The technology necessary to fry a satellite is much less impressive, and much older, than the sort of lasers we are finally seeing today. The plane-carried ABM lasers needed to be portable (obviously) because they needed to be carried where they could target the launch sites, where the ICBM is still slow and has lots of propellant to catch on fire. In order to get a high-powered laser in a package a (very large) plane would carry they use chemical based lasers that produce very high power pulses but have a limited number of shots.

Frying a GPS satellite is a lot easier, you do it from a ground station, so you have access to way more power and larger machinery (if you wanted to take out a satellite over China, and not over you then you'd need to put this on a ship or something), and you don't need a high-powered laser. We aren't vaporizing anything, we're just gently warming it. When people think lasers they are thinking something like this recent video, where a laser melts through a car hood and (supposedly) the engine underneath. That's totally overkill for what you need though, the boiling temperature of aluminum is 2467 degrees Celsius, heating a satellite to a hundred degrees Celsius would be more than enough, and while that takes more energy than the above video shows (larger mass being heated) it takes way less power, because you don't need to do it in two seconds, three hours is fine.

You actually don't need a laser at all, really any spectrum of light you throw out there will do. An old (in both senses of the word) coworker of mine told me that one of the Apollo missions was landing near an existing instrument on the moon that transmitted on the same frequency of one of the Apollo commands. They didn't have the ability to remotely turn off the device so they just pointed a very powerful antenna at it and broadcast noise until they were sure it was dead. No citation for that unfortunately, but I would love one if someone else knows of this.

Our GPS Satellites are in Lower Earth Orbits. These BeiDou satellites are in Geosynchronous orbits, far outside of our missile range, and possibly for exactly this reason. Keep in mind that in that "real war" the process of destroying the few dozens of enemy satellites you want to destroy will produce enormous debris clouds through LEO, possibly destroying yet more satellites and causing yet more debris clouds. This sort of has a MAD effect, as such a shooting war could wipe out most of the planet's LEO real estate. However, if one party doesn't have hardly any assets in LEO, this stops being much of a concern for them, it's sort of like if the US or Russia had developed an impervious ICBM shield at the height of the cold war.

Unfortunately for the US, not only is China starting out their space infrastructure in higher orbits, but the Russians have done this for decades as well. Ever since the Space Shuttle came around with the capability of grabbing LEO satellites and bringing them back down for analysis the Russians started putting their Top Secret military satellites up in higher orbits where the Space Shuttle couldn't get them. Now they aren't as vulnerable to a Space Debris Doomsday scenario either.

However, just because we can't hit GEO sats with missiles doesn't mean we can't destroy them. Satellites are very thermally sensitive due to how difficult it is to dump heat in space, and by definition GEO sats don't move with respect to the Earth much, so it's theoretically pretty easy to destroy them with lasers. And I don't mean vaporizing them with Star Wars lasers, I mean shining a high power laser on them for several minutes or hours and slowly adding more heat to the satellite than it can dump. Hard to do this to a LEO, (from a single ground station) you'll only get a shot at it for five or six minutes at a time, and it'll have its entire 90 minute orbit to cool off again, but you can shoot at a GEO forever.

Yeah, I too was expecting a discussion of the sorts of encryption, malware, etc that should be understood to be defined as "arms" in the modern world, and which of them should be considered to fall under the second amendment.

I know, planets these days are always picking up and vanishing without even saying good bye. First Ceres, then Pluto. Every morning I wake up I breathe a sigh of relief that the Earth is still here.

So you are saying that either hulked out mutated muscles are the healthiest way to live, or a sedentary person that never moves a muscle is the healthiest way to live?

No room in your hypothesis for a middle ground that doesn't go all the way to one enormous extreme being the best?

I know, who can divide by two anymore.

This summary doesn't accurately describe the situation at all. The Mars missions are so more expensive largely because they are doing more. The next Mars Rover is going to be larger, heavier, and more capable than the two previous--wildly successful--rovers in pretty much every way. That $6B mission is a sample return mission, lifting off and bringing a research payload from Mars back to Earth is an enormous technical challenge. It's never been done before and that will drive most of the cost.

Also the linked missions aren't quite as cheap as the summary implies. The proposed mission to Europa has an estimated cost of $2.5 billion (and $4.7 billion is the given estimate in the last paragraph of the first link in the summary), exactly the same price as the first "overly expensive" Mars mission mentioned. The Enceladus trip is much cheaper, estimated at a little over half of a billion, so that at least is a reasonable alternative, though I still want to point out that that mission is much earlier in the planning stages, and missions that diverge a lot from previous missions are more likely to have ballooning costs as new found kinks are worked out.

Another issue is that not only are the Mars missions promising more, but there is a much greater chance that they will be able to live up to those promises. Every single Mars mission we've done so far has added to our body of knowledge on the planet, and our ability to better plan a mission and engineer a craft that can get more and better data on the next run. From Viking and on we have answered many, many questions about Mars, and learned about even more questions (meaning that we know the sort of doodad that needs to be on the next mission to answer that new question). Starting a new series of missions to a new celestial body means that in a lot of ways you have to start back at the drawing board again. This is another reason to start small on a new body, better to have 3-4 partially successful $200 million missions leading up to that big $2.5 billion dollar rover mission rather than trying plan a $2.5 billion mission right of the bat.

I should clarify that I don't think that investigating these moons is a bad idea. I think it's a wonderful one. However I don't think that we should investigate these moons in place of Mars, when we have already accumulated so much experience on how to investigate Mars. It's also worthwhile to note that this was the viewpoint of every scientist interviewed in the article. Nobody said that they didn't want to go to Mars, they all said that they wanted this moons visited in addition to Mars, not instead of.

While each molecule of methane causes much more warming than CO2, there has been much, much more CO2 released during the industrial revolution, so the warming component of CO2 gas is still larger (60% according to here, which is also a source for the other Methane facts I say here) than the component from CH4. Also, the increase in methane levels mainly comes from the increased scale of our agriculture as our population grows, and most of that comes from our cattle farming. Large developing countries like India and China have already begun industrializing in a way which rapidly raises their CO2 levels on par with the West, however they are showing little indication of adopting the Western diet anywhere near the level that would cause their CH4 production to match that of the US, so it looks like in the near future the CO2 production will outpace methane production by an even greater extent.

Additionally, methane is a useful fuel source, that means that there is an economic incentive to capture it, so that is the sort of thing the private market will take care of by itself as the techniques arise to do so, and this has already begun to happen. New landfills have systems to capture the produced methane, and there are even people experimenting with ways to capture cow farts. There is no money in sequestering carbon in a free economy, and as long as the global and societal costs of burning carbon are not transferred to the market as a financial cost then those methods of energy production will remain cheaper than cleaner methods for the foreseeable future, meaning that that is where our political (to apply those costs) and technological (to lower the costs of the alternatives) efforts need to go.

Lastly and most importantly Methane only persists in the atmosphere for around a dozen years, while CO2 remains for centuries. That means that we canafford to hold off on addressing methane while we work on CO2, since all of the CO2 we produce will stay in the atmosphere basically indefinitely, unless we recapture it at enormous expense, we need to get a grip on it as soon as possible. Once CO2 has started down the road towards sustainability we can address Methane (if it still needs to be addressed), then watch the environment scrub that out naturally within a generation.

I've been saying this for years but every time I bring it up the point is just laughed down. Recycling paper = Green = Good has just been so ingrained into people's head that even intelligent people can't seem to bring themselves to question it.

We are supposed to recycle paper in order to "save the trees" but if we really wanted more trees we would use more paper so that the current tree farms couldn't keep up with the demand and more would need to be planted. The analogy I like to make is that if you wanted to "save the Potatoes" you would eat as many french fries as you could. If the entire nation stopped eating french fries tomorrow all of the Potato farmers would switch to other crops and you wouldn't see any potatoes any more.

The biggest stopping point I see is that most people just flat out don't believe that lumber and paper comes from tree farms. They imagine that forests are being clear cut and not replaced, not realizing that if that was really how it worked we would have been out of forest long ago. When I mention that I generally get a reply like "well I know that's not sustainable, and the corporations know that it's not sustainable, but they care too much about this quarter's profit to actually plant more trees." I appreciate the sentiment, and the short-shortsightedness of corporations is true in many cases, but it's just not true here. The biggest problem with this thought line (besides making it impossible to actually think through pros and cons of recycling) is that it also masks the actual problems of having large sections of "forests" all made out of a single species of tree of a fairly young age, which pretty much turns any normal forest ecosystem upside down.

Now I'm not saying that non-recycled paper is definitely better from a CO2 standpoint, I'm just saying that there is a really good chance that it is better. Say that T is the amount of carbon sequestered in the new paper, R is the amount of Carbon released when processing used paper into recycled paper, and N is the amount of carbon released processing trees into new paper. I readily admit that N > R, but whether R > N - T is the real question. I don't have the ability to answer that question, but I'm sure someone out there has data on the processed mass of paper and energy requirements of various paper mills, and I would love to see those numbers. Preferably in addition to a comparison of secondary environmental costs, like the types and amounts of dyes, bleaching, etc involved in each process.

Companies have to do that because it's illegal to actually ask you if you're a Time Lord.

Yes it has actually happened. Slashdot covered it at the time: http://news.slashdot.org/story/09/03/30/1249237/Is-That-Sexting-Pic-Illegal-A-Scientific-Test

What I would do in that situation is take the parts that were useful out of that book, strip out all of the useless parts, and replace them with more current models and the useful applications that those observations have. Then I could publish the second edition of the sailing book that is far superior to the first edition, and everybody could use that edition without all of the hang ups and deficiencies of the first book.

An alternative would be to classify all of the useful parts of the book as "literal truth" and the obsolete parts as "metaphorical truth" then every week I would indoctrinate children with undeveloped logical reasoning on how God said the Earth was flat because of his unbending sense of justice, and that people sailing off the end of the world if they went too far away from land represented the moral fall of people that strayed too far from his divine message.