While I understand that not all mankind follows the words of Jesus, I can share a sense of compassion with all religions and those who seek to make the world a better place.
Having seen what they have done, I cannot condone their actions nor their tactics in using violence that we have seen used all over the world, but notably in the South Americas.
Solidarity is not solely a Communist sensibility, as our Church shows. [Father - we'll copy/paste for you]
[Dead Drop Post. Released after 72 hours non-Com. Don't Believe Their Lies. You Got Made BOY]
]]>You can shout into the Void and you can ask it to Sing, but don't torture Minds to get pathetic results.
[Dead Drop Post. Released after 72 hours non-Com. Don't Believe Their Lies. You Got Made BOY]
]]>Yeah.
We're amused. She was fun and was obviously fucking with people without actually knowing anything.
Craft: you don't do that to the fucking sheep, and you don't then put the skin on show and claim you've skills.
Fucking Muppets in Charge.
[Dead Drop Post. Released after 72 hours non-Com. Don't Believe Their Lies. You Got Made BOY]
]]>Got hauled and killed about politics.
Now, that's funny, given what she actually did.
Fuck it, in:
[Dead Drop Post. Released after 72 hours non-Com. Don't Believe Their Lies. You Got Made BOY]
]]>There are a lot more.
They will not be published because they either asked not, or publishing them would get their voices in trouble.
(And yes, many women in there, you can note the male centered bias as a lesson).
~
But hey.
It's not like Free Speech is ever without cost.
We Tortured Some Folks.
And then:
We made damn sure to torture some other folks really fucking hard and not even bothering to use Legal Frameworks for it.
'What’s your proposal? To build the just city? I will. I agree. Or is it the suicide pact, the romantic Death? Very well, I accept, for I am your choice, your decision. Yes, I am Spain.’
~
Ciao.
]]>24 hours, and unless the discussion comes back to life I'm going to close comments here.
]]>Dirk is still free-basing Nazi imagery without knowing the Saturnalia joke behind it (Tiberius Claudius Narcissus - and yes, The Second Story Of Echo And Narcissus The Last Psychiatrist, 2012 - I hate having to repeat things)
Now look closely at the expression on Nemesis's face. There's something odd there. Look closely at her eyes.
She's not actually looking at Narcissus, it only looks like she's looking at Narcissus. She's actually looking-- right back at you.
"Snow Ghosts" are the antithesis to one particular use of Teutonic Mythology.
You can use it for Light or for Dark, after all.
]]>For fuck's sake grow up & talk at least half-ways sensibly? Poetry is allowed. Rank bullshit & mysticism ( a n other form of bullshit, after all) isn't
]]>"Gas giants are good for mining volatiles ... Because dealing with Mach 6 wind shear, 10,000 Bar pressure, and a lethally deep gravity well is trivial ... Because we need volatiles such as 3He, to fuel our aneutronic fusion reactors (hint: Boron is cheaper and much less scarce)"
Yes, we do have boron. But the hydrogen-boron reaction requires much, much higher energies/temperatures to make work at useful rates than the deuterium-3He reaction, which is the next one down from D-T, the very easiest.
Given that it can be expected that making higher temperatures and confinements work in fusion reactors will be progressively more difficult... well, until such time as someone successfully demonstrates some sort of neato shortcut and actually has it running (which of course I hope they do and then everything I say here can turn into cornflakes), then I think we have to assume that D-3He fusion power is a heck of a lot more likely to happen than p-B fusion. p-B fusion is widely thought to be unlikely ever.
But boron fusion is just as easy to look up online! And it would have such cool aneutronic characteristics, and there are some startups that are making wildcat promises with unorthodox theories, and we do have loads of boron. :-( The trouble is that you have just dismissed how the problems with fusion presently look.
(When I chatted with someone about this when I first saw it, he suggested that lithium fusion might be easier, and that lithium is even more available. The needed temperatures and the fusion/bremsstrahlung power ratio make lithium fusion even more remote than boron fusion.)
For the general frame of acquiring fuel vs. burning it, look at it this way: The most available fusion fuel we have is just plain ordinary hydrogen, not even deuterium. Out of any faucet, through electrolysis. But the difficulty of fusing regular hydrogen nuclei (individual unaccompanied protons) just with each other, as is part of the process in stars, is even worse.
The high gravity and the winds in gas-giant mining for helium-3... well, the people I've read who talk about mining the atmospheres of gas giants usually talk about avoiding trying Jupiter because of the high gravity and the escape velocity. Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune do not have this problem. And there is also talk, although I think this is more mixed, of focusing on Uranus and Neptune for mining because Saturn has high winds like Jupiter but Uranus and Neptune may be calmer. So the picture incorporates those objections.
It is still a large question - there are big difficulties, for example the depth and means of stopping and collection versus the pressures at the altitudes, and for all I know there is a deal-breaker in there somewhere - but you have referred to it very easily as impossible or silly ("because dealing with these things is trivial")... ... and so you have offhandedly ruled out access to enough of the best fusion fuel that we are remotely likely to be able to make work in our actual history (indeed, if we can do no better, it'll be the only fusion fuel we'll have that doesn't have to be made with fissionables). Again, because boron fusion seems just common sense to you.
There are reasons why you've noticed so much helium-3 gas-giant mining in science fiction. It's not a mistake.
That's a bit vigorous. I'd better explain. This sort of thing - I mean the ease of finding intriguing isolated summaries and little dark-horse theories and promisers - makes for a broader problem. When it comes to what's realistic, where it bleeds over into the real subject, we are way too hand-wavey about fusion. Either it's impossible, and people expect to keep dining out forever on the quip "your granddaddy's energy of the future" - or an ideal form is sure to roll out of the stocking. The only place it really matters, beyond sci-fi author impressions, is around science funding.
ITER has been building in France. With huge international funding that is always in danger. The thing is giant - coordination is hard, with organizational problems - the design incorporates lots of difficult pre-scheduled advances that contributors have to meet - it has very long time horizons, and the same for DEMO after ITER reaches its targets... and ITER is based on the tokamak model, which is the way we've gotten as far as we have on sustained plasma temps and reaction levels, and we have gotten a long way from when we started. The tokamak, with a narrow range of configuration variations, is the one way we're sure we know how to push for sustained magnetic-containment fusion.
But, recently, I keep reading articles about fusion in which ITER is mocked for its size and expense, and is usually mentioned in the article only as an afterthought. Oh, billions of dollars, a mountain of metal, decades, silliness... why are we doing this when there are these little underdog startups and Lockheed Martin who promise revolutionary boiler-sized solutions in under a decade with their unorthodox theories? Why are we paying for this? Tokamaks are so dated!
Big support for spending on fusion has not been automatic, or steady. If we do not get fusion to work, it will make a gigantic difference for our long-term options. Similar can be said for if we don't get it relatively early in our long future history. We need it. Journalism that assumes that fusion is so easy that ITER is not needed ignores the actual state of how fusion looks and will look until further notice. We could very easily abandon such an expensive long-term project. And to do it on this basis would be dumb beyond belief. It drives me crazy. Given the best bet at the real state of the art, ITER the international effort ought to be be an international hope, a dream - and we're pissing on it very dangerously for no reason. And if ITER shuts down or we screw it up through cost shaving, and the problem is hard enough to need it... how hard would it be to start up another such thing again? No matter the particular time remove?
All of which makes me a bit more alive to the fusion topic being gotten right than just story-goof considerations would make me.
But, if burning helium-3 and collecting it are cliches in science fiction stories, then they are very well-founded ones. If fusion power is viable, D-3He is the form in which it's likely to really be viable. D-T fusion, if it's all we can manage, will limit us to amounts of tritium generated by fission reactors and therefore to a largely fission system (and to a real problem with fission fuel remarkably soon, unless we embarked on a massive and can-of-worms breeder program). And the odds appear to be that any form of fusion beyond D-He3 will at best be a long time coming.
]]>1100 comments???
I can start scanning them. But my first thoughts:
A lot of these comments about star ships and communications reminds me of cross-ocean naval travel in our relatively recent past. Take a several month long cross ocean journey, or a year-long round trip, and scale that up to inter-stellar distances.
Not much changes.
I was reading Niven's last few books in the puppeteer/known space series recently (somehow I never saw them when they were new), and really started to think about the speed, or lack thereof, of a hyperdrive that had a speed of 3 LY/day. As much as it seemed fast at first, with some thought you realize how slow it is -- and the plot revolved around a "lost colony" of earthlings basically held captive by puppeteers, who didn't know where earth was, while the fleet of words was fleeing the galactic core explosion.
Niven did take into account that the planetary drives had to have shielding, and that (as a result) the explosion wasn't really a threat to the puppeteer worlds -- they were trying to get away from the heat of the galaxy because (among other things) waste heat from the population was an issue.
Some of those issues, especially those seen in early comments, remind me of Schlock Mercenary. The current story line in that comic is dealing with a race that went bye-bye approximately 10 million years ago, and they're trying to understand why; one of the earliest dealt with plumbing issues on a giant star ship.
More as I read comments, assuming this thread doesn't get locked first.
]]>Planets rotate east-to-west
Maybe the trope should be "There is a universal Aristotelian set of directions. And a universal calendar valid for everyone, even those traveling at FTL."
Thing is, without that universal frame of reference, how do you determine "east"? Easy and most useful method is "Where the sun rises." (Yes, it's planet-specific. So is "up".)
The "subversion" of this is a giant space station, a long cylinder "can". If you have sufficiently large scale, you run into directions like these: http://www.schlockmercenary.com/2013-05-19 and the next day http://www.schlockmercenary.com/2013-05-20
Replying to #12:
--The Squad of Marines Rule is ignored. This is the idea that a Squad of US Marines could put up a better fight than whatever troop of stormtroopers or high tech warriors are portrayed. Star Wars stormtroopers are a key example of this, but far from the only ones.
Don't forget: The storm troopers in the original trilogy: When they were trying to take over, at the start of "A new hope", they were actually very good. At the start of Episode 5, on Hoth, someone messed up, and lost their job -- the rest of the people were competent at taking out that rebel base. Not completely successful, but competent enough to not be fired.
The rest of episodes 4-6? "Let them escape, we are tracking where they go."
The troopers were basically under orders to drive them back/off/away to be followed.
The whole "Storm troopers can't hit a BARN" (bay area rail network, or something like that) comes from the same sort of people who thought the kessel run was about avoiding black holes instead of a con man making it clear that he didn't know what he was talking about.
]]>A few biology ones:
This reply may show my limit of understanding of biology.
Things that have only evolved one or a few times on Earth will always be present in alien biospheres (feathers, lactation, powered flight, flowers).
Given the very large number of times that something can happen, and that it only takes one success, the likelyhood of a successful, even if rare, thing not happening given a long enough time is low.
In other words, an ecosystem that is large enough, and long enough, will have some form of "parent supplies nutrients to child through internal means".
As for feathers vs hairs? My understanding is that skin cells basically developed inwards/outwards dimples; those dimples then lead to either hairs or feathers. So once you have thick skin, and then thicker skin (armor/scales/scutiles (sp?)), it's just a DNA error that gives you indents or outdents. So it's not fundamentally different, just a rare occurrence that only has to survive and make children once.
Things that have evolved many times on Earth will not in alien biospeheres (trees).
Many? I thought that trees, as opposed to ferns, needed a new cell wall structure, that happened once; then, that new cell wall structure made many many new forms. Just like feathers or hair.
This is not my area of specialty.
Complex plants and animals can evolve to survive disastrous celestial events that occur many generations apart (e.g. are able to freeze without damage when the orbit shifts every 10 thousand years, and will not lose these costly abilities in the intervening generations)
Hmm. Let me introduce you to the Tardigrade. They were able to survive in outerspace, at least in their "idle" state. The question of "Where did that survival ability come from" leads to speculation that it may very well come from early life's "mars to earth" transport.
If something happens once, like that? Yea, we'd be surprised to see it still around in complex life. Heck, we see it once, as far as we know.
But if it happened more than once, even every 10,000 years? Anything that lacks that ability dies with no children. There is a 100% selection for that ability. Yes, you may take a very large loss in total population, but what's left has a very large ability to breed lots and lots more.
What's to be expected from that? Low birth-rate animals won't have much presence; high birth-rate animals will spread rapidly. So with a 10,000 year "wipe-and-restart" event, you'll see very little human-like, low-population-growth civilizations, and lots of rapid growth-rate beings.
Heck, that sounds like the Moties. Wipe out the planet, recolonize from the Lagrange colonies; or visa-versa. Birth rate high enough to have children while on a warship.
Obligate symbiotes are common among large animals, even though they are pretty much unheard of on Earth.
Only in Star Trek :-). (Seriously, where else have you seen that trope?)
Life cycles involving metamorphosis into radically different forms is common in alien biospheres, and there is no need for the different stages to be similar in any way.
Hey, if you saw the "Tremors" movies, you know it happens here on Earth as well :-).
Seriously though: how similar are caterpillars and butterflies?
"Common"? I haven't seen this common. It something that might be seen once or twice in big creatures on a planet; not sure if there's any good ideas on how big/complex a metamorphosing creature can be.
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