Mr Monkeybat

I dont know what the answer to the threads original question is, maybe ox carts? Seriously though as things currently stand all alternatives except for other fossil fuels require significant improvement before they can run a modern economy. Things like solar and wind also need effective energy storage to replace fossil fuels. There have been developments creating things like batteries and super capacitors with graphene paper which have had promising results in energy density and re usability, graphene could also possibly have some applications in making solar panels cheaper and powerful. But it remains to be seen whether such things can be mass produced cheaply. If Robert Bussard was correct that relatively cheap fusion reactors can be made using the poly well design then that's great, but if tokamaks is the only real route to fusion power then it will be incredibly expensive. With the technological status quo fossil fuels are just so energy dense, portable and convenient, that we will continue burning it all up until we are left with worse shales and other crud with near negative EROI, No matter what carbon taxes are declared or treaties signed.

The biggest difference between humans and chimps is our complex spoken language. The big brains that enable such complex language are expensive using about a quarter of our calories when at rest, making birth more difficult, and making us more vulnerable to dehydration and concussion. Our mouth and throat adaptions also make us more vulnerable to choking. That is why it took millions of years for a species like us to come along it took a unique situation for those adaptions to remain positive for survival until we became spear chuckers. Bonobos are bit different but in common chimps a strong alpha gets his way and frequently bullies others. But often the alpha is not the strongest but the next two strongest who became friends and ganged up on the previous alpha. When humans developed language and sharp weapons the game changed. Now people can conspire and the big bully can find himself ganged up on and/or stabbed in the back. As a result tribal hunter gatherers are pretty communist, no one wants to be seen as greedy or selfish. And a tribe which is less good at using there language adaptation to cooperate effectively will likely be wiped out by a tribe that is. When agriculture began leading to much denser populations and eventually cities the game changed again with specialist warriors and all kind of other professions. Our capacity for complex language and thought allows us to adapt to many situations, but it also makes us vulnerable to propaganda, a skilled propagandist can manipulate emotions and ideas that are normally adaptive and make you do all sorts of things that are against your interests. On another thread also, I recently posted some of my thoughts on the evolution of morality:

Cremating billions of bodies would not poison the Earth over one tonne of coal is burnt for every person in the world every year it would take much less coal than that to burn their body, it would take less than half a year before you have a net reduction in pollution. Anyway why do the bodies have to bu burned? You could chuck the into the sea as fish food, process them into sausages, grind them up into blood and bone fertilizer, use your imagination! First my coment was not a prediction of the situation after the cull but of the kind of situation that would lead to mass genocide as their where many previous saying that such a cull "would never be considered ethical". Sorry I should of used the quote function to make this more clear. Second I am not sure what point you are trying to make here but it is clear to me that when the Bible, Talmud, and Koran where written mass genocide was considered an ethical and righteous action. Although ironically modern left wing politics is 17th-19th century christian universalism in atheist drag. Third technology is a tool. To a certain extent tools used mold your thoughts but If modern technology cannot avoid Malthusian catastrophe it will not stop the destabilization of universalist democracy.

I think robotic cars will be commercial by then putting most taxi, bus, and truck drivers out of work. Some people say that expiration of patents in laser sintering will see a 3d printing boom in 2014.

Another free game here shows what it would be like if the speed of light was at walking speed: http://gamelab.mit.edu/games/a-slower-speed-of-light/ All screens games and cameras introduce some distortion as the FOV of the camera rarely matches the FOV of your monitor so you could say that no screens display undisturbed euclidion geometry.

Curious is that similar Clathrates? And is it denser than normal ice or would it have a tendency to float making the boundary layer unstable?

There is a UDK demo called Hazard the Journey of Life. It has euclidean geometry but all sorts of impossible spaces.

I recently watched a Horizon documentary about the possibility of life on exoplanets. It talked about the exoplanets discovered that have a sizable fraction of their mass made up of water such as Kepler 22b and seemed to come to the conclusion that all sorts of fish like creatures could live their. But on global ocean thousands of miles deep with no interrupting continents wouldn't all sediments and trace elements settle to the bottom leaving any alien algae starved of nutrients just leaving a global oceanic desert. I dont know how possible life at volcanic vents beneath thousands of miles of water pressure is, but the documentary did not go in that direction instead having there CG artists create surface water lifeforms.

As the visual processing in the brain already has the parts for constructing 3d models of the environment it is probable that animals that evolved echo location probably have a form of synethesia like the humans mentioned above who use echolocation or other acoustic aids for navigatioon.

Quantum physics says that an atom can be in two states at the same time. So perhaps after the the time travelers intervention the Titanic is both sunk and floating at the same time until the Earths wave function collapses due to an outside observer.

Tanks are heavy but you could use inflatable reservoirs. once when I was younger I thought that on say a moon base a U bend of water could provide a efficient an quicker airlock until I realized that as air pressure decreases so does the boiling point of water until it goes directly from ice to vapor. On somewhere like Titan it would freeze.

Modern morality is the product of the industrial age and the great food surpluses it has produced, when there is enough food around the common instinct is to not make unnecessary enemies. In more Malthusian times peoples mindsets are quite different. For example when the bible was written the main character called God frequently tells the Hebrews to exterminate rival tribes including all the women and children, but sometimes they are allowed to take slaves and concubines. These things where considered good and moral, sometimes the god character does the genocide himself with powers akin to nuclear weapons or great floods. When societies advance from tribalism to despotism however the elite consider it in there interests to have some starving masses around to drive down the market value of labor to starvation rations, so philosophies that extol the virtues of peace are encouraged. If Malthusian times return democracies will revert to either tribalism or sometimes despotism.

Please elaborate.

I am not convinced by UFO conspiracy claims. If they have two aliens helping them for a while why on Earth are they still toying round with helicopters and jets in the USAF. But if I where to come across convincing evidence I would conclude that as they all look so human, and Einstein says FTL is time travel, that these "aliens" "Reticulans" "Tall Whites" "Nordics" etc are in fact the descendants of future humans. As the majority of stars in the galaxy are red and orange dwarf stars I would quite expect distant descendants of humans to look just like that in fact. A planet round a orange Dwarf would be great for agriculture as chlorophyll absorbs red light better and the plants wouldn't get sun burnt. It would also explain why they are so interested in human DNA and making hybrids, perhaps they want some traits that atrophied in the future, or start colonies on heavier worlds or brighter stars. Have no idea how causality and the timeline would sort itself out though. Any discussion of FTL brings up Fermi's Paradox. FTL plus exponential population growth (an essential feature of all living things) fills up the galaxy within a few thousand years.

Even at speed below 300km/h I should think that the bikers grip on the handle bars and leg grip on bike and stirrups play an important role is stopping the biker not being blown off the back of the seat.

Usable black powder can be made without sulfur according to Ulrich Brescher's measuments http://www.musketeer.ch/blackpowder/recipe.html It is less explosive in a bomb or mortat but a long barreled musket can still get almost as much energy from it, and has the advantage of being less smoky and less corrosive on your weapon, but the black powder armies never realized this because they always assumed the most explosive powder was the best for firearms. His website is also a good source of information on black powder in general, its history and how it was made. In a gas operated weapon the black poder would probably clog up the gas port forcing you to cycle it manually, but a recoil operated machine gun could probably work If you reduced the the strength of the recoil spring. loaded into the cartridges of modern weapons black power would considerably reduce their range and accuracy. Wikipedia lists the muzzle velocity of a black powder .303 rifle as 2040 feet per second bested by some modern magnum revolver pistols. The muzzle velocity of the early smokeless cordite filled .303's is listed as 2441 feet per second however that is the same velocity as a AK47 which shoots a similar size bullet from a much smaller cartridge demonstrating the improvements smokeless powder chemistry in those intervening 53 years. In a post apocalyptic scenario a couple alternatives to flint locks or percussion caps to consider are 1 pneumatic ignition. A spring loaded piston would forcing the air though the fuse hole due to compression would easily reach the ignition temperature of the powder. Diesel engines work the same way. It also make a handy alternative to matches: http://www.primitiveways.com/fire_piston_for_21st_century.html 2: Piezoelectric ignition found on BBQ's depending on how extensive this end of electricity is, quarts it naturally occurring. Some early breech loaders such as the Dresler Needle Gun used paper cartridges. The leakiness of the breech was apparently solved by adding leather washers to the bolt. You could swap the needle for a pneumatic piston and then you dont need the mercury fulmate.

I suggest that the reason differing popularity of the global warming narrative is this: When you think of big cars you think of America, due to various reasons such as plentiful oil, land, industrial base in the post WW2 period. So when Americans hear someone like Al Gore talking about the evils of cars it feels like an attack on there American identity, and lifestyle. While for Europeans with their fewer and smaller cars in old dense cities it gives them a way to feel good about the ways they are better than Americans instead of as being poorer, and a way to laugh at and hate those stupid evil Americans, which makes them feel better.

Fly wheels would seem to be an appropriate form of energy storage for this application.

My guess is the Flynn effect is caused by less malnutrition, lead poisoning. And people getting more practice at taking tests as the frequency of standardized tests at schools have increased..

Structural strength is not a big issue as he plans to gently accelerate it with ion engines. But It would probably be cheaper and easier to build a space ship without the 60's style streamlining. He plans to have a nuclear reactor the large radiators required seem to be missing from his plans. If you want to copy a design from 60's special effects, 2001's Discovery would be more sensible, although the centrifuge on the Discovery might be too small and make you dizzy.

And how well do you think a feral human with no instruction would paint? Whales and Elephants mainly use there large brains for long distance navigation.

As interesting as this is, is it actually supposed to be a response to the quoted post, it seem to completely miss the points the post you quoted. Notice that in your second scenario uses more fuel than the first a ridiculous amount in fact so of course there is more energy involved in the collision. If you had used the same amount of fuel as the first scenario in your relativistic scenario then of course to the Earthbound observer it would be slower. But manned interstellar travel only makes sense as a one way settler trip, so the earthbound observer time frame is irrelevant, and only the ships time frame matters which produces a similar trip time to Newtonian physics due to time dilation etc.

But isn't the energy of the impact still proportional to the fuel energy used to get up to that speed, along with the travel time according to the ships clock being the same as Newtonian calculations for the amount of reaction mass being expelled.

There are speculative solutions to the space dust problem, like vaporizing the dust ahead with lasers, or ionizing them so they can be deflected with magnetic fields. But the faster you go the harder it gets.

Here is a recent article on people who are researching self containing plasma's. http://www.redorbit.com/news/technology/1112824374/plasma-launched-into-open-air-for-energy-generation-041713/ But I don't think the writing in that article is very good. The headline says:" New Plasma Device Considered The ‘Holy Grail’ Of Energy Generation And Storage But the article itself does not say HOW the plasma device applies to those areas at all. IF there research has applications for fusion, I could see how that could be important for energy GENERATION even though the article does not mention fusion. But I cant how stable plasmas, have applications in energy STORAGE at all. Except that with good enough fusion power you might not need storage I suppose. The article should explain the headline, bad writer.