I continue to be mentally boggled at the strictness of the moderators of this forum. If you are trying to scare away people who are interested in speculative discussions, why don't you just state that clearly somewhere on your main page and during the registration process instead of surprising...
I've just started thinking about this and haven't read much about the "simulation argument" yet, but is there anything unreasonable about using computational/information theoretic/Occam's razor arguments to argue that the simplest explanation for the universe is that everything is being...
I just did a quick calculation where I end up with this:
G/D * [M_s(1/y + y^2/2) + M_p/(1-y)]
being the quantity to compare to the specific strength, which I took to be T/(A*ro) = T/mu
where ro and mu are density and linear density, A is cross sectional area of the rod, D = distance...
If you doubt the scientific plausibility of space colonies, please google Gerard O'Neill, a physicist I'm sure many of you know about. He and his students at MIT created detailed plans for orbiting colonies back in the 1970's that, as far as I know, are still sound. What exactly about space...
I can paint a picture of a day on Mars, and I'd love to be there! I understand that not everyone has this sense of adventure and curiosity, and those folks can do what such people have always done: stay home where it's safe. This is why I'm putting my hopes in bold entrepreneurs more than...
As far as natural disasters go, do I need to bring up the last super-volcano eruption, Toba, which nearly wiped out the human species? These things are very rare, but potentially so devastating that it makes perfect sense to have a backup population off Earth.
And if you're worried about...
Sophie that's always the argument of the timid, the fatalists and the non-visionaries, that we have to wait for everything to be perfect where we are before we look for new frontiers. You could have said the same thing to the first humans who left the east African plains, the first Americans...
Sorry but I don't see what is inhospitable about a suitably designed space habitat like a rotating hollow asteroid. A network of such worlds with an independent industrial base should be able to maintain its technology and population long after Earth civilization has returned to a...
We will never get things under control on this planet. There is no reason why we have to accept random catastrophes like tsunamis and super-volcanoes killing millions of people, other than a lack of imagination and ambition!
Simple? Definitely not, but clearly possible once our space industry has reached the asteroids. In general, colonizing space will be the hardest thing human beings have ever attempted, but it's also the most necessary thing if we want to have any kind of long-term future, wouldn't you agree?
Sophie, you should read "Mining the Sky" by John Lewis and "The High Frontier" by Gerard O'Niell if you don't think there's much potential in the near future for space colonization. Lewis estimates that the solar system could support 10^16 humans! The asteroids are a fantastic opportunity; one...
If we assume the spacecraft doesn't escape the disk of the Milky Way and use an estimate I found for the density of stars in the galactic disk of .05 solar masses per cubic parsec, the mean free path is:
MFP = 1/(n*A_g) where n = .05 solar masses/parsec^3 and A_g is the gravitational cross...
On the topic of space guns, I like this design for a nuclear space cannon: http://nextbigfuture.com/2009/02/nuclear-orion-home-run-shot-all-fallout.html
Given that the mean free path of stars in the universe is many orders of magnitude larger than the size of the universe, the answer is essentially forever. I suppose there would be some kind of thermodynamic breakdown due to interactions with the interstellar medium, but I'm not sure how to...