Ru

Ru

  • Commented on COVID-19
    Is that your own work? It seems similar to a (longer, less coherent) conspiracy theory that's been doing the rounds recently. Poe's law, of course, prevents us from working out whether the original posting was sincere, and it has been...
  • Commented on That sinking feeling
    what is the point of entering an agreement with a new partner (Canada) where the terms and conditions are likely to be pretty much the same as you're (supposedly) desperate to get out of? So you can say "see? brexit...
  • Commented on That sinking feeling
    Take, for example food shopping - restoring enough locally owned and taxed shops and distribution would need near-martial law I don't recall the nationalisation of the supermarkets in Halting State/Rule 34 being explained at all, but, y'know, tesco is cheaper...
  • Commented on That sinking feeling
    Or maybe EC has it right. "You've created ANOTHER monster? Maybe you should atone for your sins and STOP FUCKING DOING IT", etc etc....
  • Commented on That sinking feeling
    "It is your fault that you've created a monster. Now, to atone for your sin, you must let the monster eat you." "It is your fault that you've created a monster. For fuck's sake, stop giving it guns and bombs...
  • Commented on Canned Monkeys Don't Ship Well, the Remix Version
    So I was putting things in terms of more-or-less today technology, because I think no matter how much we increase capacities, the demand for storage per person year will scale at roughly the same rate. Quite a lot of this...
  • Commented on Canned Monkeys Don't Ship Well, the Remix Version
    I haven't read all those posts from when I took a long weekend off, but has anyone mentioned the problem of getting rid of heat in interstellar space? It was mentioned, but mostly to say that it isn't really an...
  • Commented on Canned Monkeys Don't Ship Well, the Remix Version
    There's simply no deflection per se, the particle is either destroyed or avoided entirely. Its like you read 'deflect' and then ignored every other word in the paragraph. Important ones were 'partially ionise' and 'deflect charged particles electrostatically or electromagnetically'....
  • Commented on Canned Monkeys Don't Ship Well, the Remix Version
    If you want armour, you'd best deploy it as a Whipple shield — a thin disk, floating some centimetres to hundreds of metres in front of the ship. No reason to limit yourself; you could do things like blow a...
  • Commented on Canned Monkeys Don't Ship Well, the Remix Version
    You really couldn't make stuff like this up The last private eye jokingly suggested that corbyn would have made an ideal replacement for johnson or davis. Turns out they were right....
  • Commented on Canned Monkeys Don't Ship Well, the Remix Version
    More like not developed enough yet. "For the sake of the survival of humanity, we must wait until the world is ten times as rich!" ;-) But on the other hand, if you-know-what-alliance did not spend all these money on...
  • Commented on Canned Monkeys Don't Ship Well, the Remix Version
    To go double good fast you can then fire captured bits of sail back towards home (avoiding shooting down your incoming sails of course). Capturing the sail sounds tricky if it is travelling at a fast enough relative speed to...
  • Commented on Canned Monkeys Don't Ship Well, the Remix Version
    So what's not to like? I'd be willing to bet that we'll get a functioning warp drive before the world's defence budgets get turned to better uses :-/...
  • Commented on Canned Monkeys Don't Ship Well, the Remix Version
    I was thinking that if you do use a lightsail, you could redirect a small amount of the beam forward of the craft to encourage small particles to get out of the way. "Redirecting" sounds like a horrifyingly complex bit...
  • Commented on Canned Monkeys Don't Ship Well, the Remix Version
    There's absolutely no reason to save money on backup plans for humanity's survival. There's every reason not to neglect the vast majority of people who won't be going on a starship and will likely reap zero reward from any starship...
  • Commented on Canned Monkeys Don't Ship Well, the Remix Version
    Someone is butthurt that [the] USSR... Someone is salty that I didn't genuflect towards his favourite billionaires, and also doesn't seem to understand what 'totalitarian' means or think about why someone might not like it....
  • Commented on Canned Monkeys Don't Ship Well, the Remix Version
    But I think where the point originally came from was the difficulty of heatsinking space weapons platforms. The kzinti lesson is an old cliche, but it is worth remembering that a drive powerful enough to be interesting is equivalent...
  • Commented on Canned Monkeys Don't Ship Well, the Remix Version
    I wonder if in a hundred years, while the spiritual descendants of SpaceX and Blue Origin are working on building the Dyson Swarm, In a hundred years? You haven't thought this through. Also, I'd like to hope that by the...
  • Commented on Canned Monkeys Don't Ship Well, the Remix Version
    I've been reading this thread again, and it seems that everybody is looking for stable solution within singular colonial ship/construct. Meanwhile, there's option for more extensive structure that will involve a fleet of colony ships, I think the word you're...
  • Commented on Canned Monkeys Don't Ship Well, the Remix Version
    It is to show that the concern over food isn't actually worthwhile. Well, no. It merely suggests that it is insufficient in an of itself, and no-one was claiming otherwise. Basically, you're going to pick up a dose no matter...
  • Commented on Canned Monkeys Don't Ship Well, the Remix Version
    There is also evidence that children of older parents (and it's both of them, not just the mothers) tend to have more medical problems. Part of this is due to older gametes being less fit for purpose; to some extent,...
  • Commented on Canned Monkeys Don't Ship Well, the Remix Version
    My mother was 41 when I was born in ... 1946 And nowadays there are 70+ year old mothers on record. That's not really relevant, though, because my point wasn't that 'older mothers don't exist', it was 'older mothers appear...
  • Commented on Canned Monkeys Don't Ship Well, the Remix Version
    I'm not suggesting that "aging" is a bunch of prion diseases. But there may be multiple comorbidities that only cut in late in the game, some of which have really twisty hereditable mechanisms (e.g. epigenetic modulation of immune system traits)...
  • Commented on Canned Monkeys Don't Ship Well, the Remix Version
    a mass ratio of ln(20) The idiot who posted this obviously didn't realise that they shoudl have put ln(mass ratio) = 20 or mass ratio = e^20. Its like they didn't even bother to read what they wrote....
  • Commented on Canned Monkeys Don't Ship Well, the Remix Version
    We don't know what it would do to the food crops, or the various other organisms required to make them grow, let alone mammals. There will be plenty of opportunity during the build up stage to check that your plants...
  • Commented on Canned Monkeys Don't Ship Well, the Remix Version
    building the bubble in the first place may require even more insane tidal forces or simply be physically impossible so you can't just have it built aroud you; oh and stopping the bubble at the end of the trip may...
  • Commented on Canned Monkeys Don't Ship Well, the Remix Version
    I was going to link to some blah about the firefly starship design as an example of something semi-plausible by current standards... 150 tonne payload, 3000 tonne hull mass, 42000 tonnes of fuel, 10km long. ~Two milligee thrust, 100 years...
  • Commented on Canned Monkeys Don't Ship Well, the Remix Version
    Someone else is welcome to check my "math" (in fact, I insist on it), but I figure if you can accelerate at .25g for one year that puts you up at about .25C. A target star 10 light-years away would...
  • Commented on Canned Monkeys Don't Ship Well, the Remix Version
    It's not as easy as that... Oh come on. This is a post about slower than light interstellar colonisation. Making non-radioactive food is absolutely trivial by comparison. partly because one of the important isotopes is 14C, which comes from the...
  • Commented on Canned Monkeys Don't Ship Well, the Remix Version
    Frozen anything won't work. Humans are slightly radioactive. We're constantly being slightly damaged, and constantly doing running repairs. The radiation comes from our diet. If you've already solved the closed-cycle life support problem, which you'll need to have done in...
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