SNAFU.

It also has an optional 'pull-down conversation mirror' that lets drivers check on kids without turning around."

A driver who even thinks about turning around to check on what the passengers are up to should lose their driving license until they've successfully re-passed their driving test.

That's why you strap them in. That's what you have other adults in the vehicle for. That's why you train the kids from before potty-training to not touch their seat belts on pain of straight back home and no fun for the rest of the day. That's why you train the kids over the same time scale to not distract the driver.

This is a technology which should not exist.

Memo from Self : Like I was going to do that? After the last time I worked on a Mac?

The laws of physics (and chemistry) are the same pretty much everywhere

Where, precisely, do we know that the laws of physics are different from those we see here? "pretty much everywhere" implies that there is somewhere that isn't included. Where is that?

even at small fractions of light speed, remain expansionistic, and avoid completely eradicating ourselves or transcending as a species we could colonize the whole friggin galaxy in only a few billion years.

Billion? A few tens of million years.

The galaxy is about 100,000 LY across. If we can get to 1% of c, then moving out to cover the galaxy would take (order of) 10 million years transit time. Since you're using generation ships, then while you're in flight you can be preparing a colonisation ship in the centuries between stellar encounters and drop the settlers off (and along with them, your political dissidents, mutants and space-sick passengers and other problems) ; if they think the star is settleable (does it have asteroids ; never mind the planets for the next x generations) then they stop, otherwise they do some quick (decades) mining for consumables and then depart to catch up with the mother ship.

I'd guess that "we" could colonise the galaxy in 100 Ma. Of course, by then, the species would certainly have changed, and probably fragmented into significantly different species. Certainly cultures would have changed drastically.

But it's all SF for the next number of generations.

Hmm, well I suppose if you were under hard acceleration it probably wouldn't be healthy for anything caught in the exhaust at close range,

In some SF universes that is codified as a "law" of warfare. e.g. "The Kzinti Lesson : a reaction drive is a weapon in proportion to it's efficiency as a drive."

A lot of those early mathematicians were a bit on the crazy side, having come to that realization and not having any of the framework for coping with the idea.

Well, they could have just invented a god of mathematics and had done with it. But they were pretty smart cookies, so they'd probably have noticed the stupidity of admitting a supernatural explanation of any sort into their attempts to understand the natural world.

Your analogy is wrong. You need to cut the top off the safe and then perform the rest of your experiment.

Air guns (they've never been called "sonic cannons" ; the author has been channelling early Hawkwind) are fired at a depth of 5~10m below water level, suspended from floats towed behind the survey boat. Normally there's a string of multiple hydrophones trailing along behind the air gun, held at a similar depth by tension between floats (pulling them up) and a hydroplane (underwater wing) pulling them down. Sometimes we lower a hydrophone (or several, for redundancy) into an existing well bore and lower it to the bottom, maybe as much as 7 or 8 km away from the surface, but we never lower air guns to that depth because they wouldn't work.

Understand, I am pro oil drilling, pro nuclear power... and all sorts of other things you likely find unsavory. But this just seems wanton to me. I'm not a monster or an idiot... and this seems like madness.

Then TFA's writer has achieved his (her? I forget which) purpose of spreading FUD about what has been a routine technique in other parts of the world for decades, with appropriate mitigation strategies in place.

Sharktopusnado, I'm afraid.

Agreed. There are other forms of diving injury that whales (and other non-human air-breathing divers) suffer from, but they're generally chronic and cumulative. Crush injuries to bones with isolated fluid-filled cavities which can't equilibrate fast enough, for example. Humans get the same, which is part of the reason that sat divers take several days to get to depth.

The sound is so excruciating that whales will surface too fast and get the bends

Whales don't get "the bends" (in the sense of decompression sickness). When they dive, they stop breathing (Doh!) and the air in their lungs rapidly compresses until their lungs have collapsed and the air is in the (relatively non-absorbent) bronchae and cranial air passages. Then, when they come back up, there isn't the excess of nitrogen dissolved in the blood that needs to exsolve and forms the bubbles that cause decompression sickness.

What gives human divers decompression sickness is that we breathe air while we're at depth. That allows our bloodstream to equilibrate with an effectively unlimited supply of nitrogen at depth, whereas the whales (dolphins, seals, penguins, etc) have only the one pair of lungs full of air to equilibrate against.

Don't worry, you're by no means the first person to get this wrong. I've had to talk other trained SCUBA divers through the maths before.

There are other forms of diving injury to which whales etc are subject, but they're not "the bends." And while they leave marks on the bones (as they do on human divers too), they're not enough to incapacitate the animals (though they can destroy a commercial diver's career).

Without the oil that came from the fracking boom oil would probably be at $150/barrel or higher

The overwhelming majority of the "fracking boom" is drilling for gas, not oil. Yes, it is possible to frack shale (as in the gas boom) for oil, but it's much, much less common than fracking for gas.

Of course, in conventional (i.e. non-shale) reservoirs, hydraulic fracturing to enhance oil (and gas, but more rarely) production has been going on since the 1950s without arousing any particular attention. Of the about 200 wells on my CV, dozens of them have probably been fracked since I drilled and steered them. I wouldn't know ; it's not a question I'd ever waste my time asking.

I'd think it obvious that an air cannon isn't going to produce sound levels equivalent to an atomic bomb.

Considering that air guns are powered by air compressors typically driven by diesel engines consuming a couple of gallons per hour, the average power isn't that high. The peak power is higher, because the guns fire in pulses, using the air as a storage medium.

The oscillating bubbles created by air cannons are practically microscopic by comparison.

For seismic analysis, particularly for differentiating between oil-filled rock, gas-filled rock and water-filled rock, we need lots of high frequencies in the projected sound, so that we can measure the difference of absorption at different frequencies. To get those high frequencies, we need bubbles of relatively small size. That constrains the power we can put into the water. Producing bigger guns will produce more power, but will not answer our geological questions, and so would be a waste of money. We'd have to run multiple surveys (big guns versus small guns) across the same area, almost certainly causing more harm than doing one survey.

See my comment up-thread. TFA is ill-informed and written to generate FUD, not to inform people. These aren't new techniques, and procedures for mitigating the effect of seismic air guns on sea life - particularly cetaceans - are well-known and used throughout the industry.