If you're pissed that I called him a moron, you better stop talking, because it seems like the moron label is way too good for you.

Third world populations? No they aren't. The first comparison is with Tokyo. London, Seoul, Moscow, Paris, and Osaka are all in the list as well, and all do better than New York on a per-capita basis. Really, there's no way you can spin this in a positive way or excuse it. The plain truth is that New York is a wasteful fucking city.

Absolute numbers are important and convey one kind of information; per-capita numbers are also important and convey another kind of information. Both are given in the article.

I think it's hilarious that you're ok with not reading the article, then you say "who can both read and think." Go play with your alphabet blocks, dum-dums.

No, you moron, if you actually read beyond two sentences, they talk about per-capita consumption, and it's STILL higher than non-megacity living. But it doesn't stop there. They actually try to find out the reason this is the case. It turns out, even though people living in close proximity use less energy for transportation and so on, the effects of increased wealth cause more energy consumption and waste production overall.

I'm not against increased wealth and better living conditions for everyone. It's just something that we should keep in mind. Packing people together in cities doesn't necessarily make them more efficient.

What I want to know is: Why all the act about encryption? If there is going to be a backdoor, and everyone knows there is going to be a backdoor, and the backdoor is enforced by federal law, then why go through all this circus?

Building something capable of surviving a 10,000-year journey is no mean feat, I'll grant you that. But there's no reason to think we can't do it. People are already working on a clock designed to last for 10,000 years: http://longnow.org/clock/ . The technologies used to do that aren't even that advanced. Plus, most of the issues with that clock have to do with Earth-specific problems (temperature fluctuations, humidity, theft, and so on). Deep space is actually a much better environment for preserving things.

Why hello there, AC.

> "Tech", they speak like Scientologists.

What? http://www.merriam-webster.com...

> He thinks a thermonuclear weapon is a compact power source

If it's not a source of power, then what is it a source of? Rainbows?

> much like a dam, a battery, or a tank full of gas.

I never compared thermonuclear weapons with dams or batteries. You're a shallow-thinking fool if you that's all you interpreted from what I said.

> What, exactly, about life on the Earth is so unbearable is never quite clear with these people.

Actually I think life on Earth is quite dandy. I wouldn't personally want to leave. But all these people ranting about 'new energy sources' or 'better rockets' are fooling themselves; we do not need a new scientific breakthrough to reach the stars if that's what we wish to do. Moreover, a new scientific breakthrough would not even help that much, probably, as we already know the limits pretty well.

Who's the ranting moron here?

> A small, portable power source that would be several orders of magnitude more powerful than what we have today, for one.

You mean more compact and more powerful than this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T... , which we have today?

Maybe you should re-evaluate your criteria.

Fission is already pretty up there in terms of energy density. Fusion is better (and we already have practical fusion power: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T... ) and antimatter is literally the physical limit, as no source of energy can ever be more dense than antimatter due to general relativity. We can produce and store antimatter; unfortunately production of antimatter is extremely inefficient due to physical law.

What I'm saying is that we already know what the physical limitations are. We don't need a 'new source of energy', nor would one change the equation that much.

Nonsense. Distance is immaterial (literally); the important thing is *time*. We can travel to the stars with current tech. We just can't live long enough to survive the journey. Even chemical rockets are 'good enough to travel to the stars.'

Which is why the real way to get to the stars isn't through a ridiculous 600-meter space colony carrying live humans. It's through robotics and frozen embryos (or just robotics).

We can start colonizing the galaxy *right now* - we just lack the will to do so.

Your analysis is good overall, but there are a few sticking points. I don't know where you get the 33% efficiency figure from; it may be true for huge stationary turbines or turbines for large aircraft but it most definitely isn't true for turbines optimized for light-weight applications like rocket engines. 25% would be more realistic.

Also, we still don't know what the design looks like. It's possible they are using a design which trades off pump power with some other variable. One thing to keep in mind is that the turbopump also has to pump the fuel to power itself, and this is eliminated in an electric design (although the relative contribution of this is minor). Also, a lot of the pump power goes into cooling the engine; it's possible that an alternative cooling scheme is used such as ablative cooling (this is pure speculation on my part).

p-values are inherently bad statistics. You can't fix them with 'good methodology.' Can they be used properly in some situations? Maybe, if the author knows enough statistics to know when or when not to use them. But the people who use p-values are likely not to have that level of knowledge.

p-values are like the PHP of statistics.

> "This might be a case in which the cure is worse than the disease. The goal should be the intelligent use of statistics. If the journal is going to take away a tool, however misused, they need to substitute it with something more meaningful."

There are plenty of more meaningful tools, you cunt. Just because you are too ignorant to know basic statistics doesn't mean we're forced to deal with your bullshit statistical methods.

Can you link to those cited articles? Afaik the 'decomposition' process in liquid nitrogen is incredibly slow, almost insignificant.

You don't need to have a 'perfect' freezing process anyhow. The fundamental assumption of cryonics is that future medical science will be able to reverse many of the damaging effects of freezing and decomposition.

But I've seen a common pattern among people to try to keep convincing themselves that death cannot be prevented no matter what. "Freezing causes ice crystals which damages your cells!" No, wrong. None of your cytoplasm freezes - only your intercellular fluid, and current cryonics procedures use various methods to reduce or eliminate this. "Frozen organisms can't be revived!" Again, no, plenty of unicellular and multicellular organisms have been frozen and thawed with perfect restoration of life. Humans just happen to be particularly difficult due to being very large and hard to cool uniformly.

If anything, 99% of the criticism of cryonics that I see is junk science. Cryonics depends on a lot of unproven assumptions, sure, and there's absolutely no guarantee that it will work, and there's probably 90% chance it won't. But I think a 10% chance is worth pursuing.

It is just a republic on paper. In practice it's an oligarchy: http://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-...

It is neither a 'democracy' nor a republic. It is an oligarchy - in the technical sense: http://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-...

Every time there's a thread about this, someone says the same stupid thing you're saying, and it's still wrong.

There's a huge difference in power requirement in getting a fully fuelled and loaded rocket up in the sky, and slowing the descent of a nearly-empty, lightweight fuel tank. You need very little fuel to accomplish the latter. Don't forget that parachutes have mass too and it's very hard to make a controlled descent with them (especially if you need to carry the rocket a significant distance). All in all, the solution that best combines cost-efficiency with the ability to land precisely is the vertical retro-rocket landing that SpaceX adopted.

In addition to my reply above, I'm actually going to say that I agree with you that disarmament and non-proliferation is a fantasy that probably isn't going to ever happen (at least not until there's a full-blown nuclear war, which is inevitable). But that's only because of the existence and influence of insane RWAs such as yourself.