Thanks!

Brian Webb isn't listing this on his Vandenberg AFB Launch Schedule yet. I think he's going to wait until someone official tells him a date.

With some optimism that might only be thousands of years rather than hundreds of Millions.

But it's only necessary for Earth to be uninhabitable for a short time to end the Human race. And that can happen due to man or nature, today. If people aren't somewhere else during that process, that's the end.

4-digit UID, just under 40, two half-sleeves. :)

My arms are worth...uh, about 7x what an Apple watch Sport costs (alternately, I could afford one steel Apple watch for each arm for what I paid for each of my sleeves). $200 isn't much tattoo. In fact, that was 1h20m at my artist's rates.

It's not about capacitance. The watch shines different coloured light through the skin and monitors colour changes to figure certain things out. Ink is going to absorb or reflect that light in a way that the watch isn't calibrated to handle. Ink isn't melanin, so darker skinned people won't have the same problems.

My sleeves look a lot better than an Apple watch ever could, but I may just barely have enough open skin to wear one if I wanted to.

Small prop driven aircraft, ALREADY.

The market was almost nonexistent about five years ago but it's growing quite fast. Don't underestimate what the major and ongoing advances in motors, controllers, and batteries will bring in the future. There's many radically new technologies in the works to partially or completely electrify aircraft transportation, far beyond just electrically driven propellers.

I'd have trouble being whisked around town dangling from a drone under my command without also being in a superhero costume.

Seriously, in our modern age, how else would a superhero get around? A fast car? Pish.

The system is actually not that big. The batteries are small because, despite the weight of the plane, the distances traveled are very short; and electric motors pack a lot of power into a small package. Having it all built into the plane reduces ground delays, ground staff, and additional ground hardware. It's a "pushback and go" system, the pilot can move the instant he gets clearance to, he doesn't have to wait for anyone else. It's estimated to save about 2 minutes over using tugs, which may not sound like a much, but each flight at the gate represents about $100k worth of revenue, so squeezing an extra flight in every couple days is a lot of money.

Ultimately they want to turn it into a fully automated airport traffic flow, where each plane moves from the runway to the gate and vice versa in a fully automated, optimized manner.

"Fast" is not an issue. Electric motors have a much better power to weight ratio than combustion motors, and li-ion batteries have no trouble feeding it. The reason things like solar impulse fly slowly is to reduce air resistance and thus minimize their power consumption needs.

Batteries have advanced tremendously in the past several decades and show no signs of slowing down. The transition of air travel will be more difficult and longer in the making than that of ground travel, mind you.

Before ICBMs became a reality, nuclear-powered planes were significantly researched. Probably the craziest was Project Pluto, whose concept was to have an open to the air nuclear core inside a ramjet housing, acting as the heat source instead of combusting fuel. The unmanned craft was designed to be able to fly around for months at a time holding numerous atomic bombs. When given orders to attack it would have bombed Soviet cities... then with its cargo spent, continued the rest of its lifespan flying low over Soviet territory damaging everything its path with sonic booms and the radioactive plume spewing out the back. Then when finally shot down or out of power, it'd crash as a dirty bomb in Soviet territory.

The engine was actually tested on a railcar, but there were way too many concerns about the craft, and the advancement of ICBMs just seemed a better route. Among the many concerns was that the US didn't want the Soviets to feel that they had to develop a similar such craft as a countermeasure.

There's also some interesting side possibilities of airplane electrification being looked at. I read a research paper at one point which focused on the fact that electric propulsion scales down far better than other forms of aircraft propulsion; they investigated the possibility of having a number of micropropellers along the wing which are run at full power during takeoff and landing but not during level flight. The concept was that though they're not as efficient as the main propeller, they dramatically increase the lift and reduce the stall speed, so you can have aircraft lift off on very short runways or fly at very slow speeds without having to resort to normal VTOL techniques.

Of course, the size of the batteries needed will preclude carrying any passengers or cargo.

There are already electric small airplanes that take a couple people.

Airplanes are obviously the highest-hanging fruit for switching over to electric drive, but they're not impossible. On the pure electric front you're first going to see the current growth trend in small personal electric airplanes continuing and short-range business uses like crop dusting and the like grow. From there you'll move to the little short hop passenger flights between small regional airports, and then increasingly longer ranges and sizes.

There's also hybrid jet technologies being researched, wherein you greatly simplify your jet engines by removing the turbine, and instead drive the compressor with electric power; the casing becomes the stator and the compressor the rotor of an electric motor. The moving part count is greatly reduced and there's far less resistance to the exhaust gases leaving the engine, meaning more power and better fuel efficiency.

But actually, before all that, there's one electrification system that's just now hitting the market, but it's not where most people might think: the wheels. Jet engines are horribly efficient in running at low powers such as taxiing, and planes burn a lot of fuel just moving about and waiting to take off or heading to the gate - on a short flight a plane may burn 5-10% of its fuel just sitting on the ground. There are now small scale pilot projects out there that have battery-driven electric motors in the landing gear so that one doesn't have to waste all this fuel.

Actually I was thinking nuclear power rather than magic.

I agree with the other commenter, there will be lots of people living in space if they can only get there. Mars is a good start.

Obviously I am missing something, then. Please fill me in on your better information sources. Email to bruce at perens dot com if you don't want to put them on Slashdot.

It's time to start planning another trip to Lompoc. The Motel 6 was sort of yukky last time. Maybe I'll try something else. There was an official visitor observation site that I found and got into last time, but that was for the Delta, and it was on Pad 4 if I remember correctly. This one is all the way on the other side of the base on Pad 7 or 8, isn't it? There are some farm roads that might be good observation sites if they are open.

It has been well known for quite some time now that single-sex crews are a very bad idea for long voyages.

Like 98% of military crews throughout modern human history?