Celestia Forums

OK, so what do you think about this: I submit to you that if anything were to pop in Existence suddently, it would have no preffered structure, composition or residual information. A Universe such as ours would not just Exist, because then it would beg the question "why like this, and not in an...

In a related subject, a question for the physicist(s) lurking around: why doesn't LHC use higher-temperature superconductive magnets, for instance something above the boiling point of N2? The accelerator would've been a lot cheaper, I think.

...so then there was death, taxes, and gravitation. Man, I hate this universe...

But Andrea, even with very limited funding, there are a lot of people out there who would get in for free on a GPL software project aimed at classifying all this content. Why would they try to round up 12,000 people to classify by hand, when you can round up 10 programmers pro-bono, a grid, and mayb...

I just doubt that one cannot write satisfactory and /reproducable/ recognition code! As a programmer, I incline to agree. I don't think there's anything in there that can't be solved by a bit of image processing / normalization and some straightforward code. I don't even think you need perception p...

Well, before any numbers, anything the size of an asteroid made of normal matter doesn't have nearly enough mass to create the confinement needed to maintain fusion. So, in order to create such a weapon, yo' homeboys need to punch a dent in spacetime somehow, so that the mini-star's matter stays tog...

Does it have a surface?

@ANDREA: I'm sure you realize there was a hefty dose of sarcasm somewhere in my post... and just a placid fyi, I don't think there's a soul in Romania who doesn't know that we've joined the EU on Jan 1st :) .... Well, first things first, obviously the degree of transatlantic cooperation is not satis...

NASA would probably have enough money to keep an eye on the big rocks, and consider deflection strategies, if only it would settle with the yurpeans, the red bastards and the azns. However - as per my whining on the other thread - they're not ready to do that. Come to think of it, many people would ...

quite offtopic: I love popularized quantum physics, except for the fact that it reminds me all the time that we only have some control over one of the four interactions that we are aware of . That oughta put us in our place, and dim out human accomplishments for the next few hundred years or so :) T...

You need some basic vector calculus to solve that...

"International co-operation" would be a bigger disaster though. Have you seen how bad the ISS is lately? MASSIVELY over-budget, and still not able to do the basic things it was actually designed to do properly, vast amounts of bureaucracy involved... Pish! Of course the ISS is overbudget, it's a hu...

Well if we're in the purgatory, I hate NASA for building Orion by themselves. There, I said it. Why the hell didn't they come to terms with the ESA (which I understand was open to cooperation, only this time they didn't want the backseat) why are we going to have two vehicles (the CEV and the europe...

RESURECTED! I guess my favourite starships would be the Asgard starships from the SG universe (the O'Neill class battleship for instance). It is a known fact that ships in the Star Trek universe suck when compared to ships in the SG universe. The Asgard ships are capable of intergalactic travel, and...

Hmm... what would Homer say?

Woohoo... in your face, Pluto!
(mumbling)Lousy, icy planetoid with barely enough mass to assume hydrostatic equilibrium...

I guess that would be the allmighty law of cosines.

I for one could deal with Ceres being labeled a planet, but classifying all the big plutinos as planets is a tad too much. On the other hand, placing a lower limit of a Moon mass or Ceres mass would've been empirical (so would be placing an upper limit of 13 Jupiters, because it doesn't account for ...

Well, I guess from now on there's going to be the really interesting inner planets, and the bulls*t planets, remnants of a high-metallicity circumstellar disk.

I wonder how many of these are floating around in the inner Oort cloud.

I think an analythical breakdown of vectors will get you out of this easily. To reach an angle of phi degrees between 0 and 90 with the speed Y, you need to break Y*(1-cos(phi)) on your current bearing and accelerate Y*sin(phi) at an angle of 90 degrees. At the limit, 90 degrees (sharp turn), you ne...

mmyes and how about a nice jovian ammonia haze for Mars, a couple of them Calypso sized satellites and a metallic hydrogen core... now what will happen?

(anyone said fruit salad?)