US population is stupid, emotional, and easily swayed by inane statements (see: "think of the children!", "_______ is a Nazi/socialist/fascist/racist/communist/traitor", FUD, "_____ just wants $horrible_consequence to happen", "_______ is un-American", etc). They're quite willing to believe portrayals of "the other guys" as whacko extremists while excusing almost any action of those they identify with.
On a personal level, my political views tend to confuse most people, as they don't follow the tradtional (and really f'ing stupid) "left-right, R-or-D" continuum. Some issues I'm considered far left, others far right, and most somewhere in the middle. And nothing annoys me more than for somebody to assume the other 99% of my views based on support or opposition to one issue.
If you're right that a lot of police officers shoot rarely, that's pretty scary.
Quite a number of them only shoot the minimum required to qualify. I wouldn't be surprised if many of said officers didn't maintain their weapons properly, either.
I'd guess that the average firearms enthusiast/CCL holder probably shoots a fair bit more than most police officers. The officers that do make the effort shoot a lot typically have to do it on their own dollar, especially with department budget cuts and increasing ammo costs.
Were I to guess, I'd think that the backdoor routine or whatever would be tucked inside the signal-processing unit of the radar. When the radar picked up specific signals from, say, a jamming aircraft, the backdoor would kick in and shut the radar down.
Alternatively, there might not have been a back door so much as an unknown-to-the-Syrians bug that the Israelis knew about and exploited... hit the radar with a precise return signal that triggered a buffer overflow or something like that, maybe.
Ground spoilers, like auto-brake, must be manually armed. Thrust reversers don't deploy automatically--those are manually-controlled with safety interlocks to prevent in-air deployment*. Gear and TRs are things that will ruin your day in a big hurry if they extend/deploy when you don't want them to, so they're not left up to a computer and their actuation handles are impossible to mistake for anything else.
I know the big issue is the distraction, not the automation. I just know that the general public is very ignorant of aviation and likely to "know" things that aren't true. I try to correct those misconceptions (like the impression that the autopilot is just a big Staples "Easy" button that the pilots press and then just sit back and relax).
*Exceptions that do allow in-air TR use: DC-8, C-5, C-17, Il-62
Actually, the autopilot can take off, fly the complex route, and land at the destination airport all without human control. It will also avoid other aircraft on the way.
Actually, it can't do all that. It can't operate the landing gear, flaps, or speedbrakes, and it doesn't have automatic TCAS ability (see the 737-Legacy collision in Brazil)*. And that "complex route" is programmed in by the human pilot.
I may not have stayed at a Holiday Inn Express last night, but I'm an engineer who tests flight control systems and avionics/autopilots for a living. I'm also a private pilot with business jet and airliner simulator time.
*The A380 just (as in the past couple months) certified an autopilot/flight-director to TCAS mode. This appears to be the only such certified system.
Why is it everyone assumes (like you did) that "trash earth and leave" is the only way to do it? Did it ever occur to anyone that maybe it just might be a good idea to leave earth and use resources from Mars and asteroids instead of trashing earth? That maybe the entire point of space colonization could be to expand and survive while leaving earth in good shape? That maybe the very technologies we'd develop in a large-scale colonization effort might be exactly the same ones that would help us reverse environmental damage? Fixing any damage we have done to the planet does not require abandoning it, self-elimination, or massive standard-of-living reductions. It can be done through technology and expansion, but taking that path doesn't satisfy the near-religious assertion of some self-proclaimed "environmentalists" that it's not really a good fix unless someone's suffering.
This nonsense that we need to just stay here and withdraw in our shells like hermit crabs or scared turtles, and never leave or go beyond our planet because doing so is "bad" is the same controlling line of BS that religious leaders fed to the masses (Tower of Babel) and that modern political/economic leaders feed to everyone to maintain their status.
You don't know what the hell you're talking about. Autopilots don't just "do everything", they don't make decisions or navigate themselves. The pilots input the desired course, the pilots monitor and arm/disarm the autopilot, the pilots make all of the decisions. Autopilots are not do-all AIs; they're more like a glorified cruise control.
Well, Delta and Atlas don't keep former shuttle employees busy. And everyone knows that reusing large components of something entirely different will make the end result cheaper... because you never have to do rework and the reused components are always optimal for the design.
Oh, I'm sorry, I'll wipe up the extra sarcasm I spilled there...
You seem to be proposing moving large numbers of people from earth to some other planet, in order to save resources. How would moving large numbers of people save resources?
Yes, it takes more of earth's resources in the initial push, but in the long run you end up using less (of earth's resources, at least) because you can start taking advantage of things like asteroids and in-situ resources (compressing/converting atmospheres, etc). It takes a higher initial investment, but the payoff is bigger. In the very long term, you could wind up with an on-earth population smaller than the current one, but with a total human population much larger.
Overall, resource usage is still higher, though you have a bigger population. And rather than using up resources on earth (which is still a nice place to live) you're mining the dead, lifeless rocks we know as asteroids.
It's kinda hard to play real-time interactive games when you're dealing with round-trip signal times of up to 40 minutes... I think that would knock out MMO games. Now something like split-screen Halo, on the other hand, doesn't require that, but is more likely to forment anger amongst the crew.
On the gripping hand, the old naval solution would probably work best. That is, keep the crew occupied with enough busywork that they don't have time to piss each other off. This was the standard practice on old sailing men of war; you needed large crews for combat/damage repair and for certain shipkeeping tasks, but otherwise they sat around with little to do. Hence, rituals of inspection, holystoning the deck, etc. This is also why modern crew-reduction initiatives on ships can backfire; smaller crews have a harder time performing damage control than larger ones.
Anyways, for a Mars mission you need a lot of crew for the surface exploration in order to get as much data as possible; the cruise phases (for the most part) have little for them to do. They'd likely be occoupied running different experiments and performing regular maintenance, and exercising (a lot) rather than just being couch kudzu.
Slashdot Mirror
The mirrors are likely actively cooled. Putting an active cooling system over an entire airplane would be prohibitively expensive and extremely heavy, and would make you stand out quite clearly on infrared.
Some come here to shit and stink
and pick crabs off their balls;
I come here to sit and think
and write stuff on the walls
I do think the ship models in the original Star Wars movies were more convincing, perhaps *because* of their natural imperfections, but I wouldn't expect to see a return to that style of effects in the foreseeable future.
IMO, the thing that makes a lot of CGI ships look less "real" is that the designers seem unable to resist adding "flashy" bits and all kinds of wiggly moving little details to them--details that serve no purpose and that you wouldn't expect to see on a "real" ship, but are there just to make said ship look "busier" and therefore flashier. When you're using scale models, you can't do that.
Battlestar did well in this department, IMO.
I think one concept that keeps coming up is to mount it in the F-35. As I understand it, the plan is to use the B model (STOVL one), remove the lift fan, and put a turreted laser system there. The power take off shaft from the engine (which used to drive the lift fan) would drive a generator to power the laser.
Depends on the state. In Georgia, for example, it is generally accepted that you can openly carry a rifle or shotgun without a license, since the law doesn't prohibit that. Carrying a handgun (open or concealed) or concealing a rifle/shotgun (if you physically can, anyway) is specifically prohibited, unless you posess a Georgia firearms license (functionally, a carry permit).
Of course, concealing a knife is still illegal, even if you do have a GFL. People legally carrying handguns have been arrested for having a knife in their pocket.
If the government insurance is as good as the private insurance but cheaper, what's the problem?
Thing is, it isn't. To provide equivalent care, and in the absence of other changes, simply changing who cuts the check doesn't change the actual cost of the care. Remember, there's no such thing as a free lunch--the cost will remain about the same, the only difference will be who is paying for it. And simply saying "make the government pay for it" doesn't make it cheaper.
The problem is cost. The bill does not solve that problem.
In 36 years in this country neither I nor anyone I know of has ever been shocked in that manner. Yes it's conceivable and I'm sure someone has done it somewhere but it really just isn't a problem.
I've done it trying to plug things in in the dark. Hit one prong with my thumb and the other with a finger. That is a very odd, wierd, and slightly painful feeling, something like whacking your funny bone but without the pain part.
That already exists. Cruise missiles, and to a lesser extent, smart bombs.
Leave the launch platform, fly a preprogrammed route, blow up when you get there.
And that's pretty much what the first generation of full-autonomous UAVs will be. Their job will be to fly into a given volume of space (possibly during a particular window of time) and release pre-targeted GPS-guided bombs. They'll then return to base. Essentially, it's just a cruise missile with a reusable airframe and some ability to detect and react to (ie, dodge/decoy) threats.
I'd expect the next step to be ones that loiter and attack immediate threats (SAM targeting radars, for example). Such a thing already kind of exists; modern anti-radiation missiles like HARM and ALARM can be launched in a preemtive mode; they fly up and wait for a radar to come online, then dive down on top of it.
I doubt that a full-autonomous AI that seeks out, identifies, and attacks its own targets independently will be in service any time in the forseeable future, though.
TELLING someone to think and behave a certain way tends to not work very well, unless they're exposed to vaccination-like scenarios where they can make mistakes and adapt (without the dying and maiming part).
Too many people forget this part.
It's easy to sit there in the comfort of your computer chair and talk about how one should react to various emergencies. It's easy to sit there and say "well, this is what you should do, it's only four steps, how hard can it be?" But unless you sit there, and practice it over, and over, and over again, it's all just theory.
Take a look at how the professionals do it. Airline pilots, for example, don't just get a basic "here's how this airplane works, now go fly it" kind of training. First, they spend a couple of weeks of book learning and going over normal operation of the airplane. Then, they spend quite a bit of time in simulators where the instructors throw every problem they can think of at them, usually several at once, in bad weather. A sim session might have an engine failure on takeoff, followed by an electrical fault, loss of primary hydraulics, and instrumentation failure. Oh, and a simulated medical emergency. And it's dark, with thunderstorms and windshear on the approach. The crews get used to handling such problems and will rehearse the actions to deal with them. Even low-time private pilots get put through engine failure drills on a regular basis.
Astronauts do the same thing, though they spend even more time in simulators. Go read the stories about some of the sim sessions for Apollo and Shuttle training. See how many times the crews simulated aborts, malfunctions, and all that. See how many times they "died" in the process. Very, very interesting.
Look at a special-ops or SWAT team. They spend hours practicing with their weapons and dealing with simulated malfunctions like jams and misfires so that their response is instinctual. You don't want to be sitting there fiddling around trying to figure out why your gun didn't go bang when rounds are flying at you--much better to run through the clearing drill real quick, and if that doesn't work, you transition to a backup.
The average person doesn't get this kind of training when getting a driver's license, or even in driver's ed. Mechanical failures like a stuck gas pedal or loss of brakes are extremely rare in modern cars; it's quite possible to drive for years and never experience a mechanical problem with the car. Even if they've been told what to do in a classroom setting, the lesson doesn't really kick in until they've handled it in a car under something approximating real-world conditions. And if you take someone, even someone with a decent understanding of how a car works and several years of driving under their belt, and throw a sudden problem like a stuck wide-open throttle at them, they're most likely going to get a massive adrenaline dump and freak out for at least a second or two until the rational part of the brain kicks back in. And even then, any response isn't "instinctual"--it is learned, whether by reasoning or through practice.
Don't get on an airliner, then. Quite a number of them are fully computerized (flight controls, engines, brakes, wheel steering, etc) with no mechanical backup.
Slashdot user C: Did it ever occur to either of you that (a)the same technology we use to colonize other planets can help fix climate problems on earth, and (b) trashing earth is not a prerequesite for space colonization? Indeed, running conservation and colonization programs in parallel can help preserve earth rather than destroy it! That's why you go out and colonize, specifically so you don't have to use up all the earthbound resources.
You're really over-thinking this. The point is that GP seemed to be questioning why people (in the US, at least) associated socialism with the Soviet brand of communism; my suggestion was that it was the Soviets themselves who made that association. I'm not making a detailed political and economic analysis, just pointing out that if you walk around long enough saying "I am a socialist republic", people are going to start associating that with you.
Also, only the intelligent can take the stars
But that doesn't fit the quote nearly as well :) And by "strong" I mean those who are willing to make the push and do the hard work to get out and make it happen, rather than the "meek" who sit back moaning about it being hard, or evil, or irresponsible, or refusing to look outside of Earth as if they're within a magic bubble which we have been divinely ordered never to leave.
So yes--the stars will be taken by the strong, intelligent ones.
I think it was during the 50s McCarthyism when Socialism somehow got equated to Communism
I think the "somehow" is neatly explained by the translation of CCCP (Soyuz Sovetskikh Sotsialisticheskikh Respublik), which becomes "Union of Soviet Socialist Republics".
The Soviets constantly referred to themselves as both socialist and communist; is it any wonder that people associated those terms with them?
I'd suspect this blind loyalty is due to two things.
First, a lot of people seem to be raised and indoctrinated with a particular viewpoint even as young children. From a young age, they're told repeatedly how bad the "other guys" are, and told what they need to believe in. Rather than develop their own views based on experience and reason, they're basically told "here's what you're supposed to think, now justify it".
Second are the people who develop their own opinion on one issue, find the party/group that supports it, and then blindly supports the rest of those views without even looking at them.
Frankly, I'm sick of all the partisan bullshit in this country. We have representatives being lambasted for representing the views of their constituents instead of marching the party line. We have people expressing virulent hatred for people of the "other party" when they can't even give a reasonable explanation of an issue to begin with--all they know is the filmmaker/talk-radio host/community organizer/pastor told them it's bad, and by $deity, that's what they're going to believe.
This is the US we're talking about... everyone focuses on "ideological purity" and trying to get everyone to fall in line to one of two self-contradictory world-views which are theoretically "owned" by the major political parties. Terms like "progressive", "conservative", "liberal", etc. are essentially meaningless; nobody agrees on what they mean, and the usually-accepted general definitions just don't really make sense in light of the other definitions of those terms. Anyone who doesn't toe the hard end of the party line is branded a "traitor to the party" or a "_____-in-name-only", even (or especially) if their constituents support them on that issue. This blind party-first mentality is so bad that party A could propose items straight out of the platform of party B, and yet party B would still oppose it because they didn't put it out themselves.
There's little to no rational thought involved in US politics, especially at the individual citizen's level. People are generally either indoctrinated by their parents/peers to hold blind alleigance to a given party, or they hold a strong view on one belief, choose the party that is popularly believed to support it, and then just kind of fall in line with the party line. Very few people really sit down and examine multiple separate issues; the entrenched two-party system and winner-takes-all voting systems virtually eliminate any real choice from the system.
Unfortunately, the majority of the US population is stupid, emotional, and easily swayed by inane statements (see: "think of the children!", "_______ is a Nazi/socialist/fascist/racist/communist/traitor", FUD, "_____ just wants $horrible_consequence to happen", "_______ is un-American", etc). They're quite willing to believe portrayals of "the other guys" as whacko extremists while excusing almost any action of those they identify with.
On a personal level, my political views tend to confuse most people, as they don't follow the tradtional (and really f'ing stupid) "left-right, R-or-D" continuum. Some issues I'm considered far left, others far right, and most somewhere in the middle. And nothing annoys me more than for somebody to assume the other 99% of my views based on support or opposition to one issue.
If you're right that a lot of police officers shoot rarely, that's pretty scary.
Quite a number of them only shoot the minimum required to qualify. I wouldn't be surprised if many of said officers didn't maintain their weapons properly, either.
I'd guess that the average firearms enthusiast/CCL holder probably shoots a fair bit more than most police officers. The officers that do make the effort shoot a lot typically have to do it on their own dollar, especially with department budget cuts and increasing ammo costs.
Were I to guess, I'd think that the backdoor routine or whatever would be tucked inside the signal-processing unit of the radar. When the radar picked up specific signals from, say, a jamming aircraft, the backdoor would kick in and shut the radar down.
Alternatively, there might not have been a back door so much as an unknown-to-the-Syrians bug that the Israelis knew about and exploited... hit the radar with a precise return signal that triggered a buffer overflow or something like that, maybe.
Ground spoilers, like auto-brake, must be manually armed. Thrust reversers don't deploy automatically--those are manually-controlled with safety interlocks to prevent in-air deployment*. Gear and TRs are things that will ruin your day in a big hurry if they extend/deploy when you don't want them to, so they're not left up to a computer and their actuation handles are impossible to mistake for anything else.
I know the big issue is the distraction, not the automation. I just know that the general public is very ignorant of aviation and likely to "know" things that aren't true. I try to correct those misconceptions (like the impression that the autopilot is just a big Staples "Easy" button that the pilots press and then just sit back and relax).
*Exceptions that do allow in-air TR use: DC-8, C-5, C-17, Il-62
Actually, the autopilot can take off, fly the complex route, and land at the destination airport all without human control. It will also avoid other aircraft on the way.
Actually, it can't do all that. It can't operate the landing gear, flaps, or speedbrakes, and it doesn't have automatic TCAS ability (see the 737-Legacy collision in Brazil)*. And that "complex route" is programmed in by the human pilot.
I may not have stayed at a Holiday Inn Express last night, but I'm an engineer who tests flight control systems and avionics/autopilots for a living. I'm also a private pilot with business jet and airliner simulator time.
*The A380 just (as in the past couple months) certified an autopilot/flight-director to TCAS mode. This appears to be the only such certified system.
Why is it everyone assumes (like you did) that "trash earth and leave" is the only way to do it? Did it ever occur to anyone that maybe it just might be a good idea to leave earth and use resources from Mars and asteroids instead of trashing earth? That maybe the entire point of space colonization could be to expand and survive while leaving earth in good shape? That maybe the very technologies we'd develop in a large-scale colonization effort might be exactly the same ones that would help us reverse environmental damage? Fixing any damage we have done to the planet does not require abandoning it, self-elimination, or massive standard-of-living reductions. It can be done through technology and expansion, but taking that path doesn't satisfy the near-religious assertion of some self-proclaimed "environmentalists" that it's not really a good fix unless someone's suffering.
This nonsense that we need to just stay here and withdraw in our shells like hermit crabs or scared turtles, and never leave or go beyond our planet because doing so is "bad" is the same controlling line of BS that religious leaders fed to the masses (Tower of Babel) and that modern political/economic leaders feed to everyone to maintain their status.
You don't know what the hell you're talking about. Autopilots don't just "do everything", they don't make decisions or navigate themselves. The pilots input the desired course, the pilots monitor and arm/disarm the autopilot, the pilots make all of the decisions. Autopilots are not do-all AIs; they're more like a glorified cruise control.
Well, Delta and Atlas don't keep former shuttle employees busy. And everyone knows that reusing large components of something entirely different will make the end result cheaper... because you never have to do rework and the reused components are always optimal for the design.
Oh, I'm sorry, I'll wipe up the extra sarcasm I spilled there...
You seem to be proposing moving large numbers of people from earth to some other planet, in order to save resources. How would moving large numbers of people save resources?
Yes, it takes more of earth's resources in the initial push, but in the long run you end up using less (of earth's resources, at least) because you can start taking advantage of things like asteroids and in-situ resources (compressing/converting atmospheres, etc). It takes a higher initial investment, but the payoff is bigger. In the very long term, you could wind up with an on-earth population smaller than the current one, but with a total human population much larger.
Overall, resource usage is still higher, though you have a bigger population. And rather than using up resources on earth (which is still a nice place to live) you're mining the dead, lifeless rocks we know as asteroids.
It's kinda hard to play real-time interactive games when you're dealing with round-trip signal times of up to 40 minutes... I think that would knock out MMO games. Now something like split-screen Halo, on the other hand, doesn't require that, but is more likely to forment anger amongst the crew.
On the gripping hand, the old naval solution would probably work best. That is, keep the crew occupied with enough busywork that they don't have time to piss each other off. This was the standard practice on old sailing men of war; you needed large crews for combat/damage repair and for certain shipkeeping tasks, but otherwise they sat around with little to do. Hence, rituals of inspection, holystoning the deck, etc. This is also why modern crew-reduction initiatives on ships can backfire; smaller crews have a harder time performing damage control than larger ones.
Anyways, for a Mars mission you need a lot of crew for the surface exploration in order to get as much data as possible; the cruise phases (for the most part) have little for them to do. They'd likely be occoupied running different experiments and performing regular maintenance, and exercising (a lot) rather than just being couch kudzu.