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It takes 6 months or longer if you use a low-thrust solution such as ion propulsion or solar sails. It took SMART-1 over a year to get to lunar orbit, and that required the vehicle to be firing its engines about 2/3 of the time. It takes only 3 days or so to get from low Earth orbit to low lunar orbit if you use a high-thrust solution such as was done with the Apollo missions, and that requires the firing the engines for only ten minutes or so.

First off, to be very blunt, most of "free thinkers" are idiots. Peer review is an important part of both science and engineering. The kind of criticism that goes on at this site is mild compared to what happens amongst practicing scientists and engineers. The standard mantra for such a review is "check in your ego at the door". That way, when you come out of the room feeling six inches tall, you can check your ego back out. In retrospect, if your idea has any merit, the criticisms will help you make forward progress. It is best however not to go into a peer review with a meritless, "free-thinking" idea. That 12-year old boy: Here he is in 2007. His name is David Hahn. His story is a rather sad one. A 1998 Harper's Magazine story: http://web.archive.org/web/20001215100600/www.findarticles.com/cf_0/m1111/n1782_v297/21281407/print.jhtml "The Radioactive Boy Scout" from the "Tales of the Nuclear Age" blog: http://talesfromthenuclearage.wordpress.com/2009/12/13/the-radioactive-boy-scout/

Bzzzt. Wrong. A thing that is not falsifiable is not a scientific theory.

Do you know what those adjectives mean? Incommensurable means unable to be compared (with what?) Since you did not say what your theory is incommensurable with, I can only assume that you mean it is incommensurable with everything: Existing theories, reality, ... If that is the case, why would I even be interested in reading it? Why would anyone? Irreducible means unable to be reduced. And you know this because?? Catholic presumably means universal here. Aren't you being redundant when you say this is a theory of everything? Unfalsifiable means it cannot be shown to be false, which in turn means you do not have a theory. Empirically validated means you have tested it. Against what? You just said your theory is unfalsifiable. With what? Do you have your own personal particle collider? Validated means someone has checked your work. Who? Did you submit it for peer review, or did you validate it yourself (never a good idea). Testable. But wait! You said your theory was unfalsifiable. Complete has a couple of different mathematical meanings, neither of which apply where. I am completely baffled with regard to your meaning. Consistent. Sorry, you can't prove this. Godel's theorems are going to get in the way.

OK, thanks for that. And yes, the location sucks. When the underlying software thinks I have last visited seems quite random. Sometimes it will thinks I last visited 8 minutes ago, other times, two days ago. The appearance is that it just pulls a number out of the hat. Does it really? I got completely random results when I tried to search for 41,000. The old search tool had lots of options. I could make it search only in selected subfora, look only for posts by a particular user, have it report results either as posts or as threads. I can't even find an advanced search tool with this new scheme. Another complaint: The underlying formatter is both too smart and too stupid at the same time. Heck, it is worse than Microstuff's Word, which is saying a mouthful. It is very easy to get mixed fonts when cutting and pasting. It is very easy to get stuck in a list. Where is the Make plain text button?

I'll try to be nice: The search tools in this new setup are awful. (Whew, no curse words. Told ya' I'd try to be nice.) The "View New Content" button has a rather random view of what is new. How do I find the posts made in the last day? The last two days? How do I find posts made by a particular user? Going to the user's profile and clicking "posts" shows the full text of the last two or three posts made by the user. Want to search for content? Doing a search forums gives random nonsense. Doing a google search on "<content> site://scienceforums.net" is much more likely to find what you are searching for. Edit: I now see that you have the merge working But it doesn't show a separator between the merged posts. Another issue: Touch a post, even 5 seconds after you post it, and you get "This post has been edited by ..." displayed at the bottom of the post. Any way to make that only show up if there is some reasonable lag between the initial post and the edit?

The entry page can take a long time to load.

Speed. The new scienceforums.net is slow.

jryan, you're still thrashing. Suppose the jobs have an immense amount of value. Execs #2, #3, and #4 may well go along with anything that exec #1 proposes because they foresee that should they vote against his proposal they will suffer the same fate as will exec #1. In other words, exec #1 can propose a split in which all of the money goes to exec #1; nobody else gets a dime. On the plus side, everyone gets to keep their fantastic jobs. We don't know what the value of the jobs are. All we can say is that the problem is underspecified -- or we can ignore the salary aspect and treat this as a mathematical rather than humanistic problem. (In which case you get to the Nash equilibrium solution.)

No, there isn't. You are making up information about salaries and such precisely because the problem lacks specificity. The only solution that makes any sense given the (limited and incomplete) information at hand is a 999997,0,1,0,1,0,1 split. The even numbered execs get nothing, execs numbers 3, 5, and 7 get a pittance, and exec #1 gets almost everything.

jryan, you are thrashing here. You are just throwing out solutions with no logic behind then. This is not the way to solve these kinds of problems. First off, interesting find. I suspect the OP changed the problem from pirates to executives so we wouldn't be able to find a solution on the 'net. Do note that the author came to the same conclusion that I came to: This is an evens versus odds proposition. The following paragraph in that paper is key (epmphasis mine): The secret to analyzing all such games of strategy is to work backward from the end. At the end, you know which decisions are good and which are bad. Having established that, you can transfer that knowledge to the next-to-last decision and so on. Working from the beginning, in the order in which the decisions are actually taken, doesn’t get you very far. The reason is that strategic decisions are all about “What will the next person do if I do this?” so the decisions that follow yours are important. The ones that come before yours aren’t, because you can’t do anything about them anyway. This pirate problem is almost exactly the same problem as the topic of this thread, only it is a bit better specified. The reason that the pirate problem is a bit better stated is that there is no particular advantage accrued by moving up a notch on the fierceness totem pole. This problem is about executives, not pirates. In most companies, a huge financial advantage accrues from moving up the executive seniority totem pole. That isn't true in all companies. Some are much more egalitarian. (Prototypical example: Ben & Jerry's, at least up until 2000 when Ben and Jerry sold out.) Compensation is fairly flat in such companies; what is accrued in advancing up the totem pole is a bit more glory at the expense of a lot more headaches. The division in this kind of company would be simple: Even shares for all, with everyone patting each other on the back for a job well done. No mention of wheelin' and dealin' (the thing that salescritters do for a living). Imagine a more cutthroat corporation than a Ben & Jerry's. Exec #4 pulls aside execs #5, #6, and #7. "We can sink every proposal up to mine. I'll split the pot between us, and we can all move three notches up the ladder. BTW, hit men are cheap; don't think of voting down my proposal." This wheelin' and dealin' makes for a solution that is not a Nash equilibrium. The simplistic Nash equilibrium solution is simple: Exec #1 offers $1 each to execs #3, #5, and #7. The remaining $999,997 dollars goes to exec #1. This simplistic split is not realistic. Even ignoring the dollar value inherent in moving up the executive ladder, one of those three odd numbered executives may reject exec #1's proposal on grounds of fairness. So they lose a buck; exec #1's proposal is not fair. We humans (and other animals) appear to have some kind of built-in fairness mechanism. Google "Ultimatum game" for more.

Look at it from a bottom-up perspective, jryan. Posts #3, #4, and #10. Without any other info from the OP, this is clearly an evens-versus-odds proposition. Merged post follows: Consecutive posts mergedTo illustrate how much harder this is when the odd numbered execs get their shot versus the evens, consider that exec #1 needs 3 cohorts, #2 only needs 2, etc. In tabular form, [math]\begin{array}{ccc} \text{Turn \#} & \text{\# cohorts} & \text{As percent} \\ 1 & 3 & 43 \\ 2 & 2 & 33 \\ 3 & 2 & 40 \\ 4 & 1 & 25 \\ 5 & 1 & 30 \\ 6 & 0 & \phantom{0}0 \end{array}[/math] There is no turn #7. The last exec will never get a shot. Exec #6 gets the requisite 50% from his/her own vote.

Nice job. That the spit does not have to be even is, I think, crucial. Since the OP did not provide any information regarding the value of each position the question is essentially unanswerable. The OP also did not answer my question regarding wheelin' and dealin', and that can obviously change the outcome immensely. Of course, one way to overcome this is to not offer an even split. That #1 gets to keep his job might well be worth a lot more than 1/4 million. Heck, it might be worth so much that exec #1 will sweeten the pot with some of his own money. He could offer $1 million each to execs #3, 5, and 7, for example. I would expect that jumping up a notch in the hierarchy is worth more to exec #3 than it would be to exec #7. For most people, pay levels out as one progresses. Pay raises can be quite phenomenal for fresh-outs. Some fresh-outs simply aren't qualified to do fresh-out level work, and the pay for them reflects that. Once fresh-outs have proven their worth their pay jumps by quite a bit (percentage wise). After that, pay raises start becoming rather pathetic; eventually they barely keep pace with inflation. This is not the case in the cutthroat executive world. Pay starts going off the charts the higher one climbs. Exec #1 is most likely paid more, a whole lot more, than #2, #2 is paid a lot more than #3. Things probably start to flatten out from there. To forestall a rebellion by any one of his odd numbered cohorts, exec #1 may want to offer more to #3 than #5, and more to #5 than #7. As said earlier, the OP didn't supply enough information needed to truly solve the problem. All we can do is speculate. Merged post follows: Consecutive posts merged You are forgetting that by rejecting #1's proposal exec #2 gets a shot. Exec #2 only needs two cohorts -- and those two cohorts most likely will not include exec #5. Exec #5 stands to get zero by rejecting #1's proposal. Without any other info, this is an even numbered versus odd numbered execs proposition, and the evens have a distinct advantage each step of the way. Exec #1 needs three cohorts but exec #2 only needs two. Exec #3 needs two cohorts but exec #4 only needs one. Exec #5 needs one cohort but exec #6 does need any.

Read post #7, jryan. Why would exec #2 vote for your proposal? If he joins execs #4, #5, and #6 and votes against exec #1's proposal, exec #2 can get the same amount of money as offered by exec #1 and he will get exec #1's job.

There is no reason the second most senior exec would accept such a deal. Suppose he rejects the deal along with those other three. The first deal is sunk, and so is the topmost exec. The new top exec only needs to find two cohorts to attain the requisite 50% vote. That's a bigger slice of the pie for our former #2 (new #1) exec -- and he's the new #1 exec.