We'll never get through the thick ice layer...?
Because you have complete knowledge of all present and future drilling technologies?
If only someone, somewhere had a good idea about how to do this! Wait, what's this? Oh how I love this "Google" thing.
And after 900 your fission 'war' heads won't work anymore, so the slow down will be difficult ^_^
Why would that be? U-235 has a half-life of 700 million years. These things can be engineered to be storable for a few millenia (especially with deep space cold storage - if needed).
Just take frozen sperm to diversify.
You also need to maintain mitochondial DNA diversity, so this isn't a sufficient solution.
Overblown, use a dime to represent our solar system and the next one will be less than 100m away....
Let's use the Yap Rai stone currency (up to 3.6 m across) - then it would be 20 km away.
... The fastest spacecrafts we've ever built take about 9 years or so to go from Earth to Pluto. At that rate, they would take about 120,000 years to reach the next closest solar system....
True, but irrelevant. No one is going to build a generation ship powered by chemical rockets, not even with gravity assists.
The one technology that we currently know can be turned into interstellar propulsion is fission pulse propulsion - using many small fission bombs.
With optimization of this technology, and a suitably large vessel (the technology does not scale down very well) speeds up to ~0.5% c possible, making the voyage a mere 900 years.
And sevenses of birds?
Why embryos?
Just ship frozen ova and sperm.
You poor devil! How about submariners, who spend months at a time in cramped, crowded conditions?
A strategic ballistic missile sub cruise is 3 months.
A mission to Mars lasts about 3 years.
Big difference.
And let's not touch land for three years, as some of the old whalers did. And let's make sure that everyone knows there is a minimum of a 20% mortality starting off. And let's enforce discipline with a rope's end.
I don't think so. Pacific whaling voyages from New Bedford might indeed last three (even four) years - but they sure as heck touched land during that period. Whaling vessel visits to Pacific ports were the rule - Hawaii, Australia and New Zealand were common ports of call, with calls at the many Pacific islands also (see how many times Melville trod on land).
Also, on these long-range whaling voyages flogging was rare. These men were generally trained professionals, and they vied for births on out-going voyages where they stood to make some good money. Don't confuse the commercial whaling fleet with the conscripted ranks of the British navy of an earlier period. Shorter voyages are a different story.
But, yeah, dangerous. Loss rates of 100% were not unknown.
Only some of the time? That is not much consolation.
But you are right to point out these situations as models.
And there is abundant data that these extreme situations have terrible psychological tolls on the survivors, even if they don't go stark raving mad.
See, for example, the Chilean miners trapped in 2010.
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Might want to pull back the macroscopic lens there chief before you drown in the irony of the fact that you're conducting this very experiment in order for us to send people on a one-way trip to Mars.
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No, they aren't. The Hi-SEAS project is sponsored by NASA and NASA is not proposing any (deliberate) one-way missions. If it is infeasible to develop a means to return humans landed on Mars this simply means that NASA won't mount such a mission, period. (A humans-in-Mars-orbit teleoperating robots with no time delay on the surface would still be possible.)
Did you see the item about the NASA deep space mission hazard study posted here a couple of days ago? I read it, and they are talking about missions where humans return.
This issue is a large group of people attempting to put pressure on a company to get rid of an employee based on their personal views...
Odd, I thought being a CEO made you an employer, you know, one of those "job creators".
By the way - one point a lot of people seem to be missing here is that as CEO Eich would have the power to decide how the company he heads throws its weight around in the political arena - you know making political contributions, lobbying, filing amicus briefs, funding all manner of political foundations and front groups.
So the 53% who who voted for Prop8 (and therefore materially supported it) are now unpeople who should have no rights?
I don't see Eich, or any voter, being denied a single right much less "all of his (their) rights". Idiotic hyperbole, much?
I also tend to believe that the result is correct
Why?
All we have at the moment is a correlation.
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Au contraire, if you read TFA you will find we have this correlation across multiple equid species (not just zebras) and we have experimental evidence that biting flies do indeed dislike striped surfaces.
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Worst episode? Anything with Wesley Crusher....
There is the episode where Wesley almost collapses a universe on Mom (don't you hate it when that happens?). That was "Remember Me", which I rather like, but it is really Beverly's episode. Wesley just provides the MacGuffin.
Work without a vision is slavery, Vision without work is a pipe dream, But vision with work is the hope of the world.
