181–190 of 330 posts
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in Arabic (and a bunch of other languages I'm sure) it's pronounced: Oranos, I don't understand why the U in Uranus is not pronounced like the U in Ultra.
Cuz in Greek (my mother language), we pronounce "Ουρανός" as "Ouranos".
Good to know, I guess...
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Apparently no one likes this idea. Here's mine: we nuke the planet and collect its smitherines for SCIENCE!
Let's send some boosters out there, redirect it to earth, and make a second moon. Come on people, what ever happened to doing shit cause its fuckin' rad, do you know how cool another moon would be?!
I say we catch that sucker, tow it into our neck of the woods as a second moon, and use it as a space port. Are there a million problems with this proposal? Yes. But would it be totally rad to do this? Also yes.
What sort of propulsion mechanisms (even those that are currently physically plausible but entirely outside our technology, so, for example, solar sails or nuclear torchships, but not, say, warp drive) could possibly be used to achieve such a task?
Highly impractical, and would take centuries to slow it down enough.
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It won’t do anything. Also, Carrington class events are very rare. You should worry more about space junk crashing into important things and even then it’s not much of a worry. https://warwick.ac.uk/newsandevents/pressreleases/likelihood...
> The analysis shows that ‘severe’ magnetic storms occurred in 42 out of the last 150 years, and ‘great’ super-storms occurred in 6 years out of 150 That seems extremely imminent, like in my lifetime. How many of these events would shut down tech for months or years? Are those odds worth risking civilization over?
Big storms happen all the time. They’ll knock out a few power stations or shake up GPS and communications.
The Carrington level events are far more rare. We had a near miss in 2012. That would’ve been very exciting.
I say we catch that sucker, tow it into our neck of the woods as a second moon, and use it as a space port. Are there a million problems with this proposal? Yes. But would it be totally rad to do this? Also yes.
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Somewhat unintuitively, thanks to the Oberth effect, it can be easier to reach escape velocity closer to an object, (Humorously portrayed in https://xkcd.com/1242 ). Aside: if you are looking to learn more, I cannot recommend Kerbal Space Program enough.
I've been aware of people talking about Kerbal Space Program for years and years, but I lost interest in playing it when I heard it didn't do real N-body gravitational calculations because they were too intensive. I still find that inexplicable. To me, it sounds like saying "our calculator only does basic arithmetic on four core machines, square roots are too slow".
Upping the realism lowers the playability: games and simulators are subtly different things. Otherwise we'd all be playing STK/Astrogator instead of Kerbal, and AutoCAD instead of Minecraft, and sitting in city hall basements debugging spreadsheets in place of Cities: Skylines. The type of limitations that distinguish games from serious simulators are not accidents and not laziness, but deliberate design choices.
I concede this makes certain interesting topics like Lagrange points / halo orbits, masscons, and orbital precession inaccessible. That's part of the tradeoff.
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What if it can be stopped in theory, but only if humanity pulls together and gets something right for once?
An object that side won't be dissuaded with any of the firepower available to us. We'd be better off trying to build bunkers or something.
I say we catch that sucker, tow it into our neck of the woods as a second moon, and use it as a space port. Are there a million problems with this proposal? Yes. But would it be totally rad to do this? Also yes.
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It's difficult to believe that ten years from now, there'd be any serious options other than Starship and its future peers. (Incidentally, the Delta IV is already at end-of-life; ULA is replacing it with Vulcan and its Blue Origin engines. The final Delta IV-H launches are planned for 2023). https://spacenews.com/ulas-delta-4-heavy-down-to-final-five-...
I more meant that it would take at least that size-class of heavy lift launch vehicle. With Starship this would definitely be doable, and I’m really optimistic about it; I just wanted to be cautious in my predictions. I also wouldn’t be surprised if Delta IV’s life gets extended. Vulcan is facing plenty of development delays, and Blue Origin are yet to produce anything useful.