I think you're mixing some things up. The EV1's tires were standard size (P175/65R14) and only 50 PSI. They were low rolling resistance but nothing spectacular by modern standards. I certainly hope to see big advances in tires in the coming decades (we really need tires that can adapt to the circumstances, changing their pressure and thread area / type in contact with the ground area depending on conditions and driver demands), but there's no radical departures I'm aware of coming in the immediate future.

Yes, I would welcome any chance to see the US move to metric and catch up with everyone else.

I can't think of a single EV today that is "harder to open". But as stated I can easily envision Apple doing that. I can't envision any of the current manufacturers doing that.

It's funny to joke about, but I think the concept of them only allowing it to be serviced at Apple-certified garages would be quite high. They'd probably allow the tires and the like to be done elsewhere, but I have little doubt that they'd restrict access to any internals. And would charge a fortune for trivial tasks.

24 hours *if* you have air resistance. And then you're moving so slow that you barely get past the center.

Note that no vacuum is perfect so you will lose velocity. Their scenario should have started the person off at the south pole, not the north, for the extra altitude.

Note that the heat isn't really the materials problem that they make it out to be - it's an energy problem. You don't need a material that can withstand 4000, you just need cooling. And not linearly high cooling, but an exponential decline. The longer you cool the rock down to your target temperature, the deeper your effect on the rock temperature behind your tunnel walls, and thus the shallower the temperature gradient, and thus the lower the rate of heat loss. It's like trying to cool a hot house - the air conditioner really struggles in the beginning but it gradually becomes easier with time as the walls and everything inside the house cool down.

Now, the pressures, those are insane, and the normal approach to pressure maintenance on deep drilling - filling with a heavy mud - obviously wouldn't work here.

Sort of. Stealth aircraft are not perfect, they have some radar cross signature, and a low frequency radar significantly increases cross signatures. But the cost of this was vastly reduced range. The Serbs mentioned in the article had to wait until the plane was almost directly overhead to get a lock.

That said, that Serbian radar unit was incredibly clever, I've read about a lot of their tactics. They raided scrapyards all over the country and ripped radars off of old military jets and tweaked them to make dummies to confuse HARMs, they worked out down to seconds how long they could paint a plane before they had to flee and how to accurately predict when and where the coalition would fly what aircraft, they deliberately let jets past on bombing raids (knowing that they'd be dropping bombs on their own people) in order to get them on the way back when they'd be more vulnerable, they hand-modified their old Soviet radars to change their frequencies out of the design specs, swapping out capacitors and the like so that they wouldn't be detected by coalition forces and would stand a better chance at hitting stealth craft, etc. They were drilled and managed incredibly well. If the whole Serbian military had done as well as they did, Serbia would have held out far better.

It's a cute concept, but the simple fact is, if you have some simple technology for gravity control that can take a primitive society whizzing around the cosmos, then that primitive society wouldn't be using flintlocks for battle. Because if you control gravity to the point that you can hop some primitive ship in and out of gravity wells and move at relativistic speeds then you're controlling *vast* amounts of energy to do so. And there's no way such a species is going to only make use of this vast amount of energy in their spaceships but not their weapons - even if they're only kinetic impactors.

My thoughts exactly. The environments we've physically checked so far are:

Earth: High degree of confidence that there is life here.
Moon: A couple spots on the surface, moderate degree of confidence that there is no life there. Surface in general, low degree of confidence, based only on comparing the few places we've checked with how the geology looks from orbit, with no data from many types of terrain. Elsewhere: no degree of confidence.
Mars: Same.
Elsewhere in the solar system: no degree of confidence (no other probes to other bodies have returned samples or returned data that would allow us to have any sort of confidence in determining whether life was present or not)
Elsewhere in the universe: no degree of confidence.

Many people gladly make assumptions about where life would or wouldn't be, but that's of course highly anthropocentric. "We need water, a solid rocky surface, a low radiation environment, temperatures in the 273-330 kelvin range, and these building blocks..." - you have no idea what you actually need, you have a sample size of "1". That's why people obsess over, say, Europa, despite us having absolutely zero evidence that there's any sort of life there. Heck, the best direct evidence currently on hand for life outside of Earth is probably Titan's "acetylene / ethane, hydrogen, and methane problem" (acetylene and ethane seem to be highly deficient at the surface compared to what should be there; there's some evidence that hydrogen may be disappearing at the surface; and Titan's methane persistence over geological times has long baffled; before the data on acetylene, ethane, and hydrogen was even known, it had been theorized that any life on Titan would most likely metabolize acetylene and ethane with hydrogen into methane). Plus, we know that there's extensive organic chemistry making all kinds of complex CHN "building blocks" in the upper atmosphere. But any life on Titan would have to be utterly different than LAWKI to survive the radically different environment.

The better analogy would be near-earth objects. Even still, they stay in (sort of) fixed orbits, generally close to the orbital plane of the planets, and don't try to avoid detection. Yet we're nonetheless pretty terrible at detecting "ship-sized" NEOs. If by "ship-sized" one means "aircraft carrier-sized", odds are better than not that it wouldn't be spotted until it was within the orbit of the moon. If we're talking "space shuttle sized", it probably wouldn't be spotted until it got near LEO.

Huge fireworks that spray out candy at high velocity and are lethal within a 5-meter radius?

It wouldn't be so much of a problem if the US definition of "allies" wasn't so lax (Israel, Colombia, Bahrain, etc). Don't get me wrong - I'd pick the US over Russia for example any day. But that doesn't mean that I'm comfortable with all of the US's "allies" having the right to buy the US's latest weapons, on their word alone.

Interesting story behind that... Theodore Gray was one of the cofounders of Wolfram Research with Stephen Wolfram. Apparently long ago there was a brewing trademark battle with another company over the Wolfram name. He resolved it by convincing the other company to go with Tellurium for their name (without mentioning that tellurium is a toxic metal that gives people exposed to it nasty, chronic BO)

What sort of concentration of ethephon should I spray on my papayuela (V. pubescens) to induce female flowering? I have two plants but they're both male and I've heard that it can be effective, but ran into no information about the concentrations required. And should I be spraying just the flowers, or the whole plant?

It should also be added that one should expect any life on vastly different planets to be vastly different to life on Earth, just because the environments are so different; trying to shoehorn Earth life into an alien environment is a poor fit. Martian surface life would need to be highly peroxide, radiation, and cold tolerant. I remember when people were worrying about microbes contaminating Titan with the Huygens probe - as if Earth microbes would suddenly adapt to an environment with no oxygen or CO2 and temperatures cold enough to liquify methane. Any life on Titan would have to have a chemistry totally unlike that on Earth to survive the cold, and would need to metabolize ethane, acetylene, and other hydrocarbons with hydrogen to produce methane - a metabolic cycle not found on Earth (curiously, there is some very interesting evidence that that might actually be happening on Titan... but that is neither here nor there)

Thankfully for Mars, it has excellent sterilization of its own. And not just the heat of aerocapture; the regolith is full of peroxides.

I really don't think Earth life could spread on Mars just from a couple of poorly sterilized probes. Perhaps given enough generations life could adapt to Martian environment, but there's not going to be any "generations" when there's no suitable environment for reproduction to begin with. It's like dropping a few bacteria into a container of bleach and expecting them to just evolve into bleach-eaters on the spot.

Yeah, well I'm a scientician, and I say the evidence suggests a martian supereruption!

You're supposed to include a picture every time you mention him ;)