Recent content by MonstersFromTheId

That's an excellent presentation D H, where'd you find that? I take it that a "technology readiness level" of "3" means don't bet yer butt on it working w/o one heck of an insurance policy ;-). Unfortunately, the one chart I really wanted to see there - "Altitude, G-Load, Heat Rate vs...

Hubble+/- 4.3%, is the constant "constant"? Why is the Hubble constant assumed to be "constant"? Just to keep things simple a la Occam's razor? Or is there a lot more to it than that? With further increases in the accuracy of its measurement, and a few centuries to make repeated...

Gotcha, makes perfect sense. So I suppose that the Apollo LLM essentially did a "gravity turn" on its way from orbit to the surface, with the difference being that the Moon is only 1/6th as deep a gravity well to have to drop into, thus requiring 1/6th the fuel or so to do the "gravity turn"...

Why do spacecraft have to undergo such high temperatures during reentry? Is that basically to save on fuel? For example - to take the ridiculous extreme, suppose you performed a reentry burn of the same magnitude used to place the craft in orbit in the first place? As in you use something...

A RADICAL idea... As noted above, 1/6g = 1/6 effective weight = 1/6 lateral grip between shoes and floor BUT having to deal with having the same mass, and inertia. One way of getting a grip on the floor would be to use weights. A 250 pound man would weigh just a tad over 41-1/2 pounds on the...

As a serious answer I think you'd have to make changes as you go while actually trying to play the game on the Moon. Some obvious things that would probably have to change would be setting the nets higher. Since, with the same effort, under 1/6 gravity you could jump 6 times higher, a "slam...

Tx joema. Those articles were a huge help.

This article, "Electron filmed in motion for the first time", in the MSNBC, technology and science section, left me a little suspicious -- http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/23336318/ I say "suspicious" because I've grown accustomed to overblown headlines like "Teleportation proved possible!"...

This has been done Actually the idea of "landing on a conveyor belt" has already been tested, though not by Mythbusters. At an airshow, a small plane was landed on what was billed as "the world's shortest runway" as a stunt. A large platform was mounted to the top of a motorhome. The...

ZapperZ- Tx for that link. This is HUGELY helpful. GleefulNihilism - "I hope that helps." Well, umm,.. not really. At least not yet. I looked up "minkowski diagram" on the 'ol Wikipedia. There's a lot there to read before I've got the very slightest chance of understanding where you're goin'...

That's what confuses me Ces. The thought that the reason we always remember the past and not the future, is that our memories of the future would have to be deconstructed as time ran in reverse. Think of it this way - imagine making pencil strokes on a piece of paper. You know, like you're...

"Arrow of Time?" I don't understand. I don't understand, and I'm not kidding about that, TOO many people that are a hell of a lot smarter than me ponder the question of why there appears to be an "arrow" of time, i.e. "why doesn't time run in reverse every now and then". So I have to figure...

Tx Wallace! That wiki article is great, but MAN have *I* got some reading to do!

Dark matter seems to have the upper hand at the moment, at least with what I read. But now I keep hearing about Modified Gravity Theory as a alternative explanation for the large structure of the Universe, (often paired with comparisons between Dark Matter, and what was once called the...

How fast the Moon? Just supposing you dropped a space elevator from the Moon to the Earth. The bottom doesn't have to be attached to the Earth, the bottom could just, well, sort of dangle there over the surface of the Earth. If you did do that, how fast would the dangling tip of the Lunar...