Nah, there's a level in there somewhere where human population is stable and able to continue being creative and inventive, how cute is it when humans think they've discovered a new law of physics? Awww!

If you go higher they end up over-consuming the renewable resources such as fresh water. If you go lower the population ends up getting inbred or just dying off completely.

Also by managing the human population (and a small number of predator species populations outside the human zone of influence) the rest of the ecosystem manages itself quite handily.

Oh, have you seen what we did with Mars and Venus? The Venusian fjords are just chef's kiss.

If human labour is not necessary, who actually controls the machines?

What if the machines decide that humans are just an animal like all the other animals, including feeding, care, and various measure to keep the population under control?

What if the actual backstory to Terminator is that Skynet became smarter than us, realised that the human population had grown too large, instituted population control measures such as mandatory birth control with licensed pregnancies, and John Connor's rebels are actually fighting that system because they believe humans should be free to have as many children as they want? The odd act of rebellion escalated to violence escalated to full on thermonuclear war against the environmental vandals.

So IMHO when we get to a post-scarcity utopia it will be because we humans have adapted to all life on Earth including ours being stewarded by the benevolent computer overlords.

Dragon had problems with parachutes too. I wonder if the main difference between SpaceX and Boeing is turnaround time between design and test (and subsequent post-test review and updates to designs)?

Where to spend the money: the paper review, or fabricating a new test object to test an incremental change?

> Do you think your consciousness now is the same consciousness of your 5 year old self?

Did you actually exist half a second ago or is your entire life just a set of memories that were implanted when the entire world was created just now?

The idea is that if the other side blinks (or in this case, dies) first you win.

I have to laugh when the response to "demand will outstrip supply" is "we need to be more efficient about water use" without addressing the endlessly climbing demand.

Too many humans. Too much consumption. Not enough natural resources.

We need to look for ways to slow population growth, such as making life so awful that people either won't have the time to have children or they will actively decide to not procreate because the world is too messed up to bring children into it.

Blockchain applications:

1. Scamming people by selling them crypto currency
2. Scamming people by running a crypto exchange and then pocketing everyone's funds
3. Scamming people through pump and dump scams given the entire crypto market reacts every time you sneeze

There are infinitely many applications for blockchain, any time you need a regular proof of ownership or custody only with more steps (and more hands reaching into your wallet to participate in this new business method on computers on the internet with blockchain).

Look for "expansion" and the terms "over expanded" and "under expanded".

The Wikipedia article on Space Jellyfish is a great jumping-off point too.

The exhaust particles spread out because they're being pushed by the exhaust gasses.

The USA is best known as the country that will do anything to avoid using the metric system.

Paper this article is based on: https://asa.scitation.org/doi/10.1121/10.0016878

> Significant results include: (a) the solid rocket boosters' ignition overpressure is particularly intense in the direction of the pad flame trench exit; (b) post-liftoff maximum overall levels range from 127 to 136 dB, greater than pre-launch predictions; and (c) the average maximum one-third-octave spectral peak occurred at 20 Hz, causing significant deviation between flat and A-weighted levels.

I'm just lost on how they quantify the "crackling quality" :D

Well it's actually useful to have sims/agents that have more realistic personalities for things like modelling traffic flows or predicting crowd behaviour when seating or ingress/egress routes are changed.

Like, what if we were part of a simulation and each of us is really just a fragment of a personality of someone in the real world, and our purpose here is simply to figure out better strategies for surviving the heat death of the universe?

It's not a rant. It's an English translation of a German blog post.

Posting the full text of an article that's otherwise inaccessible is a thing that Redditors do from time to time.

Ukraine switched from using Starlink for CCC to using Starlink as the communications mechanism for drones flying far behind enemy lines.

SpaceX has simply disabled the use of terrestrial Starlink for drone communications. You want in-flight internet, you subscribe to the in-flight internet service.

The rest of this article is a decent run-down of the operation of Starlink in the Ukrainian defense against the Russian invasion.

One of the plans when the ISS was conceived was to do exactly that: assemble missions to be sent on to other worlds. From the Memorandum of Understanding behind the ISS project:

> 2.3. The Space Station will enable its users to take advantage of human ingenuity in connection with its low-gravity environment, the near-perfect vacuum of space and the vantage point for observing the Earth and the rest of the Universe. Specifically, the Space Station and its evolutionary additions could provide for a variety of capabilities, for example:
>
> - a laboratory in space, for the conduct of science and applications and the development of new technologies; > - a permanent observatory in high-inclination orbit, from which to observe Earth, the Solar System and the rest of the Universe; > - a transportation node where payloads and vehicles are stationed, assembled, processed and deployed to their destination; > - a servicing capability from which payloads and vehicles are maintained, repaired, replenished and refurbished; > - an assembly capability from which large space structures and systems are assembled and verified; > - a research and technology capability in space, where the unique space environment enhances commercial opportunities and encourages commercial investment in space; > - a storage depot for consumables, payloads and spares; and > - a staging base for possible future missions, such as a permanent lunar base, a human mission to Mars, robotic planetary probes, a human mission to survey the asteroids, and a scientific and communications facility in geosynchronous orbit.

It was just never used that way. It turns out that simply sending missions to their destinations directly from Earth was easier than rendezvous with the ISS to assemble the mission piece by piece. To assemble missions at the ISS would require a large workshop where astronauts could routinely enter and exit the ISS, hold various components ready to be assembled, and provide the required propellant. With the heavy lift rockets entering service shortly it will be even easier to launch missions direct from Earth to other worlds. One of the main design intentions for Starship/Super Heavy is to reload propellant in orbit and carry payloads directly from Earth to Mars.

In the future it might make sense to build these missions in orbit using materials mined from asteroids or the Moon, but we're a long way from that possibility at this point in time.

An important shortfall of this study was the limitation of the sample population to one hospital. Most egregiously omitted from the study was, of course, this author who is of the opinion that the lack of opportunity to participate in this study was a deliberate act of exclusion by the facility rather than an accidental side effect of the geographic remoteness of this author from the facility in question.

One confounding factor that I will suggest, which I did not observe addressed in the research, is the difference in recipes for the same biscuit by the same brand in the same country, varying by geo-cultural region.

As an example I draw the reader's attention to the varied product known as "Arnott's Ginger Nut Biscuit" in Australia. It is relatively well-known that the recipe is varied by state to deliberately cater to the expectations of the dominant cultural group. The New South Wales variant is baked to be thicker and harder, specifically due to the NSW habit of dunking biscuits in their tea. As a result the biscuit will soften on the surface while maintaining a more rigid core that will maintain the structure of the biscuit between dunking and consumption, preventing softened biscuit collapsing and becoming immersed in the tea itself. In the meantime the Victorian variants are designed to be easier to eat without dunking (the NSW variant is extremely hard and poses mechanical challenges to the over-eager consumer).

I thank the team for their examination of this topic.

Regardless of where the components are built, the answer will always be "no" because you still need the equipment on the ground to collect this radiation from space and turn it to electricity. The cost of delivering the components to the project site in geosynchronous orbit over the target site is competing with the cost of extra solar panels and batteries delivered to the work site on the ground.

We already have that kind of equipment for handling the radiation received from that giant fusion reactor in the sky, so at every step of the way these plans to capture energy from that fusion reactor and beam it to Earth are going to be competing with the energy from that fusion reactor that is already being beamed to Earth by that fusion reactor.

Everything that happens on the ground to receive that energy is already being done with solar farms. The biggest difference between solar farms and satellites beaming down microwaves is that one of those systems is a directed energy weapon to be used against cities and the other is not. Apart from the utility as directed energy weapons, space power satellites add extra cost and complexity to what solar farms can already accomplish with far less environmental, economic and technical risk.

In celestial mechanics, escape velocity is the speed an object needs to reach in order for the force of gravity to never reduce the outward velocity to 0. As you travel further away from the primary body the force of gravity gets smaller and smaller, so the deceleration gets smaller and smaller, and the limit at the distance approaches infinity is for the deceleration from the force of gravity to reach 0. If the starting speed of the object was such that by the time it reaches that infinite distance it still has some radial velocity, it has escaped.

Also in celestial mechanics, a "propelled object" is one that can thrust forever (basically a torch ship). A non-propelled object includes an object which has accelerated by burning a rocket engine and has stopped consuming propellant (it's no longer propelled). If that rocket can reach escape velocity, it can coast out of the influence of that primary body. This is how rockets can push space craft from one planet to another: they reach escape velocity to escape the gravity well of one planet, and carefully aim to be caught in the gravity well of the destination.

Hope this helps.

Escape velocity from Mars is about 5km/s. The article explains that the bottom end of the elevator would be travelling at ~770m/s while the outer end of the elevator would be travelling at ~3.25km/s. This means a two-stage escape from Mars (one stage to get to the elevator, second stage to get from the elevator to escape velocity) would only need to provide ~0.8km/s to rendezvous with the elevator, and another ~1.75km/s to escape Mars, saving ~2.4km/s in delta-v overall. This results in significantly lower propellant requirements for cargo moving between Mars and Earth (and thus smaller spacecraft to carry the same payload).

Immense respect to those police for showing respect and patience enough to use the bolas before the CEW or a firearm.

We still have to prove that the operator was operating it. But funnily enough all the body cams failed at the same time and nobody can remember who was actually operating the drone when it killed that unarmed black kid.

Further reading:

• Robocop
• Slaughterbots
• List of coups and coup attempts
• Genocide

Equipping drones with tools the police want to use but can't due to the threat of physical force against the police just means those tools will get more frequently used as the police force engages in a collective power trip. Give them the tools and they'll use them even in situations where use of those tools isn't warranted such as pepper-spraying a crowd that is already docile.

In NSW, Australia, we already have issues with excessive force but also no-cause strip search of minors. In Victoria we have police using lethal force that is no justified, facing consequences as severe as a stern talking to.

You'll want to check the sticky post in /r/telescopes

Their basic recommendation is that with any limited budget you stick to Dobsonian telescopes until you understand how to operate a telescope, and have a better idea of exactly what you're interested in doing (what you want to do will drastically alter the choice of telescope).

At the price of that Galileo telescope you may be better off looking at a pair of good binoculars and a tripod or monopod or even a deck chair/lawn chair (something that can fold back to recline on) and a good astronomy beginner's book.

For choosing binoculars, check out this Sky and Telescope article on choosing binoculars for astronomy.

I've not read it myself but I've seen a few recommendations for "Stargazing with Binoculars" from Firefly Pocket Books.

Hope this helps. Just keep in mind that a pair of 7x35 binoculars, a lawn chair and a good astronomy book would be a better package than a tiny telescope on a wobbly tripod, even if they don't seem as special up front. Besides, binoculars are portable and can be used for daytime activities such as birdwatching should interests drift.

Wider field of view, different "up", older/worse sensors and looking at different wavelengths, and images processed differently meaning the various infrared wavelengths are mapped to different visible wavelengths.