Fun Stuff > CHATTER
miscellaneous musings
jwhouk:
I'm going to be honest: I really don't get into watching the Super Bowl like I did in years past. I'd be live tweeting the game before, but now? I'm not even planning on watching the second half.
cesium133:
I’m watching Puppy Bowl.
Case:
--- Quote --- "What I find fascinating about the generational wars is how Gen X, the Switzerland of generations, has managed not to get involved in all this nastiness. While boomers, zoomers and millennials are at each other’s throats, Gen X just stands in the background, smoking cigarettes and wryly observing the strife. As a wise Gen Xer would probably tell you, what goes around comes around."
"The culture war between Gen Z and millennials is on."
--- End quote ---
Hehehehehe ... eheheheheheee! :angel:
Morituri:
Today I learned that Project Orion is not quite completely dead.
In the 1960s there was an extended study of a plan for a spacecraft that propelled itself by means of ejecting small nuclear bombs and detonating them behind the ship. They studied several designs, including one the size of an ocean liner. According to their calculations, that sucker could achieve orbit riding on top of around eight hundred nuclear explosions. They could have delivered a thousand people, plus equipment, to mars. Or taken a couple hundred for a 50-year journey to Barnard's star at arount 10 percent of the speed of light, including deceleration and stopping at the far end.
The whole thing was scrapped in 1962 on account of the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty - and the fact that Kennedy was made aware of it in a security briefing shortly after he became president and was absolutely horrified at the idea.
Today I learned that Project Orion is actually still on the books as a contingency plan that might under extreme conditions actually get built. The current plan on it is that if we need it, it will be as a complete crash program to get craft out there as fast as possible, occupying a major part of the world's economic resources for ~7 to 10 years.
If the world is ever threatened by a large asteroid that we can't otherwise escape, and that's the time frame of warning we've got, then Feckin' Project Orion is still on the books, with a crash development program kept up-to-date as a contingency plan for getting to it and diverting that asteroid.
I don't know how to feel about that.
Akima:
The science-fiction novel "Footfall" features an Orion-style battleship (named Michael after the archangel who threw down Lucifer from heaven...) launched to defeat alien invaders:
But when it comes to, "I don't want to write the environmental impact report on that", nuclear rocket ideas, I thing the hypothetical nuclear salt-water rocket makes Project Orion seem sane. Admittedly I don't think anyone is quite mad enough to propose launching from Earth's surface on a pillar of nuclear fire made up of violently radioactive, chemically toxic, and probably still-fissioning Plutonium salts...
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