Yeah, wouldn't that be great if I had linked it in my first post, and then if you had actually read my post well enough to see it?

How do you come to that assumption?

By linking to a peer-reviewed paper on the subject?

A nuclear warhead has lots of trouble to even "hit" an asteroid.

Essentially every space mission we have launched for the past several decades has had to navigate with a far more precision than that needed to get close to an asteroid and activate a single trigger event when close by.

This. As one example, researchers are investigating ways to use sunlight, water, and carbon dioxide in the air itself to synthesize kerosene. If we can manage to do that on an economically viable scale (which would mean building these plants on a massive scale), it would make a serious dent in curbing our fossil fuel appetite.

You simply can't beat the efficiency of hydrocarbon fuels in terms of released energy for a given weight and volume (as fuzzy gives us some hard numbers below), and that's crucially important for aviation. At the moment, there simply isn't any viable alternative.

We send spacecraft on comparable missions all the time. And it doesn't really take a spectacularly large payload to destroy (yes, destroy) an asteroid a few hundred meters in diameter. 1/2-kilometer-wide Itokawa could be blown into tiny bits which would not recoalesce, via a 0,5-1,0 megatonne nuclear warhead, a typical size in modern nuclear arsenals (in addition, the little pieces would be pushed out of their current orbit).

I know it's a common misconception that "nuking" an asteroid would simply create a few large fragments that would hit Earth with even more devastation, but that's not backed by simulation data. And anyway, even if it didn't blow the asteroid to tiny bits (which simulations say it would) and even if it didn't push the remaining pieces off trajectory (which they say it does), anything that spreads an Earth impact out over a larger period of time is a good thing - it means the higher percentage of the energy that's absorbed high in the atmosphere rather than reaching the surface (less ejecta, lower ocean waves, a broader (weaker) distribution of the heat pulse, etc), the weaker the shockwaves, the weaker the total heat at any given point in time, and the more time for Earth to radiate away any imparted energy or precipitate out any ejecta cloud. If the choice is between 15 Chelyabink-sized impactor (most of which will strike places where they won't even be witnessed) or one Meteor Crater-sized impactor (same total mass), pick the Chelyabinsk ones. 50 10-megatonne meteor crater impactors or one 500-megatonne Upheaval Dome impactor? Pick the former. The asteroid impacts calculator shows the former generating a negligible fireball and 270mph wind burst at 2km distance, while the latter creates the same winds 25km away (156 times the area) and a fireball that even 25km away is 50 times brighter than the sun, hot enough to instantly set most materials on fire.

But that's all irrelevant because, quite simply, simulations show that nuclear weapons do work against asteroids.

What we need is enough detection lead time to be able to launch a nuclear strike a few months before the impact date (to give time for the debris to disperse). There is no need to "land" or "drill" for the warhead. There is no pressure wave; instead, an immense burst of X-rays is absorbed through the outer skin of the asteroid on the side of the explosion, causing it to vaporize (unevenly) from within, especially near the ground zero point, and creating powerful shockwaves throughout its body. In addition to ripping it apart, the vaporized material and higher energy ejecta flies off, predominantly on the side where the explosion was detonated, acting a broad planar thruster.

Oops... first sentence is supposed to end with "and a commercial flight filled with cargo and hundreds of passengers."

There's a pretty big difference between a solo flight in an ulta-lightweight solar-powered plane. Note that they've had to wait for months for a clear weather window, and you're claiming that it's now possible to use commercial solar-powered planes? It's sort of like claiming that because we put a man on the moon, we're now ready to build a tourist resort there.

You can't pass a law of physics through legislation. This is cool and all, but don't mistake a this for any sort of substitution for current aviation tech. It's not, and won't be anytime in the near future. We need to focus our efforts on places where it IS feasible to reduce or replace our use of fossil fuels in the relatively near term. Power plants. Cars. Stuff like that. There are many people who are investigating more sustainable aviation fuels, but for the foreseeable future, these are still going to be carbon-based.

I hate sounding like a naysayer, but you need to be a bit realistic about these sorts of things.

On the other hand, if they're doubling capacity, then you only need half the number of cycles (it actually even works *better* than that, as li-ion cells prefer shallow charges and discharges rather than deep ones - but yes, fractional charge cycles do add up as fractional charge cycles, not whole cycles). If you have a 200km-range EV and you drive 20 kilometers a day, you're using 10% of a cycle per day. If you have a 400km-range EV and you drive 20 kilometers a day, you're using 5% of a cycle per day.

Top commercial li-ion capacities are about 30% more than they were 5 years ago. And today's batteries include some of the "advances" you were reading about 5 years ago.

I'm sorry if technology doesn't move forward at the pace you want. But it does move forward when you're not looking. Remember the size of cell phone batteries back in the day?

Most of them a good 51% of the human population are idiots.

This is from personal observation and working a few years when I was young at an amusement park. the bulk of people are really morons.

Taze yourself, Guaranteed to get far more likes and clicks than any selfie you can take.

Wow very short life. Call me when it's 2000 cycles.

Root and install a blocking hosts file.

  Bethesda proved that ad's on free games is only for complete crap games. Fallout shelter has ZERO ad's ZERO nags, and they are making money hand over fist with it.

So if your app has ad's, it's a strong sign that it's a complete crap app.

Luckily 99% of all free apps are trash, so I dont use them, the ones that are worth buying, I buy.

Damn... if only we had some sort of device that could perform tremendously complex real-time calculations - thousands, or maybe even millions of them per second. Then they might... just might... have a shot at pulling this off.

Sure. Perhaps you've heard of bigamy? Alice can't marry Carol because Bob already has a vested marital interest with Alice. For example, if Alice marries Carol and dies, Carol is entitled to 100% of her assets as spouse. But so is Bob.

That's not the policy rationale for the prohibition on bigamy, and while it is perhaps a little better of a reason than administrative convenience, it boils down to the same thing, since the question of marital property is one of the issues that legislatures will have to address when the ban is overturned as it inevitably will be.

On the contrary, tradition is absolutely relevant as to whether something is a fundamental right. Marriage is a fundamental right because it's enshrined in our traditions and collective conscience. ...
Polygamy does not have such a place in our traditions or collective conscience, and therefore is not a fundamental right.

Yep, that's the bullshit argument that people were rolling out against same sex marriage all right. That because it wasn't traditional, it wasn't fundamental.

The core mistake with that argument, whether in the context of same sex marriage or marriage among persons already married, or in larger numbers than two, is that what's fundamental is not opposite sex marriage, or same sex marriage, or polygamous marriage, but simply marriage, without qualification of any kind.

Issues like gender, race, consanguinity, marital status, and number of spouses are all restrictions on that singular fundamental right. Whether they stand hinges on whether they can be justified. Two of them, it transpires, cannot be. Ultimately I think the only restriction that will hold up will be consent, and perhaps consanguinity will have to be reframed in terms of consent if it's to be salvaged.

This is a form of camouflage known as "dazzle", and it's designed to break up the shape of the object rather than necessarily hiding it from view.