AnIndefiniteArticle

That’s not carbs, that’s water weight.

Look at the source again, at the pie chart of “calories by source”. 80% protein, 16% carbs, 4% fat.

Well, the Ramjet collects protons in-situ while flying through the interstellar medium for use as fusion fuel.

Putting aside that fusion rocketry is very different from combustion rocketry, even the solar wind isn’t dense enough for that, which is the medium in question for interplanetary travel.

At 1AU, solar wind has ~1 proton per cubic centimeter, moving at about 500 km/s, per current readings at time of writing. That’s 1e6 protons per cubic meter, and a flux of 5e11 protons per second passing through each square meter.

Now let’s move in to Mercury at ~0.38 AU (+/-eccentricity). Mercury receives on average ~10x the flux of particles assuming 1/r^2. Suppose we make a ship with a collector for solar wind the size of Mercury, with a radius of ~2.5e6 m. Our ship then collects 2e13 square meters of flux, or ~1e26 protons per second. A proton is ~1e-27 kg, so that’s almost 10% of a kg per second to power our now dwarf-planet-sized collector infrastructure.

Oh, you wanted an engine? Good luck having anything leftover. You can’t collect the solar wind and use it in real time. But wait an Earth year, and now your collector has collected a million kg, which is about enough to fuel a single one of these. Looks to me like all stages and boosters here burn H2, from what I’m reading. This seems like the appropriate place to say TIL about Saturn V stage 1. Thanks.

Collection at background solar wind levels is not possible. The time to go proton fishing is during a CME. A single CME ejects billions of tons of protons, per NASA’s space weather prediction center’s page explaining them. A billion tons is a trillion kg, and enough to launch a million of those Delta IV Heavies from a single flare event.

I understand that “catching a solar flare” may be easier said than done.

Saturn V didn’t need boosters to lift off with hydrogen.

Hydrogen from Earth comes from fossils, but at least the carbon can be responsibly sequestered in a controlled environment rather than spewing it out the back of the rocket. Once we leave Earth, Hydrogen is the most abundant thing in the universe.

I read that there would be genetic markers of a manmade virus, and that this virus’s RNA matched a natural evolution.

Every action leaves some sort of trace.

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That’s all the reason it should be easier to distribute power. More people to distribute it between!

Remember when we paid people to do those things directly?

We, the American people, paid a lot of people each a reasonable salary to get to the moon.

Privatized spaceflight has we, the American people, pay a single entity less total money (they can make it more efficient, of course!). This concentrates decision-making and power.

That vehicle going in to orbit needs a city to work together. I want my taxes to pay that city and the people in it, not Boeing’s shareholders who aren’t helping put the vehicle into orbit, not Musk to build a second smaller city in Texas he is king of.

Thank you for your points. I completely agree that we should be paying the workers on the ground who get us to space instead of the wealthy who claim to own it.

Curious to know what you mean here.

What parts of a virus could they find to be racist about?

We saw what happened the last time space infrastructure was privatized.

Boeing gave all the money to the stockholders and delivered a criminally late product that ended up failing and stranding our astronauts. Boeing obviously didn’t care to test if the Teflon in those thrusters could survive repeated heatings.

SpaceX decided to go backwards in rocket technology, from Hydrogen to Methane. Hydrogen is more efficient, and makes it easier to bury carbon responsibly. Sure, Boeing’s rockets got made fun of for being leaky, but I think that might be Boeing more than Hydrogen at fault. Dirty Methane rockets were cheap, and could be built simple as they experienced less thermal variation without cryogenic fuel.

SpaceX undercut the competition and turned itself into a monopoly while Boeing threw their hand to the stockholders. Now SpaceX picks up the pieces of the game they upended.

NASA was supposed to manage a thriving marketplace, full of competition. Instead it managed its way to a monopolistic structure that a single entity may try to sieze.

Fun fact about autocratic structures like monopolies and dictatorships: they can’t grow power themselves, they can only sieze power organized by others.

We need to build our next wave of structures in a distributed fashion such that the levers of power are not so concentrated that they may fall into the wrong hands.

Give the power to the people. All of them.

There are reasons to build a rocket other than fragile masculinity.

Take the piss and make jokes about what he’ll do with them (rape and pillage)? Absolutely. That’s the fragility: his plan for wealth and power is entirely dependent on stealing it from the neighbors. Just as he’s been taking all of the federal and investors’ cash in exchange for memes for the past few decades. He doesn’t produce anything of value himself.

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Bystanders have a duty to step in.

Michael Moore called Trump a Molotov Cocktail in 2016.

Project 2025 is going to reshape the federal government. It is structured as a new constitution. It defines the roles and checks/balances of various government agencies at greater specificity than the constitution.

We need to produce a progressive counter constitution that promises something better.

Project 2025 is a specific deal with America.

We need a better offer, and the people need to trust that the person running will enact it.

Kamala isn’t “getting the wrong ice cream flavor” compared to Trump.

She is still genocide, racism, incarceration, transphobia and the rest which you call Trump.

She just sugarcoats it.

The sugarcoating does make it palatable, but a palatable slavery to the rich is still a slavery to the rich.

I don’t want a country run by a few guys getting rich off of bombing and incarcerating.

I didn’t do it, but I respect holding back in this election to demand a better option in the next one.

I hear the next election will be the most important and pivotal ever!

I hope the choices won’t be corpo trash and fascist dictator.

… My actions of voting Harris? My actions of working to get others to vote?

It’s time to build a real alternative to America’s legacy of settler-colonialism, starting at a local level.

What’s he gunna do with Cheney’s bunker under 1 Observatory?

He can spy on everyone’s couches at once!

Ok, one side says it with actions, but the other says it with actions and words.

That sounds like one side being honest.

Drillin’ Joe was sure acting like it was a hoax!

I voted Kamala, but I understand sitting out.

It was the promise that he could be negotiated to the left.

Instead Joe gave us a country producing the most oil and gas in world history, no movement on healthcare, etc.

The weather is going crazy because of the increase in fossil fuels Biden presided over.

He broke the deal that he could be brought left on economic/environmental/medical issues.

Kamala promised more of the same.

How can you expect anyone to trust the same deal from the VP that the P didn’t make good on?

Joe didn’t deliver, and Kamala didn’t promise anything new.

Four more years of wildfire.

rocket ships that land within 12 inches on the moon of where they wanted to land

That’s Japan, not Elon.

Except not.

Harris isn’t a subpar meal that makes you sick for a little bit, but you’re fine in the long run. She is the candidate that will feed us today while kicking the can on bigger problems down the road. She’s the delicious tapeworm pork. She’ll keep the economy and war machine running so Americans can keep leading their comfy lives on top of the world for a few more years before collapse. This prolongs the damage caused by the petroleum state that we call America, which accumulates into massive climate impacts.

Trump is food poisoning that is a lot worse in the short term and for America specifically. Another Trump term is likely to lead to civil war and/or national collapse. America focusing inwards may be better for a world that America has been terrorizing and holding hostage with its massive military. America is funding genocides and producing more oil than any other nation in history. America has spent this century positioning itself as an enemy of habitability. If you realize that your survival threatens the world, shouldn’t you choose the poison for the good of others?

I suppose it all depends on how long we have until a collapse and ensuing paradigm shift under Harris (a short time will encourage me to vote for her) vs how dangerous the senile old man will be before we can overthrow him and build a new country. Harris is promising too much stability for what we need to replace; Trump is promising to be senile and easy to overthrow.

If Harris wants me to vote for her without hesitation, she needs to tell me how she plans to shut down the fossil fuel industry and the evil war machine. Trump is promising to run them stupidly and dangerously, and the ensuing damage may be better than keeping the planet-killing machine running. That’s the horrible decision of this “lesser of two evils” approach. I’d really rather vote to responsibly shut it down, but my options are either live comfortably while it destroys the earth or shove this stick between the spokes and hope that the damage of crashing is less bad than if we keep going.

That said, I already voted for Harris, because that’s where my judgement lands on this question. But it’s a serious question that needs careful consideration from everyone. This is a big and important election. Everyone should think very carefully and weigh the options. This is NOT an easy decision, and anyone who thinks it is has been drinking the kool aid of one side or the other.

In four more years, my judgement may land differently.

Ok, but what if it’s a choice between those moldy potatoes that are poison vs undercooked pork that’ll give you tapeworms like RFK Jr’s brain.

Surely the latter is the “lesser evil”. You get fed today, and maybe your immune system keeps you healthy tomorrow. Still a risky proposition!

But you could also demand that the pork gets cooked longer by adding some progressive policies like not supporting genocide, demilitarizing, and investing in a clean environment. I’d say that’s worth protesting for. Be a Karen, ask to see the manager, and demand your pork is cooked properly.