Of course, I suppose after generations on a world-ship it's quite possible that not everyone would want to settle down.

I'd say that's a racing certainty. It's not a trope I've seen exercised much in SF (a notable exception being "Building Harlequin's Moon" by Larry Niven and Brenda Cooper. The necessity for a mutli-generational approach would tend to cramp things like character development (BHM spans a period IIRC of some 60,000 years, as the colony ship has to lay over to carry out repairs, and in the process need to, erm, build a moon. In orbit around "Harlequin." (Niven is Old School SF.)

There are interesting things to think about in such a situation and a mission. Including, particularly, how do you man a mission that is going to be profoundly multigenerational. How do you know you're going to be able to motivate the 79th generation after launch?

Those strong magnetic fields would, indeed, change the energies of electron orbitals (indeed, of proton orbitals inside complex nuclei too), but they'd do so in accord with the laws of physics. That would (probably ; IANA quantum mechanical chemist) change the laws of chemistry to be different to those that apply in lower magnetic fields (and lower field gradients too). However the underlying laws of physics will still be the same.

There's a very definite hierarchy of precision and strength of lawfulness in the sciences. If we accept economics as being a science (the dismal science), then it's "laws" are much looser than the laws of biology. (I was reading a paper last night on the laws of social evolution of non-breeding behaviour, couched in terms of probability of various outcomes, and the consequent effects on probably descendent count for each member of the population ; those laws were couched very much in economic terms, of calculating probabilities.) The laws of biology are much stricter ; egg plus egg does not make a fertilized egg ; 23 chromosomes plus 24 chromosomes makes for a pretty fucked-up organism, if it's viable at all ; oxygen metabolic enzymes plus sulphide (or hydrosulphide) ion makes for a broken or non-functional enzyme molecule. The laws of chemistry underlie the laws of biology and are considerably stricter ; in aqueous solution, silver ions plus chloride ions precipitates silver chloride if the solubility product of AgCl is exceeded (assuming no thiosulphate ion in solution) ; argon reacts with fewer elements than xenon, and forms less stable compounds ; silver chloride has the sodium chloride structure at NTP. The laws of chemistry themselves are founded on the laws of physics - those precipitations and crystal structures are basically the result of electrostatic interactions (as are the more subtle interactions of quantum mechanics in forming covalent bonds) ; when people talk about "unknown new laws of physics that will give us FTL travel, I invite them to jump out of a tall building and try to argue for an exemption from the laws of gravity.

In your example, the changes to the emergent laws of chemistry result from adherence to the more fundamental laws of physics.

If you can drag up a few string theorists, I can bring some mathematical philosophers ; we can throw them into a pit and let them fight it out to see if physics or maths is more fundamental to the universe. I'm not a great fan of either marshmallows, or popcorn, but I can bring a barbie and some great venison burgers.

SNAFU.

It also has an optional 'pull-down conversation mirror' that lets drivers check on kids without turning around."

A driver who even thinks about turning around to check on what the passengers are up to should lose their driving license until they've successfully re-passed their driving test.

That's why you strap them in. That's what you have other adults in the vehicle for. That's why you train the kids from before potty-training to not touch their seat belts on pain of straight back home and no fun for the rest of the day. That's why you train the kids over the same time scale to not distract the driver.

This is a technology which should not exist.

Memo from Self : Like I was going to do that? After the last time I worked on a Mac?

The laws of physics (and chemistry) are the same pretty much everywhere

Where, precisely, do we know that the laws of physics are different from those we see here? "pretty much everywhere" implies that there is somewhere that isn't included. Where is that?

even at small fractions of light speed, remain expansionistic, and avoid completely eradicating ourselves or transcending as a species we could colonize the whole friggin galaxy in only a few billion years.

Billion? A few tens of million years.

The galaxy is about 100,000 LY across. If we can get to 1% of c, then moving out to cover the galaxy would take (order of) 10 million years transit time. Since you're using generation ships, then while you're in flight you can be preparing a colonisation ship in the centuries between stellar encounters and drop the settlers off (and along with them, your political dissidents, mutants and space-sick passengers and other problems) ; if they think the star is settleable (does it have asteroids ; never mind the planets for the next x generations) then they stop, otherwise they do some quick (decades) mining for consumables and then depart to catch up with the mother ship.

I'd guess that "we" could colonise the galaxy in 100 Ma. Of course, by then, the species would certainly have changed, and probably fragmented into significantly different species. Certainly cultures would have changed drastically.

But it's all SF for the next number of generations.

Hmm, well I suppose if you were under hard acceleration it probably wouldn't be healthy for anything caught in the exhaust at close range,

In some SF universes that is codified as a "law" of warfare. e.g. "The Kzinti Lesson : a reaction drive is a weapon in proportion to it's efficiency as a drive."

A lot of those early mathematicians were a bit on the crazy side, having come to that realization and not having any of the framework for coping with the idea.

Well, they could have just invented a god of mathematics and had done with it. But they were pretty smart cookies, so they'd probably have noticed the stupidity of admitting a supernatural explanation of any sort into their attempts to understand the natural world.

Your analogy is wrong. You need to cut the top off the safe and then perform the rest of your experiment.

Air guns (they've never been called "sonic cannons" ; the author has been channelling early Hawkwind) are fired at a depth of 5~10m below water level, suspended from floats towed behind the survey boat. Normally there's a string of multiple hydrophones trailing along behind the air gun, held at a similar depth by tension between floats (pulling them up) and a hydroplane (underwater wing) pulling them down. Sometimes we lower a hydrophone (or several, for redundancy) into an existing well bore and lower it to the bottom, maybe as much as 7 or 8 km away from the surface, but we never lower air guns to that depth because they wouldn't work.

Understand, I am pro oil drilling, pro nuclear power... and all sorts of other things you likely find unsavory. But this just seems wanton to me. I'm not a monster or an idiot... and this seems like madness.

Then TFA's writer has achieved his (her? I forget which) purpose of spreading FUD about what has been a routine technique in other parts of the world for decades, with appropriate mitigation strategies in place.

Sharktopusnado, I'm afraid.

Agreed. There are other forms of diving injury that whales (and other non-human air-breathing divers) suffer from, but they're generally chronic and cumulative. Crush injuries to bones with isolated fluid-filled cavities which can't equilibrate fast enough, for example. Humans get the same, which is part of the reason that sat divers take several days to get to depth.

The sound is so excruciating that whales will surface too fast and get the bends

Whales don't get "the bends" (in the sense of decompression sickness). When they dive, they stop breathing (Doh!) and the air in their lungs rapidly compresses until their lungs have collapsed and the air is in the (relatively non-absorbent) bronchae and cranial air passages. Then, when they come back up, there isn't the excess of nitrogen dissolved in the blood that needs to exsolve and forms the bubbles that cause decompression sickness.

What gives human divers decompression sickness is that we breathe air while we're at depth. That allows our bloodstream to equilibrate with an effectively unlimited supply of nitrogen at depth, whereas the whales (dolphins, seals, penguins, etc) have only the one pair of lungs full of air to equilibrate against.

Don't worry, you're by no means the first person to get this wrong. I've had to talk other trained SCUBA divers through the maths before.

There are other forms of diving injury to which whales etc are subject, but they're not "the bends." And while they leave marks on the bones (as they do on human divers too), they're not enough to incapacitate the animals (though they can destroy a commercial diver's career).

Without the oil that came from the fracking boom oil would probably be at $150/barrel or higher

The overwhelming majority of the "fracking boom" is drilling for gas, not oil. Yes, it is possible to frack shale (as in the gas boom) for oil, but it's much, much less common than fracking for gas.

Of course, in conventional (i.e. non-shale) reservoirs, hydraulic fracturing to enhance oil (and gas, but more rarely) production has been going on since the 1950s without arousing any particular attention. Of the about 200 wells on my CV, dozens of them have probably been fracked since I drilled and steered them. I wouldn't know ; it's not a question I'd ever waste my time asking.