Recent content by sophiecentaur

That's what I learned in my first hour of sailing and it works in ideal conditions. A craft of the size and cost that is described in this thread won't react fast - you can't just let the mainsheet fly when a sudden squall turns up (except in a small dinghy and I never used them much). With a...

What sort of things? The springs on those clamps are not very strong so what direction will the force be required to work in? is the tension in the direction of the clip or at right angles? Going back a bit, do you really need to use a simple cable clip. There are many other fixings available...

IS this thread discussing the quest for life forms or the quest for advanced civilisations? I would not be surprised if some life forms were discovered within a decade or so but that is many orders of magnitude from chatty little green men.

But a ship needs to have protection from gusts of wind when it is going slowly or when the engines fail (which is the issue in this thread. Stabilisers on container ships are to protect rolling forces on deck cargo. The effect on a sail is additional; more lateral forces. A sailing yacht has a...

Yes but doesn't the ship need to be moving through the water? Not necessariiy a conspiracy - just an awareness that, in engineering, things don't always scale conveniently. Ships have got bigger and bigger because of the economics of fuel use. Large ships have their own disadvantages and (I am...

How 'smooth' do you want the sequence to be? The resulting video will depend as much on the suspension characteristics of the car as the road surface. Shooting from a luxury car will produce an entirely diffrent result than from an unladen truck with a harde suspension. Film makers go to a lot...

Look up “straw man” as a form of argument.

Your average mission costs $1B which may or may not seem massive. What sort of project would you be thinking of? JWST was about $10B. That would correspond to very good value for money because the data it produces is much more than a yes / no answer. However, JWST doesn't look for low entropy...

Throw away what chance? You talk as if this sort of project would take up no resources. It's a bit like "you've got to be in it to win it", which is the way Lottery tickets are sold. And we actually know the probability involved in a lottery.( I am totally shocked, btw, at the total amount of...

This is true but the development of civilisation with technology is a very different matter.

Machines often have flywheels to give high instant power from a lower power. You do not want the speed to drop as the load of the ball is applied so you have high angular momentum somewhere to achieve this. There is an extra problem of spin that's needed for a convincing launch of the ball. How...

You are making a huge assumption here about ‘people’. Many people are more interested in football results. Personally, I am a pretty staunch atheist. I look for no answers to (as I see it) irrelevant questions. I’m afraid you are destined to be annoyed for a long time.

Evidence is that low tech tends to preserve life - or is it low mobility and low populations? But we are where we are; we like our comforts, medicines and anaesthetics so there's no (voluntary) way back for us. A faustian contract, I think. hm. I don't see much 'control'. We've been on a...

I'm using no assumptions at all. Any candidate self reproducing system would have to have evolved to a level something more than just eating and being eaten. Apart from the timescales of a few billion years that the stars impose we can assume nothing about the lifespans of these aliens. Any life...

Excellent sleuthing, young man. So now we are up to date with the history of TC. Doing it 'that way round' makes a lot of sense . Everything was analogue in those days and long video delays were a lot of trouble so at least starting with good timing at each source was handy. I wonder how that...