Paul451

Paul451

  • Commented on Deaths and Deadlines
    Me: "seeing them "go dark" occur" "light from 'go dark'" Yes indeedy....
  • Commented on Deaths and Deadlines
    Moz: "Only if infection and transmission are instantaneous. More likely it will take time to infect a host, take it over and prepare to on-send the infection. Given discrete infectable nodes and even a small lag, at least some nodes...
  • Commented on Deaths and Deadlines
    whitroth: "My take on Why Haven't We Seen or Been Contacted... 1. If you were an intelligent race, would you contact this bunch of psychos with nukes and hair triggers?" You think we're all garbage, and yet here you are...
  • Commented on Deaths and Deadlines
    "[you guys] grumbling about that stoooopid light speed latency problem" "[there's me] in case you get 20 minutes' warning to evacuate your house before it burns down." You aren't allowing for the fact that these are not analogous situations. The...
  • Commented on Deaths and Deadlines
    Daniel: "[Sagan] assigned the letter A to represent 106 unique bits of information (less than any recorded human culture) and each successive letter to represent an order of magnitude increase, so that a level Z civilization would have 1031 bits....
  • Commented on Media Piracy and Unpronounceable Names
    From the article: "Ideally, the destination is handled the same way as the payment target; the merchant gets it as crypto gabble they can authenticate as the correct sort of crypto-gabble, but not outright read. They use their shipping service...
  • Commented on Canned Monkeys Don't Ship Well, the Remix Version
    We're not going to attempt interstellar trips until we have the technology to effortlessly travel and live throughout the solar system. A generation ship is basically a space settlement, with better propulsion and recycling. So you can assume that most...
  • Commented on Unsustainable Interstellar Civilization, Hotspot Colonies, and Dwarf Culture
    Re: Gravity, Radiation, and Air. Agreed. This isn't a mark against asteroids, but a mark for. You build rotating habs inside an asteroid. Shielding, gravity and you strip volatile asteroids/comets for air/water/ammonia and other volatiles. With any planet, you are...
  • Commented on Unsustainable Interstellar Civilization, Hotspot Colonies, and Dwarf Culture
    "that MOST physicists talk crap on this matter." The world is full of crackpots thinking they've found some obvious flaw in physics, it can often be hard for a non-expert to see the specific flaw they've made, but I find...
  • Commented on Holding Pattern
    Guys, This may come across as shitty, but when someone tells you about a sickness/death in their family, don't talk about your own version. It ends up being all anyone talks about. "Is there's anything I can do?" and "Oh,...
  • Commented on Unsustainable Interstellar Civilization, Hotspot Colonies, and Dwarf Culture
    Frank, (Re: The original article) The scenario you are creating is a variant on the old sub-light colonisation-wave idea. Going back to Fermi & co. If we can find any way to travel between the stars, we can colonise the...
  • Commented on Paging Agent 007
    "Which is, IMO the big problem with short-haul hypeloop - you will spend a lot more time packing people in and out of the projectiles than you do actually hyping them." The model (at least in the original proposal) is...
  • Commented on Paging Agent 007
    Minor aside: "steam engine time" A variation of the idea that you don't get railways until its time for railways. But this idea fails when looking at Briton itself. Around 80-100 years before the first practical railway lines, there was...
  • Commented on Report on Seat 14C
    "...spread of the historical viruses... {death, destruction, cats and dogs living together}" Not how immunity and common viruses works. If anything on the plane isn't killing the passengers (and us in 2017), then it won't kill the locals in 2037....
  • Commented on Report on Seat 14C
    "VHF radio is so 1950s" Yes, these systems are incredibly conservative. And that's why they won't go anywhere in the next couple of decades. During an emergency, it's typical to fail-back technologically when you experience communications failures. The modern shiny...
  • Commented on What else can you do with a Big Dumb Booster?
    [ DELETED BY MODERATOR -- reason: rudeness to another contributor ]...
  • Commented on What else can you do with a Big Dumb Booster?
    Me: "This limits you to targets that are perpendicular to a line between the telescopes. An arc perpendicular to Neptune's orbit, slowly sweeping around the sky once every 165 years." That wasn't very clear. I meant "a arc-of-observation perpendicular to...
  • Commented on What else can you do with a Big Dumb Booster?
    Glaurung (#170): "NRO would love to be able to launch bigger spy sats, but how much bigger? Make the lens too much larger and you're just taking very sharp pictures of atmospheric haze, with no further progress being possible toward...
  • Commented on What else can you do with a Big Dumb Booster?
    Charles H (#69): "OK, how about this: A pair of, say, Neptune orbit observatories a third of an orbit apart, each with a 5 mile mirror." [Aside: This limits you to targets that are perpendicular to a line between the...
  • Commented on What else can you do with a Big Dumb Booster?
    paws4thot (#)8: "I'm not sure either way about the plausibility of 0-g coitus; [...] it occurs to me that, ah, maintaining penetration is going to require the participants to be tied together around their pelvic girdles and/or thighs." Charlie Stross...
  • Commented on What else can you do with a Big Dumb Booster?
    Don't get the repeated suggestions that Musk is pulling a bait'n'switch for his "real" plan. Whether SPS, or asteroid mining, or just pulling a Space Trump to milk gullible investors. Musk is a child of Bob Zubrin's obsession. He believes...
  • Commented on We'll all go together when we go
    Pigeon, It's often counter-intuitive. Saw a local science program recently that was following up on the "nanospheres" scare (nanospheres or nanoparticles being put into everything and ending up bioaccumulating in wildlife.) Apparently it turns out that bioaccumulation of nanoparticles is...
  • Commented on We'll all go together when we go
    "People already fuck vastly more often than they sprog, after all, the difference being accounted for by artificial methods to reduce fertility. All they'd have to do to compensate would be to use those methods less. (Which leads me to...
  • Commented on We'll all go together when we go
    I wasn't complaining. I was intrigued. (Likewise, Greg (#185), was that empty <a> link meant as a gag?)...
  • Commented on We'll all go together when we go
    "in order to stop customer dissatisfaction figures falling" They needed to resort to dark physics to prevent improving customer satisfaction? The backstory for that got me more than the gerbils....
  • Commented on We'll all go together when we go
    Daniel Duffy: "Or maybe we are immune to extinction because we have already passed the Great Filter" dpb (#90): "Does that mean I am immune to death because I successfully crossed the road last week?" Yes, if averaged out over...
  • Commented on We'll all go together when we go
    Thomas Jørgensen (#115), "an extinction plague If technology delivers that kind of capability unto the script kiddies of the world, however, I think we're done for." As others have said, there are always survivors. But I'd go further. The kind...
  • Commented on Cytological Utopia and the rapture of the eukaryotes
    "where do you draw the line between consciousness and unconscious life" The question treats the science and technology of the simulation as if it simply exists without background. If they have the ability to similate all that is suggested, then...
  • Commented on Three Unexpectedly Good Things VR Will Probably Cause
    "When talking about the workplace effects of VR, most people are imagining the typical office in __ industry. Instead, let's ask the question: how would VR be implemented in your field?" I stuck with existing IT-centric applications, because most fields...
  • Commented on Three Unexpectedly Good Things VR Will Probably Cause
    To avoid derailing: So what are the visual/physical metaphors that would suit VR work environments? Obviously oversized faux touch-displays. But beyond that. I could see paint/design/modelling software turning the on-screen metaphors back into their original physical counterparts, but retaining the...
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