I always wonder the same thing...and the answer is "maybe:"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

I got my pitchfork right here. Let's go!

How are we going to get there, again?

And one that is generally frowned upon by religious people. The names are essentially anti-religious, not religious, in nature.

If the state of Utah is theocratic and makes funding decisions based on particle names, choosing blasphemous ones is not the path to big research bucks. Mormons take the prohibition against taking the name of deity in vain pretty seriously.

Corr: That should read "doesn't lose much IR transmission as a consequence of neutron bombardment like happens in higher frequency bands" - accidentally lost that middle part. Fused silica and fused quartz (especially the latter, but also the former) blacken under neutron exposure, losing transparency; it's even done intentionally to make jewelry. But the papers I ran into when researching the topic showed that this effect isn't very pronounced in the IR band.

It's only wage-slave click-baiting modern journalists who are responsible for this. It only takes one scientists to slip up and use a funny or sensational nickname for a particle (which will happen eventually), and then these media idiots run with it.

I mean, the smallpox was there, why not the plutonium?

The mistake I was referring to was smallpox's occasional error in failing to leave a few survivors.

Agreed. But that doesn't mean it doesn't make sense to embark on big projects. Rather than a "Hey, we're going to walk somewhere new" sort of thing, I'd like to see work on one of any number of space-related megaprojects - for example, a launch loop and/or fallout-free nuclear rockets**. Something that could actually lower the cost of access to space to the point that it doesn't take a vast effort to go walk on another celestial body.

** - There's so many competing designs it's hard to know where to start. My personal concept I've mulled over is a variant of the nuclear lightbulb concept, but instead of the fused-silica bulb containig a gas or plasma core reactor which requires some unknown containment method, the concept calls for a dusty fission core (akin to a dusty fission fragment rocket), which can be electrostatically contained. The energy would be released in the infrared, not visible or ultraviolet (as in a conventional lightbulb concept), but that's fine - fused silica is also transparent to infrared, and moreover doesn't lose much IR transmission as like happens in higher frequency bands; the lower radiation rate of infrared would be compensated for by the huge surface area of the dust radiating it. The simultaneous huge amounts of electric output (from fission fragment deceleration in a grid) could be used in part to run a microwave beam, creating a plasma sheath in ducted atmospheric air surrounding the bulb (airbreathing mode) or injected gas surrounding it (rocket mode) to aid in IR absorption and keep as much of the heat away from the (reflective) walls as possible. A VASIMR-ish mode is possible if you use low gas injection rates and a magnetic nozzle. In space, gas injection could be terminated altogether and the core could be opened up to run in dusty fission fragment mode and get Isp figures in the lower hundreds of thousands. To make up for the problems with using the standard dusty fission fragment rocket proposal's (heavy) moderator in such a high power environment, my thoughts were to have it operate as a subcritical reactor with a spallation neutron source as the driver - after all, there's no shortage of electricity to run an accelerator if you're decelerating a good chunk of the fragments; you don't even have to deal with Carnot losses.

You tell 'em, Ayn! You'll be rich enough to afford your own space program any day now - or at least you would be, if it wasn't for all those Liberal Looters derailing you to get themselves a free ride!

"Plot idea: 97% of the world's scientists contrive an environmental crisis, but are exposed by a plucky band of billionaires & oil companies." -- Scott Westerfeld

Not if you're the Russian intelligence services, the prime suspect behind the hack. Anyone want to bet that this was part of the same initiative that brought us the more recent scandals of Russian state funding for European anti-fracking groups and American lobbying against LNG export approval?

Whatever it takes to keep your main market open, dependent, and buying your main exports in vast quantities, I suppose.

Considering Japan has been having on-off again discussions internally about amending the constitution to allow a non-defensive military for the last 10-12 years it wouldn't surprise me. Especially now that China is/has become the largest belligerent in the region.

So now that it turns out that this was done in conjunction with the Maldives government, what's your deal?

Is it that you prefer to leave hackers and carders out there robbing people and businesses?

I'm not the biggest fan of America (actually look forward to renouncing my citizenship as soon as I'm able), but seriously, I think you prematurely Godwinned.

That seems to be precisely what his public defender is saying today (see elsewhere in this thread). And that it was done in cooperation with the Maldives government. So it looks like if there's a scandal here it would be the Maldives government breaking their own laws (although I personally have no clue if that would be illegal in the Maldives, or even what legal grounds would have been used)