Brett_

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• Commented on Sucker bet (a thought experiment)
  Although to be honest, you could get much more money by liquidating immediately and re-investing the $51 billion at a much higher return, hoping that a GFC doesn't hit you in a decade's time. If you can get 10% a...
• Commented on Sucker bet (a thought experiment)
  You engage in creative use of a foundation and trusts. Year One: Use $1 billion to set myself up in comfort - multiple homes, private plane, bolt-hole stocked with independent power and food storage for several years in a rural...
• Commented on Do my Homework
  Highly complex Desire Modification is one potential blindspot. What happens to a society when you can completely suppress boredom, anxiety, paranoia, etc with technology? Not just in the ways we have now with some drugs, but "wiring in the head"...
• Commented on Canned Monkeys Don't Ship Well, the Remix Version
  A couple of thoughts- -You don't spin the whole spacecraft, just a cylinder (or better a pair of cylinders rotating in counter directions) inside of the ship. -It's really not a stretch to imagine that a spacecraft meant to effectively...
• Commented on Why I barely read SF these days
  The Culture is definitely a model for that, although perhaps more benign (admittedly I've only read Consider Phlebas). Human beings that don't have to work for a living are very good at filling the time with stuff, especially competitive status-seeking...
• Commented on Why I barely read SF these days
  Star Wars might not have wage labor as we know it, at least in the films. Do we ever see anyone who could be described as an employee who wasn't a soldier or bureaucrat (or one of Jabba's thugs)? Most...
• Commented on 2117 revisited
  Vat-grown meat seems unlikely to me. More likely is fake meat made from plant inputs and flavoring ingredients that near-perfectly replicates the taste and texture of meat. We're close to that already with fake boneless chicken breasts. Agreed on the...
• Commented on 2117 revisited
  2117 diets will have a bias towards crops and foods that can be grown densely in sheltered greenhouses with efficient use of water, although that won't be the entire composition of their diet by any means (and it's possible food...
• Commented on Popcorn Time
  If England's a non-EU basket case after 2025, maybe they ought to petition to see if they can join Canada. Former commonwealth country, could keep the royals, and since the Canada-US part of NAFTA is unlikely to disintegrate it would...
• Commented on Some notes on the worst-case scenario
  That's too premeditated for the Trump Administration. Please note that the following scenario assumes that what we are witnessing is deliberate and planned and that the people in Trump's inner circle actually have a coherent objective they are working towards....
• Commented on The Day After
  It is going to be completely unbearable when we get the inevitable "Trump Regret" from some of his supporters down the line, especially the Nice Exurban White People. "I was just voting for change and to make America great again...
• Commented on What else can you do with a Big Dumb Booster?
  A Martian version of that would be using Carbon Monoxide rockets. The ISP is way worse than something like methane, but it'd be easy to make and you can use it for short suborbital hops around the planet....
• Commented on What else can you do with a Big Dumb Booster?
  It was Kate Upton. They did a shoot with her in a bikini the Vomit Comet. She's done some rather unorthodox shots before - one of her prior shoots to that one was a bikini shoot in Antarctica. Something like...
• Commented on Sad Trombone Exoplanet Reality Check
  Not really, I'm afraid. We're the classic example: we have enormously high literacy, but we're going to leave bugger-all behind for our successors, because essentially all of our writing is on media that fall apart after years to a few...
• Commented on Sad Trombone Exoplanet Reality Check
  The problem for that set-up is the presence of writing and literacy. The reason why we know so much more on average about the past 3000 years versus the past 7000 is because writing became more common, and even with...
• Commented on Sad Trombone Exoplanet Reality Check
  Exactly this. A lot of science fictions stories are basically space fantasy, either mysterious adventures in strange new lands or "X but in space". Star Trek is that (although it does have some interesting science fiction elements in the system...
• Commented on Sad Trombone Exoplanet Reality Check
  If this planet holds up and is actually Earth-size (i.e. less than 1.2 times Earth radius and 2-3 times its mass), then I'm really hoping we can eventually do analysis on its atmosphere. Finding an earth-like planet with a habitable...
• Commented on The iron law of development
  Could a civilization in an Olduvai situation jump-start industrialization by going to straight to electric dynamos, electric wires, electric motors, and modified flywheels running off of water and wind power? They are going to have a lot of metal readily...
• Commented on We'll all go together when we go
  The counterpoint is that if you can keep some type of logistical system open (and countries can usually do this even under duress - look at the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany in World War 2), then you've got a...
• Commented on We'll all go together when we go
  I wonder how long the IL-4 would stay that lethal. Diseases that kill quickly and totally tend to burn out really quick, or shift into less lethal but more contagious and chronic forms. One of the reason why Malaria was...
• Commented on A game of consequences
  This might be more of a severe problem for free-"floating" habitats than surface-side colonies off-world. The proposals I've seen for early Mars colonies are essentially sets of hab modules, each with their own life support systems, connected together - and...
• Commented on Some notes on world building
  Great stuff. Some aspects of the human condition are changeable: voluntary control over fertility leads to changes in family size, for example, which has huge impact on storytelling (how many siblings does your protagonist have?). Now there's an interesting idea...
• Commented on Defining space opera
  Scale and Grandeur are key aspects of this - there needs to be huge stakes, great drama,and so forth. "The galaxy is at risk!" "The solar system civilization is at risk!" You need high emotional investment and expression as well,...
• Commented on Towards a taxonomy of cliches in Space Opera
  -Major alien civilizations should not have a single monoculture that apparently all of them ascribe to aside from rare individuals unless there's a very strong reason for it (i.e. they went through some type of horrific purge). I'm looking at...
• Commented on The paranoid style in 2016
  I agree with most of what MisterDK is saying. It's important to separate Trump The Brand from Trump The Manager - the latter is a mediocre businessman who has repeatedly run businesses into the ground, declared bankruptcy multiple times, and...
• Commented on Long range forecast
  I'm a bit skeptical that we'll see full food collapse in the US. The US is just too big and climatically diverse - just look at the current weather. And there's a lot of areas that are perfectly amenable to...
• Commented on Science-fictional shibboleths
  Yeah, pretty much. It's why I don't think fusion will be a major power source for electricity generation - the aneutronic version is just incredibly difficult, and even the very difficult version we might be able to do in a...
• Commented on Science-fictional shibboleths
  I just think it's unlikely. Our ancestors were already bipedal apes when they discovered fire, so fire shaped what they already had and maybe accentuated it further. Whereas, an alien that looks like a six-legged land crab that discovers fire...
• Commented on Science-fictional shibboleths
  Status Goods. You trade in rare items from other solar system as a way of showing that you're the type of person with so much influence that you can literally command starships to be built and sent....
• Commented on Science-fictional shibboleths
  What NASA wants in terms of shorter-time-lag telepresence isn't really constant control in real-time by an operator. They like the whole "program everything into a sequence in advance" model for robotic space exploration, because it keeps power and control over...