Hmm, my mistake - the ramjet does appear to predate Doctor Bussard considerably - clearly my avionics history is lacking.

On the other hand, Arthur C. Clarke credits "L'Autre Monde: ou les États et Empires de la Lune" (1657) as both being the first example of rocket-powered space flight and for inventing the ramjet. Though I would imagine they probably discussed something similar to a conventional ramjet, fusion having not yet been imagined. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ramjet#Cyrano_de_Bergerac)

No, it's been shown that one particular hypothetical design based on one particular set of assumptions would not be viable. Not that the fundamental concept is flawed. There's a post a few pages up that gives more details.

No, I'm pretty sure it's the other way around - there's now a real jet which adopted the name of a theoretical fusion engine that had been designed decades before.

Okay, so they tried turning it off and back on, but did they check to make sure it's plugged in?

Immortality is only available to individuals who have been permanently sterilized before having children. Your choice - you can strive for immortality personally, or through your children, but not both.

Of course enforcement would be an issue...

Nope. Cosmic radiation is pretty much continuous. What's (relatively) rare is the ridiculous high-energy radiation, such as a single photon carrying mass-energy equivalent to an entire iron atom. Our planet is still presumably getting bombarded by them near constantly, but they're rare enough that it's uncommon for them to hit the few particle detectors we have capable of recording them.

Actually, I believe current research suggests that there may be a link between cosmic rays and cloud formation - it's actually one of the current areas of genuine controversy in climate science. The caveats being:
1) The effect is relatively small - to the point of being virtually invisible until you have modeled the many stronger influences with sufficient precision.
2) It has nothing to do with Global Warming, as the direct measurements of cosmic ray levels have been basically unchanged in recent decades.

Of course, the link between clouds and temperature is even less straightforward. As I recall the research suggests there is only a very small effect on average temperatures, though there is a dramatic effect on the diurnal variation - cloud cover tends to stabilize temperatures, causing slower heating during the day, but also slower cooling at night.

Nah, there needs to be an intelligent species present at both ends of the desired wormhole in order to coordinate its creation. So far no such species exists in the Sol system.

Ah. Of course. Absolutely. Nice catch. I look forward to the day when high-capacity flywheels become cost-competitive with chemical batteries. But I'm not holding my breath.

But the gradient won't be across a dozen kilometers - in fact if it were then the vast majority of the vented CO2 would be lost to interplanetary space rather than getting anywhere close to Mars. To be effective this system would have to be designed to resist a laminar flow distribution, so that virtually all the gas leaves the funnel at *exactly* the same speed. Any molecule moving at a speed off by even 0.001% will never reach Mars. We're trying to throw a dart at a bullseye moving at 24.1 km/s, hundreds of millions of miles away, with zero possibility of fine-tuning the path after launch.

As a matter of fact, even the initial thermalized lateral motion of the gas molecules would pretty much render it impossible to hit Mars - We're talking months to years of transition time, even a few dozen m/s of lateral motion will cause the gas cloud to expand so rapidly that I doubt more than a tiny fraction of a percent would even make it to Mars's Hill's sphere, much less the planet itself. You would have to find a way to completely eliminate all thermalized motion, essentially creating a giant highly collimated particle accelerator with negligible inter-molecular interactions rather than an air gun.

Well, as soon as someone invents the AC battery we can switch back...

What do electric cars have to do with anything? The article is talking about *home* batteries.

No, it does not. Re-read my post after you've had your morning coffee. You're free to use the API however you want, it's presumed not copyrightable. The *one* exception is using it for interacting with the Linux kernel, because the kernel *is* protected from such access by the GPL, and only GPL-compatible code is allowed to interact with its internals. The API is irrelevant to that fact - it's simply the interface used by those who *are* allowed to interact.