For starters, please spare us lies that any asshole can disprove with a five second Google Search. Secondly, the outrageous cost of housing in California is a well known issue and has been for decades."

People really do come onto this fucking website and say whatever bullshit they want.

Wish I had mod points for you. It's constantly staggering to me how many people can't grasp this basic orders of magnitude problem.

We've already had something like that happen - Kosmos 954. Total clean-up bill submitted to the Soviet Union by Canada was 6 million dollars - about 42.5 million in today's dollars. That won't even buy you a single F-16 if you include the leather seats and entertainment package. Frankly, as long as Boeing isn't launching the damn thing, I'll take the risk.

It was also the first ever utilized fission bomb in history with a grossly inefficient warhead (about 1.5 percent.) That's efficiency of fissile materiel, to say nothing of 1945 technology applied to the rest of the bomb. This is also ignoring that it was a fission, rather than a fusion bomb. With fusion, a small fission bomb is used to generate the temperatures and pressures necessary to initiate fusion in a larger bomb attached to it, resulting in destructive power-per-kilogram greater than fission bombs by orders of magnitude.

They just let anybody post on this site don't they?

Fortunately not. Nobody was sure which kind of asteroid it was before we got close-up pictures, but DART's pre-impact photography clearly shows it's a rubble pile asteroid, similar to Bennu, Itokawa and Ryugu. These are all rubble pile asteroids, and, incidentally, also pretty big ones that orbit very near Earth's orbit, making them of obvious interest for planetary defense. As the landing to sample Bennu showed, we have a lot to learn about these "rubble piles," e.g. the probe that landed on Bennu found the surface was much more fluid than anyone had expected and flowed away from the sampling arm like water. Obviously, this is concerning for planetary defense efforts - a stony/iron asteroid that's big and dense and solid is pretty easy to predict impactor effects for as an inelastic collision, but these things are a whole new ballgame.

So we got quite lucky with the DART test as a "rubble pile" is exactly the kind of object for which "just hit it with a fastball" is very hard to definitively predict results for. We're definitely going to get our money's worth out of this mission.

The idea you are pursuing here - finding ways to convert the radiation energy released by a thermonuclear weapon into kinetic energy to generate effects in space - has fortunately already been studied by NASA! It's called the Casaba Howitzer. In effect, it is a nuclear shaped charge that efficiently converts a bomb's radiation energy into kinetic energy, specifically, a blast of tungsten plasma. For obvious reasons it is a popular warhead choice in science fiction.

Even better, the howitzer's effects can be tuned; by modifying the design one can adjust the angle (and thus the destructive effects) of the directed plasma "beam." This is because the howitzer was originally intended for use with Orion pusher-plate spacecraft - it wasn't until the scientists said "now we must be very careful with our figures lest we focus the plasma too much and blast clean through the massive monolithic steel pusher-plate" that they realized what they had just done.

Even without deploying a Casaba Howitzer device, nukes have plenty of utility in deflecting asteroids, even so-called "rubble pile" asteroids that seem to be very common. A close-range detonation (some tens or hundreds of meters, depending on the yield and the size of the rock) will efficiently bake and/or vaporize the dust and smaller debris, thus generating thrust (and the radiation of thermal energy will also alter the rock's orbit; an accelerated version of the Yarkovsky effect which is what causes these rocks to wander into occasional earth-crossing orbits to begin with. Due to how orbital mechanics works, a very small nudge applied far enough in advance can make the rock miss Earth (which is a very small target in a very big solar system.) However, given the state of our sky searches, we may only find a rock some months or even weeks before impact, in which case we would want to compensate with a much bigger nudge - and lord knows we have enough thermonuclear assemblies between all the nations of earth to provide it. :)

I know more than a few gay and bisexual men (friends of mine) who are conservative gun owners, and they happily point out that child grooming IS happening and you need look no further than all the heterosexual white female teachers every year that are arrested for having sex with underage minors in their classes.

It wasn't conservatives that decided to make Drag Queen Story Hour and the lunatics that prance around in fetish gear during the Pride parade(s) the "face" of gay men in America. And for that matter, it sure doesn't seem to be gay people themselves doing it, either.

Gays need a platform that isn't beholden to any one political party. It's not impossible. Just ask a pro-gun guy about Reagan sometime, or a black gun owner about "cop watching" and you'll see what I mean.

Something tells me that Elon Musk, one of the richest buisnessmen on Earth, has a lawyer check over the contract before he signed it.

"Invade a sovereign country to stop climate change" is one hell of a take.

Tell it to the local militias in Ukraine who are still raiding the supply lines of Russian occupation forces... many of them with privately owned rifles.

I propose an indefinite moratorium on graphene articles on slashdot until one with the headline "GRAPHENE LEAVES THE LAB" is written. Until then, buzz off.

I love the comments on this one; all the same people who quote "mass shootings" in the US chapter and verse while studiously ignoring that the proportion of deaths by any cause in a nation of 350 million caused by them are infinitesimal suddenly remember that statistics exist when it comes to gun laws in Japan after The Thing That Doesn't Happen In Any Other Country Ever At All suddenly does happen. Funny how that works isn't it.

You mean solid-fuel ballistic missiles? whuppity-fuckin-doo

The difference between a subsonic and supersonic cruise missile is arguable, esp. in terms of survivability vs. payload mass. An air breathing scramjet hypersonic weapon is one with subsonic missile mass but achieving velocities that currently only solid-fuel rocket powered weapons (i.e. big, heavy, bulky and expensive) can manage. They're an absolute fucking gamechanger.