Has a President or members of the Administration using the bully pulpit ever been seen as anti-constitutional? Surely an Administration has the right to lecture, cajole and whine. If Federal agents are showing up and forcing Mark Zuckerberg to type "I will not repost Nazi slogans" two hundred times, well sure, at that point lines have been crossed. But finger wagging, even vigorous finger wagging?

Here's the real problem with all of this. It isn't economically viable simply because the externalities aren't factored in at the point of initial manufacturing. We have built an economic system that is heavily reliant on basically mortgaging the present and demanding the future pay for it; a sort of vast buy now, pay later (and by later we mean decades). If manufacturing plastics, glass and everything else had the long-term costs factored in up front, I suspect recycling in all cases would look more attractive.

Presuming you could do it at all (and that's a pretty big assumption) it isn't going to be blown away in a few years. It would take hundreds of thousands, perhaps even millions of years for the atmosphere to decay. It certainly would endure long enough for a colonization effort, but that presumes you can pull it off, and again, that's a massive "if". You would need some really huge rockets to intercept and redirect comets and other material to start bulking up the atmosphere.

In a future where we have fusion or some other form of energy, aka Star Trek, I suppose why not. A few decades or centuries of robot spacecraft smunching stuff into Mars wouldn't cost much more than not doing it at all.

What I've heard as a rough estimate is that if somehow someone was able to give Mars a dense atmosphere (thicken it with water vapor, nitrogen and a whole more CO2 to create a greenhouse effect) it would probably endure for a million years, but without replenishment, eventually the solar wind will indeed just blow it away. As to create a sufficient magnetic field, well, I don't see how it's actually possible to create that large a magnetic field without a helluva lot of energy. I don't know if there is an engineering solution without magical far future technology to shield Mars' atmosphere from the solar wind. I've read of some guys suggesting we bombard the planet with comets and other debris to kick start the various cycles (carbon, nitrogen, water) as well as create a whole lot of heat to start melting the large amounts of water, but for that we're talking if not super far future planetary engineering, then at least we're talking about really big rocket engines (probably nuclear) shoving all kinds of gunk at Mars from every corner of the solar system.

Who knows, maybe in a few centuries the technology will exist to pull it off. Mars certainly seems the most likely body in the solar system to terraform. It is, by some estimates, still in the Goldilocks zone, so providing there's a sufficiently dense atmosphere with enough CO2 to actually capture more solar radiation, it might work. But it really would take a whole other level of technology to protect that atmosphere from steadily being eroded, and stop everyone from getting horrible cancers along the way.

Firstly, it's an assumption that bronze mirrors were the best available to Archimedes. Since well before Archimedes, people have been making mirrors out of polished metal. Yes, usually bronze, but other metals were available. Notably silver, which is very nearly as reflective as aluminum (and is notably _more_ reflective in infrared ranges). The obstacle for silver was obviously the cost, but, although modern silver plating did not exist, silver leaf did. While applied silver leaf would not be an ideal surface for a mirror intended for admiring ones reflection, it could potentially work quite well in one merely intended to reflect sunlight. Then of course there are other materials that were available such as pewter that could have been used for an improved mirror surface.

Of course, even if only bronze was available, there is still room for improvement in the shaping of the mirror so that it can focus the light to more of a point at the appropriate range. Bear in mind that I am not saying that Archimedes did any of these things. There is simply no evidence that he could not have. Suitable materials existed and were known at the time, even if they were not commonly used in vanity mirrors of the time. Not to mention that historical discoveries keep showing us that many inventions that we think of as modern have actually been invented in the past, then vanished into the mists of history: flushing toilets, steam engines, electric batteries, clockwork, etc.

Ironic for you to accuse me of a failure to understand when you clearly either have a serious reading comprehension problem or you do not understand the difference between lift and thrust. To clarify, I wrote: "...a dragon with certain characteristics would not be able to generate downward thrust equal to its body weight." Note please that I said "thrust". You replied with "Of course a dragon has to generate lift equal to its weight to remain airborne". This sentence is technically true, but does not relate to my sentence about thrust. Thrust and lift are different concepts in aerodynamics. Thrust can be used to generate lift, but most heavier than air flying machines and animals use significantly less thrust than their own body weight to stay aloft because aerodynamics allows them to generate lift greater than their body weight. That you go on to say " that is just Newton's second law, that an object with a net force applied accelerates in the direction of the force (in this case, downwards)." suggests that this was not mostly a reading comprehension fail, you just really do not understand aerodynamics. Or, at least you do not understand the role of thrust in aerodynamics.

So, my point stands, the author in the magazine in question was incorrectly assuming that a flying thing needs thrust equal to its weight to stay aloft. Your explanation about gliding entirely misses the point that gliding works without any thrust. A gliding object is capable of falling slower than acceleration due to gravity would demand because lift is countering that acceleration, not thrust. Now, gliding is not flying, but it is part way there. By also applying thrust to a gliding object, you can turn a gliding object into a flying object that can stay in level flight indefinitely (at least until the thrust runs out). The cost in thrust to do that is, under normal circumstances, less than the force of gravity that applies to the object and is generally approximately equal to the difference between the lift it gets as a glider and the force of gravity. Sure, that's a simplification. Once again, the main point still stands: you do not need thrust to equal or exceed weight in order to make something fly!

I'm not sure where you got your nonsense analysis of what I wrote. You seem to have made the error of thinking that I am trying to defend the idea that a dragon would be able to fly. That's missing the point entirely on your part. My point was that the argument they made for why a dragon would not be able to fly was nonsense. It was back of the envelope stuff by someone who was not considering the physical realities, just their little math problem.

You see this kind of stuff all the time. People claiming that, according to the math, bumblebees can't fly or kangaroos or sturgeon use more energy than they consume as food. All based on flawed models of aerodynamics or hydrodynamics or, in the case of kangaroos, ignoring that bounding is elastic and most of the energy from a jump is recycled in the next jump. Other fun examples are those people who insisted that large sauropods would have had to spend their entire lives in ponds because there's no way an animal that size could walk around without its leg bones fracturing. The ironic counterpoint to that ridiculous argument was that sauropods could not have stayed submerged because the pressure would have crushed their windpipes. That also ridiculous argument used a comparison between a sauropods neck and a garden hose, ignoring the fact that the garden hose is very, very thin and a sauropods neck would have been very, very thick and made of bone and very solid muscle.

So, that's the problem I have with so many Mythbusters episodes and other people who think that they have "disproven" things with simplistic methods and math. The problem is that they are not generally disproving the thing itself, they are disproving a model. If the model is wrong, then their proof is meaningless. That does not mean that the thing they are trying to disprove is actually real, it just means that they need to work harder to convincingly disprove it.

What you're saying may be true, but it's not really relevant. We made the solar power plant solar thermal in this example, but it could have just as easily been photovoltaic, or wind power (ultimately driven by the sun). The point was that if you bypass traditional imaging optics as the method, you absolutely can concentrate temperature to a higher level than the source over a lesser area. The fact that some or even most of the energy is dissipated has absolutely no bearing on that. You obviously can, 100% with no doubt, use the EM radiation coming from the sun and, through various methods, concentrate that energy to produce temperatures far in excess of the temperature of the sun. Sure, there are situations where you can't when you apply arbitrary restrictions like the very specific technologies you're allowed to use but, in the general case, you absolutely can. It is unquestionably true.

Mythbusters, while a neat show, had a tendency to jump to conclusions based on insufficient data. One of their biggest problems was testing skills that might take a decade to master after about a day of training and concluding that they were impossible. One episode I remember, they wanted to test to see if it would be possible for someone to catch a sword between their hands like in a kung fu movie. So they built a hand clapping machine that clapped two flappy hands made of ballistic gel together and tried to catch a sword with it. Substituting something that was supposed to be a carefully coordinated set of highly-trained, careful movements with an extremely crude, unwieldy machine. Naturally the result was myth busted. That's not to say that catching a sword blade would in any way be a practical combat move, but it's at least blatantly obvious that someone attempting to do it would try to match the motion of their hands to the motion of the sword blade, which their device obviously did not do.
The same applies to their two episodes on the death ray. They "busted" it once, then tried again due to deficiencies in their original experiment. For the second one they had a whole classroom of students helping them aim mirror shields and they developed a technique for aiming. Still though, those students ultimately only had a few hours of training. Not to mention that the mirror shields they used did not go through any process of refinement to make them better suited to the purpose.
For an actual military weapon, soldiers would have drilled day after day, week after week until they could pick up their shields and aim at a common target almost perfectly in a few seconds. The shields would have been refined to best concentrate the light at the appropriate range. There might have even been different selections of mirror shields for different ranges, or different techniques developed for getting better concentration of light at arbitrary range. The Mythbusters episodes did none of that.
You pointed out that it might be better to fire stuff out of a catapult or from an archer's bow rather than use such a system, but that ignores the fact that decent archers or catapult operators get lots of practice. Have you ever seen anyone try to use a bow on their first day? Sure, some people might have an instant talent for it, but if you just grab a bunch of school kids and hand them bows and arrows, you will not get good results. If you used the same methods the Mythbusters used to "bust" the death ray, you would have to conclude that it was a "busted myth" that archery was ever used effectively in warfare after watching them try to fire hundreds of arrows and fail to hit or even reach a ship 200 meters offshore.
I am reminded of a piece in some educational magazine I had in class as a child that "explained" why dragons would not be able to fly. It used a wing surface area argument and pointed out that a dragon with certain characteristics would not be able to generate downward thrust equal to its body weight. At the time, it seemed very wrong to me. For one thing there was the whole chain of assumptions about weight, material strength, muscle strength, etc. but also, even though I did not know much about aerodynamics at the time, it was intuitively obvious that thrust doesn't need to exceed weight in order to fly. It seemed obvious from seeing things glide. If no thrust was required to glide, then staying aloft should just require the difference between gliding and level flight, not full thrust. So, it was clear that they had just contrived a set of parameters and rules that would lead to their conclusion rather than carefully considering their model. That's not to say that I believed in flying dragons, it was just obvious that their model was garbage.
All that said, it does not mean that the solar death ray would have been a practical weapon, or that it even ever really existed. It's just to say that the "proof" offered by Mythbusters was insufficient.

That seems wrong. As was pointed out, the restriction only applies when using imaging optics to achieve the goal. Plenty of other methods of doing it will achieve the goal of "concentrating temperature to a higher level than the source over a lesser area"
Consider as a thought experiment a solar power plant hooked up to a Z-machine. A z-machine generates temperatures far in excess of the sun. We'll make the solar power plant in question a thermal solar power plant too, just to avoid confusing the discussion with a digression into light energy vs. thermal energy.
The largest solar thermal plant I can find is Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum Solar Park Phase IV which apparently covers 30 sq miles and produces 700 MW. There's no reason (aside from cost, which doesn't matter because this is a thought experiment) you couldn't make it a thousand times the size and produce 700 GW. That's enough power to easily run a z-machine or any number of devices that take electrical energy and generate temperatures hotter than the sun. It's been done in labs so many times in so many different ways by now that it's just routine and, for most of those devices, the input is just electricity.
So, clearly you can take EM energy coming from the sun and concentrate it to generate temperatures far, far in excess of the sun by "concentrating temperature to a higher level than the source over a lesser area". To do it, you apparently can't use pure imaging optics, but, as this thought experiment shows, there are clearly other arrangements of opticis plus other mechanisms you can use to achieve the required end result.

Fuck you! I use tar for all my version management. Now get off my lawn!

Yes, well, Democrats didn't use the magic formula "To Protect Our Children!" as in "We Need Everyone To Have Large Capacity Semi-automatics TO PROTECT OUR CHILDREN!" or "We Need To Keep Vomiting Vast Quantities of GHG's Into The Atmosphere And Allow Poisoning Of Water Sheds TO PROTECT THE CHILDREN!"

Republicans, standing for smaller invasive government; unless it involves the use of genitals or what you read on the Internet.

There's also the rather unique aspects of Darwin's theory as opposed to previous theories, such as Lamarck's theory. That organisms seem to fit into hierarchies was in and of itself not a new idea, though I would argue Linnaean taxonomy with its fairly strict methodology was a new innovation. Darwin's key observation wasn't merely that populations evolve, but rather that there is variation exists in all populations, and that some variations will be more favorable than others, and thus more likely to be selected for through differential reproductive success. While he didn't have Mendelian genetics which when plugged in to Natural Selection, provided the hereditary aspects of the theory, but he did make that critical observation that was very different from anyone else's previous stab at some sort of evolutionary process.

I'm not really all that sure that anything resembling Darwin's theory of natural selection could have developed without Linnaean taxonomy, not to mention that unlike much larger biospheres, the Galapagos Islands could be more easily observed, so I think it unlikely that da Vinci would have had the kind of environmental exposure.

Who exactly is cancelling Charles Darwin? This looks like some manufactured outrage, a strawman you can beat endlessly without ever having to get out of your echo chamber.

Jesus, grow up.

Unfortunately they also put the immunocompromised at risk along the way. I have absolutely no issue with people flinging themselves off cliffs. When they tie a rope to an innocent bystander and pull them down as well, then I have an issue.