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As I understood it, the reaction mass for Orion comes from the chemical explosives used to implode the bomb. (The bomb design would be quite unusual, with several tons of explosives acting on a very small amount of plutonium).
There are better options if you want to go nuclear for propulsion. http://www.nasa.gov/pdf/718391main_Werka_2011_PhI_FFRE.pdf
It's not an unreasonable amount of mass to get into LEO, and so very elegant as a drive.
Sure, but people don't try this in rich countries either. Places like Texas or Florida would be a lot nicer in the summer if they were 10 degrees cooler.
I'm not sure about the specifics, but there must be some way to get that cold out of the ocean depths and up to where people can benefit from it. People have been transporting large volumes of water since Roman times, and we have huge multibillion dollar oil rigs that drill through the ocean floor.
Eh.. There is indeed work being done on this. Google seawater greenhouse - Which is basically a way to engineer a cooler, wetter micro-climate and turn a net profit.
Perhaps. But never underestimate the political clout of the wealthy.
In this case they would have to change already existing law in a way that is blatantly against the interests of the majority and manage to do so it globally - because if any country defects from a policy of limiting top mods to the upper class, every country has to, or get buried 20 years later. This is not a winnable political struggle.
However, one real problem might be just having more variation among people, and having to invent ways for them to get along well with each other, if this is even possible.
I expect that after an initial short transient, widespread availability of human genetic enhancement will lead to less variability rather than more: some modifications will be mandated by the law, other will be prohibited, and among those which are voluntary, most people will go for some popular set of modifications.
Increased variation could be possible if there is a high price difference between techniques (this could be caused by patents, for instance). In that cases, the rich will become superhumans while the poor remain unenhanced or only get basic enhancements. After some time, the rich and the poor could effectively become separate species.
It can't actually - Medical patents are already borderline in terms of "political viability". A system of patents that gave the rich this kind of advantage would result in the end of patents. Heck, it is already law in many places that you cannot hold IP in human genes.
People are in general very, very bad at spotting signs of interest. This is not unique to you. - The non-verbal communication channel for "I'd like to get to know you in a romantic fashion" just does not work very well at all.
Trying to become adept at reading it is, of course, possible but unless you have sky high social intelligence to begin with, I do not recommend it.
What you need to do instead is figure out how to express unambiguous, unmistakable interest in a way that does not scare the shit out of potential romantic partners. If someone doesn't do this, the both of you are potentially running around as the unwitting participants in a real-life romantic comedy where everyone is interested, but also assume that the other party is not.
So, someone has to use their words. Be clear, be honest, be flattering (but still honest), don't make it an ultimatum, and leave their lines of retreat open, both literally and socially. Feeling cornered isn't a turnon for anyone.
Rejection is not the end of the world. You are asking a question, that is all, and unless you do so in quite uniquely repulsive a manner, all that will result is that you get an honest answer, which can only leave you better off.
If this happened to someone in an undeveloped non-Western country that didn't have much contact with the rest of the world, or in a premodern society several centuries back, the character wouldn't have the ideas to think about his or her situation as a scientific problem. But a reasonably intelligent woman who grew up in the U.S. in the early 20th Century would at least know of the existence of a culture of science that could shed light on her condition.
This raises the question of whether a nonaging person encountering science after several centuries would have the abiltiy to absorb the implications of this relatively new and unintuitive way of thinking.
First option doesn't exist. The third world is well and truely aware that science is a thing. As for the second.. Writing someone who is old, but not impaired by decay is very, very difficult, due to lack of examples, but I think this might be less of a leap than it seems. Necessity will force mobility upon our protag, and contact with various cultures will immunize against believing received wisdom without proof. Going from there to "reality is the final arbiter" isn't much of a leap.
.. Now I am trying to think what applicable skills someone really old might have to bring to the project of science, assuming she didn't win the cosmic lottery trice over and is both a genius and highly creative on top of unageing..
"Social-Fu, ninth dan"? Hypercompetency at organizing a group of people into working smoothly together is something which she could with very high plausibility have picked up simply from endless practice. Setting up a carpentry shop in Milan one decade, a china production in venice the next and so on conferring skills that do tranfer quite well to running a lab within budget and with abnormally low social frictions.
It's entirely, and frighteningly, plausible that women are diverging in height because they are not eating enough during their teen years.
Eh, no, not plausible. Go to any high school and look at the girls, see how many malnourished to the point of stunted growth you'll find.
I am also pretty sure that by late teens IQ is set and undereating will not affect it.
The thing is, how would you distinguish a world in which the female population of said high-school are missing five centimeters and 4 points of IQ due to dieting from the one we inhabit? Where do we get a baseline from? Arrgh.
In response to
Open Thread, Apr. 13 - Apr. 19, 2015
Weird: more gender equality correlating with not less, but more psychological gender differences:
"high gender egalitarian nations also exhibit larger sex differences in Big Five personality traits and the Dark Triad traits of Machiavellianism, Narcissism, and psychopathy; in romantic attachment and love styles; in sociopolitical attitudes and personal values; in clinical depression rates and crying behavior; in tested cognitive and mental abilities; and in physical attributes such as height and blood pressure[51]. If the sociopolitical gender egalitarianism found in Scandinavian nations is supposed to produce smaller psychological sex differences, it’s not doing a very good job of it."
My tentative hypothesis: the less difference there is, the more important it becomes to signal it. More weird stuff in the article.
https://evolution-institute.org/article/on-common-criticisms-of-evolutionary-psychology/
Evo psyc is always bullshit, so what else could be causing this?
Two minutes of thinking later... and now I am suddenly getting extremely worried about teen and earlier eating habits among women.
Caloric deficits negatively impact height and a slew of other outcomes. To a first approximation, noone in the first world is short of calories growing up due to inability to get enough food.
But there is immense social pressure on women to be thin. Anorexia skews female to a very extreme degree.
It's entirely, and frighteningly, plausible that women are diverging in height because they are not eating enough during their teen years. Even short of outright disorder, just not eating their fill when it is available would not only cost them a fair few centimeters of height, but also, and far worse, points of IQ, focus during critical educational years.. Ugh.
This is a very bloody worrying possibility, which needs investigating, and stopping.
In response to
Open Thread, Apr. 06 - Apr. 12, 2015
The Age of Adaline, a film about a mysteriously negligibly senescent woman:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=clbSd2JzAqc
Let me guess: The unaging woman finds fulfillment by pulling an Arwen or some similar nonsense.
Because Hollywood can't (yet) make films about the utter coolness where ordinary people discover this woman's power, reverse engineer it and become negligibly senescent themselves.
Honestly, I think almost all media treatments of this entire topic will be extremely problematic in hindsight once an actual cure for senescence is found.
In this particular case, I'd expect her to become... very interested in biochemistry. That would be a much better plot, wouldn't it? One woman's fight to cure ageing because she knows for a fact it can be done, but at the same time trying to not end up strapped to a lab table. Heck, for the first period, the fact that women were massively overlooked in science would be outright helpful. - Getting hired at a place which does whatever she was currently investigating would be fairly simple, and then just have some random dude steal credit for whatever results she manages. Paper trail? What paper trail?
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A cure for aging would be almost as difficult as "cure" for entropy.
I mean, it wouldn't necessarily be physically impossible, but short of massive nanotech, I don't see how you could prevent DNA mutations and oxidative damage to extracellular proteins from accumulating over the years.
This is wrong - The body isn't a closed system, but an ongoing exporter of entrophy. There is no fundamental reason why "better repair mechanisms" wouldn't result in an permanent health. I don't like calling this immortality, because.. well, mishap and violence will still get you eventually, but the whole decay and slow dying thing isn't written into the laws of physics or even biology. It's just that Azathoth never had a reason to fix it.