TheVat

I can see some truth to the first paragraph, but your second went in a tinfoil hat direction I would question. I can see political opportunists making the most of a war, but welcoming it? Especially when that attack in the south made Israel's defense forces look inept and clueless and sort of asleep at the wheel.

Must be related to the collision impact, and the relative effects. An IC engine block and drive train are fairly durable in an impact. I don't about batteries and other EV components. Maybe there's a lot of expensive fly-by-wire stuff that's delicate?

Seems like that would be the classic distraction tactic. Guys like Bibi pretty much created the Hamas of today. And now their timing couldn't be better for bolstering the Likud Party and its corrupt boss. It was also the 50th anniversary of the 1973 war, which began October 6 of that year. Hamas basically just gave Israel its very own 9/11 attack, and an excuse to level Gaza. I don't know if they're just stupid or fatalistic, maybe both.

I was curious, so looked at a few citations, starting with the EPA. https://iwaste.epa.gov/guidance/radiological-nuclear/orphan-sources Which provides basic definitions. Then looked at a list of incidents on Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_orphan_source_incidents And this catalogue is used by professionals to help find orphaned sources. https://www.iaea.org/resources/databases/international-catalogue-of-sealed-radioactive-sources-and-devices One disturbing bit I found in my meandering was that a lot of orphaned source materials end up as scrap metal, which scrappers are often unaware of.

Believe. I had difficulty with this, which I presumed to be some sort of rebus. Axe ewe rocket time? Pick ewe launch time? Hmm. I look up British synonyms and see first image also called a mattock. Nope, that doesn't work. Or ewe could be the more general sheep. Nope. The non-AI continues to struggle, though leaning towards something about picking your launch time (or lunch time? if one is willing to bend a word, something I don't see an AI doing). With AI, the question is if it can figure out a context. I went straight for a rebus, but perhaps it would waste time trying to construct a narrative and flounder around in that context....Pick a sheep to send on the eight o'clock rocket. Humans are good at zooming back and assessing a larger context, so a human would realize a narrative would likely be pretty silly and move on to it's being a rebus. We also presume a left to right sequencing, if our native language follows that convention. And that there is likely to be a verb. Could an AI home in on those assumptions? Probably. It's really larger context that seems to be the challenge.

Unless we go to Clarkeian space elevators or rockets using some exotic propulsion that drastically drops payload costs, I would see privatized space travel as mostly creating a playground for the wealthy. Even if there were asteroid mining or similar profit ventures, very few people would physically go up, as automated processes (without expensive life support systems and radiation shielding) would be far cheaper - engineers and other technical staff would likely run such operations from the ground while robots dug out the minerals.

There was that odd tinkling that coincidences make, when I read "Flannan Isle" in your post, as I had just the past week watched a 2018 movie about the Flannan Isle mystery. The Vanishing offers a solution a wee bit more dramatic than that a storm surge swept them into the sea.

No. That would be....weird. Early 20th century American slang, "tickle the ivories," for playing the piano. Ivory piano keys were common then. Mostly from walrus tusks, IIRC. (common misconception that they were from elephants)

You have failed to capitalize Jelly Roll! It is Jelly Morton Morton, the ragtime/blues piano icon. You have offended the Piano God! I speak of the coming annihilation of the heretics who are not humble before the Great 88 who tickles the ivories of heaven! There is no God before the Piano God! Prepare yourself!

Went a little overboard on plus ones. Good thread, and I thank @iNow for a chuckle, imagining a Dem Jeffries as speaker of a GOP House. How many nanoseconds would pass, in today's hyperpartisan congress, for a motion to vacate if Hakeem were voted in? But yes, it would be cool if paleo Repubs sort of jumped ship.

Th GOP seems so divided between ordinary conservatives and the freaks in the Trumpian clown car that it could require some Dem votes to get a speaker. Which could mean someone more centrist. OTOH, the GOP could continue letting itself be tugged farther to the right - but that would ignore voters who are tired of the attacks on women's rights, labor rights, and LGBT rights, a fatigue that has spread well past party lines. So then you'd see quite the turnover in the next election cycle. I think the GOP has to move towards sanity, or wither and die.

I've thought about that effect of acceptance of what one is born into, and it's certainly an element of generation ship novels (like Harry Harrison's Captive Universe). You could argue the ship would just be your world, and seem normal, but I wonder how a starship compares to an entire planet, especially if you are young and restless and find out what planets are. Much would depend on the shipboard culture that evolves over the dozens of generations. And the question also gets back to Mac's comments on size. How much ship does it take to satisfy any human desire for a "world"?

Three generations and one can be happy knowing ones grandchildren will step on a new world. 100 and any future involving another world and your descendants would be pretty abstract. How would many generations that know they are only placeholders....footnotes in history feel about their lives? I guess it's the topic that generation ship novels explore.

Isn't a scaramucci ten days? Should we check with the International Bureau of Weights and Measures? (July 21 - July 31, 2017)

It's a crude analogy. I guess the idea is that the number of universes that have constants which favor black hole formation will tend to increase. Not about competition, more about "fertility" - without any barriers, the ratio of BH forming universes tends to increase. Indeed, black holes don't have to adapt - just form and then collapse. The collapse opens another universe. The process is passive proliferation.

For a viable longterm colony, the 50/500 rule of population biology would apply. For a human population to retain evolutionary potential, to remain genetically flexible and diverse, 500 is considered an approximate minimum. For exploration, I've heard of studies that monitor glucocorticoids (stress hormones) in groups and found optimal sizes ranging from 6-25, however I wonder if there is still a shortage of empirical data on this (especially where a rigorous selection process is used as would be the case with astronauts). And, in the situation of exploring an entire strange new world (boldly going where no one has gone before), the demand for many kinds of expertise could mean higher numbers regardless of what would be optimal group dynamics. It wouldn't be like a moon trip where a couple astronauts can confer constantly with JPL while doing a small set of activities of limited scope.

I will leave this summary of Smolin's hypothesis, just to show an alternative view where there are changeable constants. (he sees parameters as driven by the ability to produce black holes): Black holes have a role in natural selection. In fecund theory a collapsing[clarification needed] black hole causes the emergence of a new universe on the "other side", whose fundamental constant parameters (masses of elementary particles, Planck constant, elementary charge, and so forth) may differ slightly from those of the universe where the black hole collapsed. Each universe thus gives rise to as many new universes as it has black holes. The theory contains the evolutionary ideas of "reproduction" and "mutation" of universes, and so is formally analogous to models of population biology. Alternatively, black holes play a role in cosmological natural selection by reshuffling only some matter affecting the distribution of elementary quark universes. The resulting population of universes can be represented as a distribution of a landscape of parameters where the height of the landscape is proportional to the numbers of black holes that a universe with those parameters will have. Applying reasoning borrowed from the study of fitness landscapes in population biology, one can conclude that the population is dominated by universes whose parameters drive the production of black holes to a local peak in the landscape. This was the first use of the notion of a landscape of parameters in physics.

Ok. Then you are saying there are equally logical bases that could potentially be uncovered for alpha, e.g. Or elementary charge.

What causes there to be three extended spatial dimensions?

It's unclear to me how one could ever obtain definitive first principles for constants (like below) without access to other universes. The unperturbed ground-state hyperfine transition frequency of the cesium-133 atom ΔνCs is 9 192 631 770 hertz. The speed of light in vacuum c is 299 792 458 meters per second. The Planck constant h is 6.626 070 15 × 10−34 joule second. The elementary charge e is 1.602 176 634 × 10−19 coulomb. The Boltzmann constant k is 1.380 649 × 10−23 joule per kelvin. The Avogadro constant NA is 6.022 140 76 × 1023 reciprocal mole. The luminous efficacy of monochromatic radiation of frequency 540 × 1012 Hz, Kcd, is 683 lumens per watt. And of course the FSC, which has to stay around a certain range to have stable matter and hence observing creatures like ourselves. Value of 1/ α  137.035999084(21) Perhaps we could develop better ways to model toy universes (or make them, haha) in order to get at such principles?

“This is rather as if you imagine a puddle waking up one morning and thinking, 'This is an interesting world I find myself in--an interesting hole I find myself in--fits me rather neatly, doesn't it? In fact it fits me staggeringly well, must have been made to have me in it!' - Doug Adams I know his quote has been posted here a hundred times but it bears repeating. No cleverer statement of the observation selection effect will be found. I like Smolins fecund universes theory, which @joigus mentioned, which assumes universes have "offspring" through the creation of black holes whose offspring universes have values of physical constants that depend on those of the mother universe but can differ slightly. He's made a couple of predictions from that theory which have held up.

Propulsion systems using reaction mass seem just wrong to me, for reasons touched on already. And exterior acceleration (laser sail, say) confines exploration of Proxima to a very fast fly-by, given we can't zip on ahead and set up a deceleration laser there. Alcubierre metric drive looks good albeit maybe impossible.

What happens when the ditorus is stimulated?

Great song! An earworm for me in the early eighties. Good blend of social comment, funk, reggae. Don't know if I recall this rightly, but wasn't there some street in Brixton that was the first to have electric lights, hence it was named that.

Phlegm theories Article in the Atlantic a few years back on the explanatory holes in many theories of consciousness. Popped back on my radar...an excerpt: https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2016/03/phlegm-theories-of-consciousness/472812/ If you want to read it and you get paywall blocked, LMK and I'll put up a screenshot link.