That's why you ship a prototyping unit to the moon. Build everything else on site with local materials. It takes a bit longer, but it's orders of magnitude cheaper.

New York wasn't shipped intact from Europe, not even the majority of the materials were shipped from there. Only a little material that couldn't be made here at the time. The rest was of local manufacture. Why should a colony on the Moon be any different than a colony an ocean away?

Forget Helium 3. If you can build a mining operation on the Moon, you can ship anything back to Earth for little cost.

Build oxygen/aluminum-carbon rockets. Use them to launch payloads on an earth intercept orbit.

Build basic aeroshells with heat shields. Load anything you like into them. Have them land anywhere on Earth. Pick any lake, if they float, then no landing gear is needed. Tow the thing to a dock, and cut it up. Recycle the entire mass. Iron, aluminum, copper, silica, glass, rare earth elements, it's all gravy. If the asteroids are factored in, then you could ship oil back too. some asteroids are up to 40% oil. How many cubic kilometers do you want?

A couple of hundred people living in Space/on the Moon could pay for the entire space program. Using linear induction motors, you could launch from the Moon without even using rockets.

Remember, the astronomical cost of space is almost all used in getting there. The return trip is as easy as dropping a rock off a cliff. Once it's set up, the rest is easy. Setting it up is very hard (read astronomically expensive), the fist time. But only the first time.

My wife doesn't want more than a basic phone. she would like voice, text messaging, contact list, camera and nothing else. She is using an old Moto Razer right now, and it has too many features. A dumb brick phone would be her favorite real soon.

Meego? Nokia had Maemo working two years ago. It worked well, as anyone with an old N700 or N800 tablet could tell you. Just add a phone chip and the same software that the other phones have and there you are. But no, they couldn't go with a product that worked. Now, it all depends on Microsoft. If Microsoft fails like they have before, then Nokia is doomed. If Microsoft succeeds, then both Apple and Google/Android Foundation will up the ante. Microsoft doesn't have a very good track record at continual upgrading the software OS. So, I still come up with a net loser for Nokia.

Java/QT for developers would have been the way to go. Why didn't they just finish what they started? Corporate politics most likely. Now both the Symbian and the Linux sides lose. For a little while anyway.

HTML5, while limited, will run on every browser. It is being pitched as a platform for writing 'apps' for all of these devices. While the application sets are limited, they will work across all of the devices. Maybe we should all be brushing up on our Javascript skills.

Loosing QT for the phones is a problem, as it can be installed on all of the major platforms (unless Apple bans it), so Nokia clearly made a blunder there. I am sure though that if dropped by Nokia, the KDE folks will continue on with a QT fork. They may need a new name though. I'd suggest "graphical++". But I'm lousy with catchy names.

In China, they stock the paddies with fish when the rice is transplanted. They harvest the fish before the rice. Some of the methane you talk about is from the fish. Some is from bacteria. Bacteria are eaten by insects in the water, which are eaten by the fish, which are eaten by the people who also eat the rice. The fish also fertilize the fields. The bacteria and insects recycle human waste too. It's really an intricate system.

If you eliminate the rice, you lose the fish too. What are you going to replace that protein with? Cows or goats? they make even more methane. They would also need additional land for fodder.

  They use the system they do because it provides the most nutrition for the least land.

Of course, you need lots of water to make it work.

A magnetic sail is possible, but to do what you propose would require an accelerating field. That would mean a lot of energy.

The proposed solutions I have seen involve either a superconducting magnet to create a miniature Van Allen belt around the craft, or a static generator to place a high positive charge on the spacecraft, usually with a negative charge on a wire from the craft to balance the charge. Protons and cosmic ray nuclei are repelled by the positive charge, as they also have a positive charge. How high the charge would need to be is a function of the energy of the incoming particles.

A magnetic field would cause the charged particles to bend, hopefully missing the spacecraft. Such magnetic lenses will have directions that offer more shielding than other directions. There would be close to no shielding from directly to the poles. But, it is much easier to shield a small hole than the entire craft.

There would also be a passive shield for reducing X-ray and UV rays. Gamma rays are much harder to shield against, but since most of those pass right through you, they are actually less of a threat. Most estimates I have seen say that the passive shielding would need to be around 18 inches of water (just less than half a meter). Though any material with a high percentage of hydrogen would work. Plastics are one possibility. Foam might work too. There has also been some work on exotic materials that provide a sort of quantum barrier to some forms of radiation.

The final design of an interplanetary craft will probably use all of these, as well as some that we don't know yet.

NASA has been quietly working on all this at a fairly low level for several decades now. They aren't done yet.

Some would, that would cool the remaining water down to freezing. further cooling by sublimation would cool it to the point where it would be stable in space, like the water in a comet.

Without knowing how you would build a nuclear powered rocket, there is no way to know how much radioactive fallout would be generated.

The NERVA system would have lost around a half pound of uranium mixed with 5% plutonium on a single launch. spread out over the hemisphere, it isn't really much. Since the Uranium is naturally occurring anyway, there is always some uranium dust in the air anyway.

The Orion system, on the other hand would have left several tons of plutonium in the atmosphere after each launch.

The HTGR versions I have seen proposed would have left several hundred pounds of uranium or plutonium in the air after each launch. None have actually been built and tested, so we don't know if it would really work. For these, the exhaust is much more toxic than just the radioactive component. YMMV.

Some of the proposed heat exchange engines might have left no residual heavy nuclei behind, but they haven't been built, so it's all still theory there.

BTW, in space, if you ever point your rocket away from the Earth, you are spraying the Earth with whatever you use for thrust.

Just something to think about.

Actually, it does both, at the same time!

You lose some water to evaporation, until the ice forms and blocks the hole. After that, you lose some to sublimation, until it passes the lower temperature limit for that process (around -60 degrees C.). The the losses stop. That's why comets can form and keep intact in the outer solar system.

To work well in a spacecraft, you would want to have a high reflectance outer surface. Letting the water freeze before any hole formed would also help limit water losses, but might hinder the stop leak effect.

Correct, or almost so. The NERVA rocket did produce thrust, but leaked . The leaks were due to erosion of the pipes at supersonic flow. The system worked by injecting a working fluid (liquid Hydrogen, liquid Helium, or liquid water.) into pipes (nozzles really) that ran through a working reactor. The reactor was designed to be very high temperature. The working fluid was heated to around 2000 degrees C before emerging from the rear of the engine. The system did work, but the thrust levels were not high enough to lift a working ship off the ground vertically. The plan at the time was to build an aircraft like vessel, and fly to high altitude, then keep going faster until you were in orbit. It might even have worked.

The Nuclear Test Ban Treaty killed it. The working engine put out small amounts of the radioactive fuel. The exhaust was radioactive, not because the water or hydrogen was radioactive, but because there were small amounts of heavy nuclei in the stream. The same problem in the Japanese reactor that the US press loves to pummel. The steam itself isn't radioactive, but it carries some radioactive dust. If the Test Ban Treaty had been worded differently, work could have continued on better nozzles. Oh well.

BTW, the unit looked cool on it's test bed. For all I know, it may still be there in Nevada. Of course, it had the nuclear fuel removed in the 1970's.

The "Crash of 2008" was the result of several simultaneous actions.

First, the overspending by the still relatively new Democratic Congress were not vetoed nearly enough by Mr. Bush.

Second, the real estate boom busted. Mr. Bush had warned of the coming collapse 4 years earlier, but Congress, both Republicans and Democrats were much too interested in claiming credit for the easy home loans to worry about something that was more than 3 months off.

Third, the relaxed accounting rules put in place during the Clinton Years had their final clash with reality. Reality won. Profits were nowhere near as high as investors were being told.

Fourth, the savings rate by Americans continued to decline, a trend that dated back to the Carter years, and is a result of tax policy. This resulted in under funded banks that relied mainly on loans to each other for collateral, as there were not enough depositors to provide the funds. Like paying one credit card with another, a point comes where you have to pay the piper. The long toll had gone on for years. Finally reaching a breaking point. Much of the banking system worldwide went down together. Full recovery still hasn't happened. Europe has several countries that are in deep financial trouble because of it. Several US States are hurting from this as well.

The US press of course blamed the President. That is after all a long time US tradition. Mr. Bush even got blamed for a hurricane or two. Stupid people believed it. New Orleans Mayor Levin for instance.

A coastal city that is 30 feet below sea level, with only a dirt levee between it and the ocean should expect storm flooding of epic proportions, say 30 feet or so. That is what happened. The Army Corps of Engineers had been warning of this since 1910. It happened. There was an interesting article in Scientific America about that in the late 1970's. It was not a question of if, only of when. The problem still isn't fixed, so it will happen again.

Now of course, Mr. Bush is no longer President, and Mr. Obama is getting blamed for the actions of others, including the weather. Well, he asked for the job. The blame comes with the territory.

So, it's all officially Obama's fault now. Really, it is lots of people's fault. Who benefited? Mr. Soros, and a few select others. Mr Buffet didn't do too badly either. Mrs. Pelosi and Mr. Reid got a lot from it too. Mrs Pelosi has lost her throne as an aftereffect, but Mr. Reid managed to hang on, thanks to a hundred Million from Mr. Soros. The list goes on, but it is so much easier to just blame someone. It doesn't fix anything, but you might feel better for a while. That is really the take home lesson. We didn't fix anything, but we have blamed someone. They may or may not have had something to do with it.

Don't worry about Mr. Soros, he got 7 Billion of the Stimulus funds to develop an oil field in Brazil where the oil is contracted to go to China. Mr. Buffet made out well on the recent stock climb, so he's doing well too.

There are lots of interesting happenings on the other side of this political aisle too. Pick any famous Washington or Wall Street insider, and they are probably in it up to their necks. Some don;t even know they were partially at fault. After all, some very intelligent people are deliberately stupid. It's pride.

No matter what side you are on, you were probably betrayed. It is after all about money.

It's been tried, was stopped by telco lawsuits. Just like Sarah Palin was forced out of Alaska government by media lawsuits against Alaska filed by east coast liberals.

Bet you never see that reported on MSNBC, CNN or Huffingtonsocialist post. PBS, maybe in 40 years or so. Like they will finally talk about the NYT/CBS charactor assignation of Barry Goldwater in 1964, but still won't talk about Joe McCarthy in 1956/7.

Truth is, college kids, more of your life is controlled by Monopolist oligarchs than you know, and the real controllers are people you have been taught to trust.

That's how Social Security has worked from day 1 (in 1934). The Feds have always spent the excess. They still do. There is still an excess, and one is expected for around 5 more years. What happens after that is the rub.

Yes, it always was a Ponzi scheme. I expected in the 1970's that it would be bankrupt before I retired. That still looks about right.

But for your modest proposal, do you really want to starve your parents to death? If so, you are one seriously deranged individual. I am sure they have a free room and board situation for you in Leavenworth Kansas. Enjoy!

This corresponds nicely with the cold weather onslaught in the 1300's. the Little Ice Age that killed off the Vikings in Greenland and opened the conditions for the Black Plague in Europe and Arabia.

Maybe we should be worried about high and low CO2 levels.