Wasn't hemp supposed to be so good and so cheap that William Hearst fought a war against it to keep his forest empire profitable? Why aren't we using more hemp, then?

Also, low-water-use plants tend to also be slow-growing. That's why they use so little water.

Hesperaloe produces 1.5 kg per cubic meter of water. This is comparable to the water use efficiency of forests used for paper, which is between 1.5 and 4 or so. So this actually requires as much water as trees, if not more. The only advantage, if you can call it that, is being able to plant it in places were trees won't grow.

But the problem is that this also means you'll be cultivating plants grown far apart, none of which produce very much mass per plant without taking so much that you kill the plant (whose roots are likely the only thing keeping the topsoil from eroding). That means you need an order of magnitude more land per unit of crop mass, and probably closer to two orders of magnitude. (Trees get tens of feet tall. Hesperaloe is a pile of long leaves that gets maybe a foot tall.) So the energy consumption involved in harvesting it is likely to also be one to two orders of magnitude greater because you might have to harvest an entire acre worth of red false yucca to get as much biomass as you'd get from cutting down one fully grown coniferous tree in a few minutes.

So you've gotten a little bit more crop land that nobody asked for, and/or saved a bunch of trees that were planted specifically to turn into paper, and in exchange, you've introduced a massively energy-intensive harvesting process followed by some other probably massively energy-intensive conversion process. This doesn't seem like a net improvement to me.

Either that or you harvest it including the root system, and yeah, you've gotten a lot of raw material, but now your topsoil erodes, and you can't plant anything there for a thousand years.

The process itself might be useful in some other context, of course, but it seems like a solution in search of a problem.

Are you implying more would go out in bad weather if they had a robo-car?

It is true that we have never seen any objects in the region known as the Oort cloud. They'd be too far away to observe. But that doesn't mean the Oort cloud is "theoretical only."

We have viewed lots of long-period comets, and have studied their elliptical orbits well enough to infer where their apogees are. And they're in the region we call the Oort cloud. That's indirect evidence of its existence. Indirect evidence is not weak evidence.

What you say is true... but basically all of the other president have actually been pretty smart people. There are some who clearly aren't as smart as others, but I can't think of any who were as dumb as Trump.

Selection, not coincidence. He's the right kind of grifter, with the right kind of personality. He's really not very smart, though. If he were actually smart he wouldn't shoot himself in the foot with such regularity.

To be useful in deep space, you're going to have to deal with very harsh radiation, far harder than the Vikings dealt with. You really want to have some large number of computers, where the number has to be odd and exceed 5. The reason it has to exceed 5 is that you need 5 in order to be able to use the Byzantine General's Problem to discern which computers are working correctly and which are radiation damaged. Since some will be damaged over time and you want 5 computers still operating around the time the power runs out, you have to start with more than that.

Massively radiation-hardened highly-robust low-power chips could be done. If you were clever enough, you could do this as a wafer-scale system where you marked parts as bad and networked around them. Free space optical communication across the wafer might be doable.

They might well still end up being low-density CMOS discrete logic.

Lead-lining the electronics isn't as much of a problem if you've launchers capable of handling heavy objects and don't mind burning through a lot of ion drive propellant for course corrections. This would improve the hardening beyond what can be done through the usual operations.

But, yeah, you'd need defect-free microelectronics. You really can't handle F00F bugs or defective instructions once you pass Earth orbit. And I can't think of anyone who knows how to do that.

I think it's just cultural although that's a problem. Even their language emphasizes hierarchy and otherness with the honorifics and how they work.

But they've been doing right wing economics and policies since the 90s and have been in a permanent recession since then. It's the definition of insanity.

And they basically just elected Trump in a dress.

I know the Yakuza there are used as Union busters. I used to wonder why they didn't have any push for unions like we did here and that's why. In America the unions cuddled up with organized crime to get the muscle they needed to push back against the Epstein class but Japan didn't have that because the upper crust got to the organized crime first.

In America we use racism and homophobia to divide the working class along with certain religious divides but I don't quite get what does it in Japan. They are ridiculously homogeneous. Then again I sometimes meet people from Maine who are racist against black folk and I know that they come from towns where the only time they see a black guy is when a new Michael Jackson album came out

I don't see the point in launching a rescue mission that would catch up to, and re-power, a very distant spacecraft with 1970s-era technology. Better to devote that effort to a brand new spacecraft with updated instruments.

Well, not just the solar system but the heliopause as well, and the near-Sol galactic winds. We can estimate the effects of space from just about any ancient near-Earth space junk, but I'm not sure how we'd go about calculating the impact of the galactic winds on something. The Voyager sensors won't be sending back nearly enough high-quality data to establish that.

It's actually a lot harder. The fly-bys invovled gravitational slingshots, which not just steered the probes but vastly accelerated them. Without the slingshots, human rocketry of the time would not have had the capacity to get probes to solar system escape velocity.

Our understanding of asteroids is now reasonably good. We know they come in solid and rubble-pile formats. We know that several show signs of lava flows, suggesting they come from disintegrated planetoids with a liquid core. We've managed to land on some and even retrieve samples from one.

Our understanding of comets is much weaker. We know that several appear to be multiple bodies fused together with ice (the one we tried sending a lander to was of this type) and the break-up pattern for Shoemaker-Levy 9 is suggestive (but not proof) of it having been a composite structure too. The one icy body we've seen in the Kuipier belt was also two bodies frozen together. Photographs of the core of Halley's Comet also suggests two bodies fused together with ices. This leads to some interesting questions. Obviously the probability of this configuration is very high, but what is the probability of other configurations? Is it so incredibly low that the odds of finding single-body or triple-body configurations is practically non-existent?

(This is kinda important if NASA is serious about a DART-type project to redirect one.)

Our understanding of solar system captures is non-existent. If there are extra-solar objects flying through every few years, then there is a definite non-zero probability that there are significant extra-solar objects that have been captured by the solar system in the last 5.5 billion years. That would be kinda very useful to know.

Current solar system formation models don't work well, but planets have sorted their composition by mass. Studying them only tells us so much. Asteroids are more useful but hit each other too often, so we don't know how much mixing and reconstitutuing has occurred there. The Kuipier Belt is much better, from that point of view. The density is far too low and most of the objects far too small. A lander could obtain a lot of extremely useful data about how the solar system formed that we can't obtain closer.

The Oort cloud is theoretical only, at this point. The only way to find if it is real is to send something out there.

If we're to get any probes in the future to go between solar systems (and such missions are entirely possible), we need to know a great deal more about the heliopause and the galactic winds.

I mean sure Japan doesn't have nukes.

They've got a large nuclear power industry with reprocessing and etc and socks of literal tons of plutonium.

They keep trading places for the top fastest supercomputer.

They have a solid fuel scientific satellite launcher with mobile capability from when you just need to launch a satellite from an undisclosed location after a long time in storage. It's not an ICBM no not at all. But if it were it would probably be the best in the world. Good job it's for scientific satellites.

Japan's been hovering around the "we could have nukes by next Tuesday" point for quite a few years now.

You're not learning anything from an instrument that is shut off. Those instruments that are still operating on both spacecraft are the Magnetometer (MAG) and the Plasma Wave Susbsystem (PWS). Voyager 2 also still has its Cosmic Ray Subsystem (CRS) operating. These all provide information about the heliospheric and interstellar space environments.

About $5 million USD per year for everything. And that includes the "pings" transferred and processed by the Deep Space Network of radio telescopes. Cheap, considering the frontier science that can be delivered, and the value of assets in that region of space.

They will, they won't. Start blaming the fucking tool already because you're stuck with it.

I've worked with monitoring and alerting software of different stripes long enough to see the same pattern, the tool is somehow blameless for data quality issues when we all know damn well the data quality problems can be traced back to UX design of the tool. We're stuck with it anyway and that's the go-to defense. I've seen too many people give software, the tool, a pass because getting accurate data in and maintaining it, owning it, is the hard part. Well no, fucking, shit, the tool's developers know that, and bad software design is always the user's fault, we're always holding it wrong.

Who owned that data entry, for a suspected murderer, with what, plates and no description of the car or driver? That's like setting a bear trap in a busy campground. Don't worry, it's for the bear! I'll just mark a X on this bubblegum wrapper with some squiggly lines, and forget about it. Were they watching it, does the tool enable that, does it enable the level of ownership that is required for anything that dangerous? Were they aware of the first police response? Was the second team of responders days later aware of the first team's response? Was the owner of the alert? Bad data entry? .. and this information system is fine right, don't blame the tool. Bullshit.

When you radically increase the number of interactions with police you slightly reduce crime and you greatly increase the risk of innocent people being killed and the incidence of them being killed.

This is just a fact. If you want to reduce crime you fight it with social solutions like fixing the economy and fixing wealth inequality and more education not by sending more cops to beat the shit out of people.

All more cops do is broken windows policing which is where the cops constantly bust people from minor infractions which cause them problems in society leading to more problems and more crime. It's like the whole thing where Batman is creating his own villains.

You need a handful of police to stop crazy people with guns and they need training in de-escalation not military assault. You also need a handful of police to prevent people from doing dumb things in cars because public transportation is for weenies.

The basic problem we are all dancing around is that we heavily militarized police and then we trained them to believe they're in a war zone. Seriously go look up some cop training especially the stuff they get after the academy and it's basically military training but more ridiculous and extreme. The cops view themselves as an occupying force in constant danger. They are trained to think of themselves like soldiers in Vietnam surrounded by Charlie...

So since we can't reduce the number of police and fix all the social problems because voters won't go for that people have been trying to reduce the number of times police interact with the public. It's an incredibly stupid way to solve a problem but as the saying goes America will always do the right thing after it's tried everything else