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Comment Re:The God-fearing and the Accountants (Score 1) 152

You don't get to create and then destroy life just to prolong yours

Why?

I made it to earth and processing oxygen...why should I not make and have the opportunity to extend my run for as long as possible?

I guess my innate sense of self preservation is much higher than yours.

I really love my life and I love being me and there's not much I'd not do to keep that going.

Why would I not?

Comment Re:God forbid Accountability come into play. (Score 1) 152

Hey....all the smoking, drinking, general partying and getting laid as much as possible was FUN as a kid and young man.

I feel it has been a life worth living so far....sure, things are starting to fail and fall apart a bit, but whew....glad I got to travel the road I did....not boring, and really ....how much life did I lose with all that in the past?

Comment Re:I've seen this movie (Score 1) 152

Hell, if there really were such things as vampires, I'd become one in a heart beat....well, err....I'd like to lose some weight first, I'd hate to spend eternity being chubby like I am right now, but I'd do it.....

I dunno about so many people I really really like being ME and would like to do so for as long as possible....and would do almost anything to prolong that.

Comment Spares, by Michael Marshall Smith (Score 1) 152

"Michael Marshall Smith's 1996 novel Spares, in which the hero liberates intelligent clones from a "spare farm", was optioned by DreamWorks in the late 1990s, but was never made. It remains unclear if the story inspired The Island, so Marshall Smith did not consider it worthwhile to pursue legal action over the similarities."

Anyway, we're all saying the same thing here. This is all Torment Nexus stuff. We know how this ends.

Comment Re:Here it comes (Score 1) 66

You're confusing the importance of avoiding Kessler syndrome in LEO with the difficulty of causing Kessler syndrome. GEO debris can potentially remain there for millions of years before interactions between the gravitational pull of the Sun, Earth, and Moon sufficiently perturb it. LEO debris remains for weeks to months. You have to have many orders of magnitude more debris in LEO to trigger Kessler Syndrome, where the rate of collisions exceeds the rate of debris loss.

The fact that a LEO Kessler Syndrome would also be short is something that exists on top of that.

It's also worth nothing that not only are modern satellites not only vastly better at properly disposing of themselves than they were in the 1970s when Kessler Syndrome was proposed, but they're also vastly better at avoiding debris strikes. All of these factors are multiplicative together.

Comment Re:I've seen this movie (Score 1) 152

Who cares?

I mean, I prefer the brainless version and if so....what's the controversy?

Please SIGN ME THE FUCK UP!!

Are there that few people that would be willing to do just about anything to live longer or near forever???

If you don't have a very healthy sense of self preservations, then please drop out of line, but if given half the chance for much longer life, potentially having a young body again....PLEASE TAKE MY MONEY and put me near the head of the line.

Comment Re:Here it comes (Score 3, Insightful) 66

People forget that the primary concerns about Kessler Syndrome were about geosynchronous orbit, which used to be where all the most important satellites went (many of course still go there, but not the megaconstellations). It takes a long, long time for debris to leave GEO. But LEO is a very different beast.

Comment Re:Here it comes (Score 4, Informative) 66

Yeah. In particular:

with fragments likely to fall to Earth over the next few weeks

LEO FTW. Kessler Syndrome is primarily a risk if you put too much stuff with too poor of an end-of-life disposal rate in GEO. End-of-life without proper disposal rates have declined exponentially since Kessler Syndrome was first proposed (manufacturers both understand the importance more, and do a better job, of decreasing the rate of failures before deorbit - in the past, sometimes there wasn't even attempts to dispose of a craft at end-of-life). And now we're increasingly putting stuff in LEO, where debris falls out of orbit relatively quickly. It's not impossible in LEO, esp. with higher LEO orbits - but it's much more difficult.

Or to put it another way: fragments can't build up to hit other things if they're gone after just a couple weeks.

And this trend is likely to continue - a lower percentage of premature failures, and decreasing altitudes / reentry times. Concerning ever-decreasing altitudes, we've already been doing this via use of ion engines to provide more reboost (with mission lifespans designed for only several years before running out of propellant, instead of decades like the giant GEO ones), but there's an increasing interest in "sky skimming" satellites that function in a way somewhat reminiscent of a ramjet - instead of krypton or xenon as the propellant for an ion engine, the sparse atmospheric air itself is the propellant, so the craft can in effect fly indefinitely until it fails, wherein it quite rapidly enters the denser atmosphere and burns up.

Comment Re:If only (Score 1) 80

As a counterpoint, The Linux kernel and much of the userspace in various distros is done remote. It can work, even on highly collaborative projects. Like anything, some will enjoy that more than others.

Required physical equipment can be a limiting factor, of course. Though I have done firmware development from home because the dev board wasn't expensive nor is a debugger for that hardware.

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