> A small, portable power source that would be several orders of magnitude more powerful than what we have today, for one.

You mean more compact and more powerful than this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T... , which we have today?

Maybe you should re-evaluate your criteria.

Fission is already pretty up there in terms of energy density. Fusion is better (and we already have practical fusion power: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T... ) and antimatter is literally the physical limit, as no source of energy can ever be more dense than antimatter due to general relativity. We can produce and store antimatter; unfortunately production of antimatter is extremely inefficient due to physical law.

What I'm saying is that we already know what the physical limitations are. We don't need a 'new source of energy', nor would one change the equation that much.

Nonsense. Distance is immaterial (literally); the important thing is *time*. We can travel to the stars with current tech. We just can't live long enough to survive the journey. Even chemical rockets are 'good enough to travel to the stars.'

Which is why the real way to get to the stars isn't through a ridiculous 600-meter space colony carrying live humans. It's through robotics and frozen embryos (or just robotics).

We can start colonizing the galaxy *right now* - we just lack the will to do so.

Your analysis is good overall, but there are a few sticking points. I don't know where you get the 33% efficiency figure from; it may be true for huge stationary turbines or turbines for large aircraft but it most definitely isn't true for turbines optimized for light-weight applications like rocket engines. 25% would be more realistic.

Also, we still don't know what the design looks like. It's possible they are using a design which trades off pump power with some other variable. One thing to keep in mind is that the turbopump also has to pump the fuel to power itself, and this is eliminated in an electric design (although the relative contribution of this is minor). Also, a lot of the pump power goes into cooling the engine; it's possible that an alternative cooling scheme is used such as ablative cooling (this is pure speculation on my part).

p-values are inherently bad statistics. You can't fix them with 'good methodology.' Can they be used properly in some situations? Maybe, if the author knows enough statistics to know when or when not to use them. But the people who use p-values are likely not to have that level of knowledge.

p-values are like the PHP of statistics.

> "This might be a case in which the cure is worse than the disease. The goal should be the intelligent use of statistics. If the journal is going to take away a tool, however misused, they need to substitute it with something more meaningful."

There are plenty of more meaningful tools, you cunt. Just because you are too ignorant to know basic statistics doesn't mean we're forced to deal with your bullshit statistical methods.

Can you link to those cited articles? Afaik the 'decomposition' process in liquid nitrogen is incredibly slow, almost insignificant.

You don't need to have a 'perfect' freezing process anyhow. The fundamental assumption of cryonics is that future medical science will be able to reverse many of the damaging effects of freezing and decomposition.

But I've seen a common pattern among people to try to keep convincing themselves that death cannot be prevented no matter what. "Freezing causes ice crystals which damages your cells!" No, wrong. None of your cytoplasm freezes - only your intercellular fluid, and current cryonics procedures use various methods to reduce or eliminate this. "Frozen organisms can't be revived!" Again, no, plenty of unicellular and multicellular organisms have been frozen and thawed with perfect restoration of life. Humans just happen to be particularly difficult due to being very large and hard to cool uniformly.

If anything, 99% of the criticism of cryonics that I see is junk science. Cryonics depends on a lot of unproven assumptions, sure, and there's absolutely no guarantee that it will work, and there's probably 90% chance it won't. But I think a 10% chance is worth pursuing.

It is just a republic on paper. In practice it's an oligarchy: http://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-...

It is neither a 'democracy' nor a republic. It is an oligarchy - in the technical sense: http://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-...

Every time there's a thread about this, someone says the same stupid thing you're saying, and it's still wrong.

There's a huge difference in power requirement in getting a fully fuelled and loaded rocket up in the sky, and slowing the descent of a nearly-empty, lightweight fuel tank. You need very little fuel to accomplish the latter. Don't forget that parachutes have mass too and it's very hard to make a controlled descent with them (especially if you need to carry the rocket a significant distance). All in all, the solution that best combines cost-efficiency with the ability to land precisely is the vertical retro-rocket landing that SpaceX adopted.

In addition to my reply above, I'm actually going to say that I agree with you that disarmament and non-proliferation is a fantasy that probably isn't going to ever happen (at least not until there's a full-blown nuclear war, which is inevitable). But that's only because of the existence and influence of insane RWAs such as yourself.

I think I figured out what your sticking point is. You completely lack knowledge of what nuclear weapons are and how they work. You seem to have this idea of nukes as some mythical all-destroying force. You seem to think that once a country develops nukes it instantly has the power to flatten Washington DC or New York, and can start dictating terms to everyone.

> No country that has built nukes has ever built "just a few dinky nukes" - so you are imagining a world that doesnt even fit objective reality.

Actually that's exactly what India, Pakistan, and North Korea did.

The reality is that nuclear weapons development is expensive and hard to hide. No nation has ever successfully hid its nuclear proliferation activities. Every nuclear-armed country has gone through a phase when its nukes were pretty crap and ineffective and it was vulnerable to attack and takeover by other countries. Ultimately, the reason such intervention didn't happen had nothing to do with the fear of nuclear retaliation from those nations.

I'll grant you that (B) is a good argument and the first non-psychopathic thing you've said so far. And it shows that you're simply not listening, because I'm mentioning a global non-proliferation effort that would by definition marginalize rogue states that attempted to develop nuclear weapons.

But I get it. People like you don't want peace. You want war. You'll come up with pseudo-scientific bullshit to support your cause in any way you can. Nukes are necessary, you'll say, right up to the point where some fool presses the button and we all have to deal with the radioactive consequences.

In America you need a huge amount of money to run for president. It's essentially impossible unless you're a billionaire or have mega campaign donations. On the republican side, only the far-right whackjobs get the campaign donations, and on the democrat side, only the corporate whores get them. Hence the results we see.

Are you kidding? Rand Paul may have started out as a libertarian like his dad, but now he's in line with the establishment republican stance on virtually every issue. He has lost all personal integrity.

No, I understood your point, and my second point was a direct response to it. You have a simplistic view of the world because you heard about game theory once and think that your childish interpretation of the prisoner's dilemma can be used as a direct substitute to understand something as complicated as global politics and nuclear deterrence!

I'm not even going to reply to you again, just advise you to re-read what I wrote.

I envy your simplistic view of the world. People like you try to present a false and dichotomous view. That we have to choose between nukes and annihilation, because "prisoner's dilemma doncha know."

There are two main reasons that you're wrong. 1. Real life isn't as psychopathic as you make it out to be. During the cold war, the USA had several very good opportunities to take out the USSR with a nuclear strike but it never did. Or do you think only Americans are human?

Regardless, even if you completely lack faith in humanity, you're still wrong, because 2. the combined power of the world's conventional military forces would be more than enough to counter the threat of a few dinky nukes created by some rogue state.