Every parent needs to do this. It would make both the world, and the teenage years of childhood much, much better.

Don't do that... Don't use bullshit to pretend you have facts.

Internet voting inherently appeals to a different demographic, there is absolutely nothing strange about a different demographic voting differently.

It's not strong evidence because it's not evidence at all. It might be worth looking into, but don't be that guy.

Oh hell, if we can just tell everyone to "get along" instead of actually having trials, I'm becoming a fucking judge!

Regardless of how stupid a patent case is, it's the current law and deserves a trial. Period.

You wanna change the patent system? then fucking help change it. Don't ignore your responsibilities.

You aren't terribly bright are you? You replied to my statement about running thousands of miles of cable with "this replaces quantum entangled bits".

That's wrong.

This "replaces" the current methods of OTP, which is to say it doesn't.

It also doesn't replace QEB because those are actually potentially practical.

I'm sure I'm wasting my time here... you clearly don't understand that this entire paper is garbage wrapped in stupidity. It isn't even original, FFS.

In fact, that is the worst ROI possible.

There is no reasonable return for doing such missions, we pretty much know what Mars is about and any further robotic exploration is merely because people aren't willing to do the real thing.

I'm also for extra Mars missions of any sort, because they give the private industry a chance to cut their teeth on such things... But to suggest that rovers are a better ROI than long-term habitation on other planets/moons is a joke.

well let's see:

ln(mi/mf) is the same for both rockets, which leaves us with pure multiplication.

Of course that's not counting that you don't have to fly through an atmosphere, or that because your fuel/lift ratio is so much higher and gravity much lower you can carry many times the amount of fuel in the first place, or any number of other reasons the moon makes a great launch pad.

You're in over your head.

There is nothing pragmatic about shunning exploration and invention based on arbitrary political states.

You should take at least high school physics before commenting on such things...

I'm so glad people like you are the minority... we'd be absolutely fucked as a species if you weren't.

Enjoy your idiocy while the rest of us try to make your life better.

Cheaper on the whole perhaps, but definitely not easier... doing a manned mars mission from Earth is insanely complicated. By comparison doing it from the moon is like walking down to the corner store in a metropolis.

Actually, just based on simply astrophysics we know very well that there is lots of delicious stuff on the moon ready for the taking.

You can know that much with nothing more than the facts that it is differentiated, and has volatiles present.

So while you are correct that LEO != moon, there's no chance of getting there and finding nothing of value.

And you also mustn't forget that the moon has lots of metal already. In reality if you're willing to do some automated assembly and don't mind it taking longer (for gathering/smelting/forging) you can actually get a large part of what you need right from the moon itself.

Perhaps more to the point, the first factory you'd probably send up the typical way, but there's nothing stopping you from building the second, third and fourth for free (by comparison) once you get setup.

That brings the cost/unit down to actually surprisingly reasonable numbers.... it's just a hell of an upfront.

I'm not sure but I think they were referring to the upgrade post-moonbase.

The simple fact is that the journey now is ~6 months minimum, but if you can stage the launch from the moon where you start off with 1/6 gravity you can get there a hell of a lot faster.

Yeah there are still issues regarding radiation and such, but when you're now talking about a few weeks instead of months the issues are far easier to deal with.

Even assuming that target velocity only scales linearly with gravity, you're looking at instantly cutting a 6 month trip to 1 month. The truth is though that it's closer to an exponential increase since you can carry the same amount of energy but only use 1/6th or less getting out of the gravity well, and then "nearly 100%" of your energy expended is converted directly into speed.

So assuming that the GP was talking about a minor jump after a moon base is established, they're right. Taking away most of the gravity allows you to make much quicker journeys, that alone brings Mars missions about a bajillion steps closer to immediate reality.

You keep using that word... I don't think you know what it means.

So, just to be clear... you aren't okay with the GPL right?