If they volunteers to assist with that, sign me up

gravity of all the planets pulling on each other pull them into a stable, flat plane. Imagine all the planets but one rogue one are in this same plane, like circles on the surface of your desk.. The rogue planet orbits at a big angle, so even if it is going in a circle, half of the time it is above the desk, and half the time below (like this: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/e/eb/Orbit1.svg/1280px-Orbit1.svg.png - the grey is the plane all the planets are in, apart from the rogue one which is the yellow orbit) . When it is above the plane, all the other planets are located below it, and pull on it with gravity, down towards the plane. When it is below the plane, the planets in the plane are all above it, and they all pull it up. Over a very long period of time this brings the rogue planet closer and closer into the plane. Once within the plane, the planets still pull on each other, but there are no forces which would cause them to leave the plane again. Over time everything will settle into this single plane as its the only true long term stable solution.

The planets all have gravity, which pull all the other planets just a little. Over a very long timescale this results in most of the planets lying in the same plane, like concentric circles on a piece of paper, and orbiting in the same direction. They are not exactly flat, they differ by a couple of degrees, but it's pretty flat. A couple of stray rocks and comets are much more inclined, some even perpendicular, but the planets themselves are very flattish, and this is known as the Plane of the Ecliptic. They are definitely not the same size though, and much further apart than is usually drawn.

But where do they go?

With realistic scale, Mercury will be about 0.5cm from the sun, and Nepture at 30cm. That's just the radius from the sun, so probably the biggest you wanna do for a normal table. You'll be needing a pin to place Mercury, rather than a square grid.

Why the fuck am i drinking a milkshake out of a floppy paper straw???

Its true that light takes 2.5 million years to travel to Andromeda, as seen by us who are mostly stationary and not doing the travelling. The thing is though, the faster you go, the more time on board the ship slows down, relative to the outside world. If the ship goes super fast, approaching lightspeed, it would look to observers on the outside that time is almost stopped onboard the ship. Or to look at it another way, from the point of view of astronauts on board the ship, the local shiptime is normal, but the time outside seems to get faster and faster. If the ship travels fast enough, you get to watch 2.5 million years go by outside, at which point you are at Andromeda.

If you are able to reach almost lightspeed, you can reach almost any part of the universe within your lifetime (or even years, or days, if you go extremely close to light speed), but, the universe will have aged by millions or billions of years when you get there. For photons, which actually do travel at lightspeed, the journey is instantaneous, as they don't experience time at all.

Besides the navigation, which others have mentioned, are equations for temperature and pressure used in the cabin gasses, propellant system and general thermal management. There are inverse square falloff equations for signal strength on the radio transmissions and radar returns. There are basic electrical equations for voltages, current, and resistances in the equipment.

So at what range can you detect a dust particle? If you come creeping up behind it and gently nudge it, there's no need for lasers. And what if it IS a tennis ball sized bit of debris?

I posit that anything travelling at such high velocity as to endanger the ship, will not be detectable in time to get an energy weapon on it long enough to vaporize it and give it time to disperse.

Those are just clearly artificially placed as a signpost.

Since we dont actually know how it works, saying its basically as simple as some data stored on a hard drive is rather speculative.

Some theories suggest that the operation of neurons depends on quantum effects. And quantum stuff is influenced by the observer, so it potentially could get a bit tangled. Personally I think these tangled systems are most interesting, and that by reducing the brain to a classical computer type device, we miss the more interesting possibilities for how consciousness and awareness (information) might be some fundamental aspect of reality rather than an emergent property of it. Eastern mysticism has for a long time said that consciousness and an external reality arise simultaneously, and are intrinsically linked. To me at least, it seems western science is only starting to describe the same thing, albeit from the reality side of this duality, where eastern thought took it from the consciousness side. But both suggest that both sides are somehow intertwined and co-dependent.

For example, the idea of consciousness being the thing which divides a cosmic oneness into dichotomies (true/false, this/that, real/unreal, etc) is strikingly similar to quantum probabilities being collapsed by the actions of an observer. So striking in fact that I find it hard to believe it's not the same underlying thing simply being described in multiple ways.

Not really. It has the same amount of bits, but different organizations of bits have more or less informational entropy. You can randomize the bits, for very low amount of information. You can set them all to 0, which is more ordered, and so contains more information than the random sequence. Or you can have files and folders, which contains a gigantic amount more structure and patterns of information, on many different levels. This concept is important in cryptography for example, where you can take a random looking string of letters, and calculate the entropy of it, to determine whether it contains less or more information, ie, work out if it is actually a random sequence, or if it is a coherent message in a natural language like english, even if you cant yet work out what the message actually is.

Salyut-7. It's unashamedly campy at times, but the spacewalk scenes are better than those in Gravity, the spaceship interiors are fantastic, its based on a true story, and its got a class and style of its own. Big plus that its not a hollywood action flick. If you haven't seen it you really should!

The director also recently flew to the ISS and shot a lot of footage for his next movie, can't wait to see that.

I felt the movie portrayed him multiple times like a rabbit in headlights, frozen and not reacting to what was going on, whereas I think the opposite was pretty much the case.

On the other hand, he did crash the LLRV, had the aborted gemini mission, had the most problems on a lunar landing, fluffed his lines on the moon, and flew them into gimbal lock during the docking. But he managed to get through most of these issues, too, so maybe that counts in the long run. I don't think any other astronaut had so many varied incidents in their career.

Very little to do with human safety, everything to do with the cost of the vehicles.

I don't think we have much to worry about from civilizations in any of those galaxies

Only the discovery of life on Mars would make it worth going there. Otherwise its a waste.

ps, Columbus was returned in chains to spain as a failure. He died disappointed that he did not find the trade route to Asia.

Ok, I'll concede that they are pushing technology forward regardless of where it ends up. But my greatest fear is that the insane cost of a Mars base, and no actual tangible financial benefit, is just a re-run of the 60s moon race and will actually turn off the major backers and sources of money from further missions. It would be a shame to let Elons dream derail space exploration for another 60 or more years, just cos he wants to. At least government-financed missions were influenced by public support, whereas Elon essentially can do what he wants with all the money he got from everyone, with no accountability.

Funny you mention Columbus... his explicit mission was to uncover a land route to Asia, to improve future trading, and the return of gold and wealth.

It was not to put a flag on the Americas or live there. None of that justifies the cost of the expedition.

Remind me again how a one-way ticket to a dead end destination helps with manned solar system exploration?

Glory, and PR.

Also, if traces of life are found, dead or alive. Not many other reasons, and I'm afraid that it'll cost so much and return so little that it'll kill off manned solar system exploration for good. The moon landings were so one-shot and expensive it hasn't been attempted in 60 years. Why woulda Mars mission be any different?

Proper pacing would be to try some asteroid mining, to get various types of mass into low earth orbit for constructing the next wave of exploration.

Is it forwards though? Its essentially a very expensive sink into another gravity well for nothing but PR and glory. Without an immediate economic return you get a repeat of the 60s moon landing... very dramatic, very exciting, very expensive, and very quickly abandoned for a very long time.

We'd get a lot further with manned exploration if the same costs were spent on some asteroid mining to return chunks of ice to low earth orbit. That would work as supplies and fuel for the next wave of exploration. It would pave the way for a lot of new technology like in-space material processing, telerobotic and AI controlled mining machines, and cuts costs for long-term zero-g presence ($25000 for ever kilo of water ice you get), and r&d for deep space power sources. Mars gives you ... not so much. You might do some in-situ mining and resource processing, but its expensive to return that to earth to help with earth orbit construction of new missions.