Congress is the only instrument of impeachment. Unfortunately Congress is made up of spineless jellyfish wimps afraid of their own shadows. Thank you for your reply and the graphic.
And a 0.1G field is the minimum required to sustain musculoskeletal health. Mars is beyond us unless they design the craft for constant boost (with a skew-flip at the midpoint) or spin the ship. What point is there in sending astronauts to Mars if they are too enfeebled by the journey to move?
I'd go with your third one first m'dear. For the first one..what is a "boost" ship? AND. I have a fear of heights so for me personally space travel wouldn't be on my list. Your second one will show you my abject ignorance. What is the purpose of and benefit from sustainable nuclear fusion? I really don't have a clue! Thank you for your thoughtful reply Sbf. I appreciate it. As always! :)
Constant boost, the ship is continuously providing thrust. Rather than the current situation where the engines shut off after achieving escape speed, then the craft coasts in free fall - necessary with conventional engines to conserve fuel, so a radical new type of drive would have to be invented. Sustainable nuclear fusion solves the world's energy problems indefinitely. The by-product is stable helium, another thing there's a shortage of.
Thank you for the info Sbf. So Constant Boost is comparable to DC whereas what we have now is AC? And sustainable nuclear fusion...(is that the same thing as "fission"?) is better than what we have now. Is it possible? Is it like a search for cancer cure(s)? We know it's out there somewhere we just have to keep trying through trial and error eliminating what doesn't work in hopes of finding what does? In another life if I were smart enough I"m pretty sure I'd want to be a Quantum Physicist. That whole word of black holes and other dimensions/universes and wormholes and event horizons is endlessly fascinating to me. If you could be anything/do anything what would it be? I ended up being an Internal Auditor which I always enjoyed but Quantum Physics? Wow. There's an adventure I would have liked to experience first-hand! :)
Fission is the splitting of heavy elements (uranium, plutonium, thorium) and releasing the energy in the nuclear bonds. Fusion involves combining heavy hydrogen atoms to form helium, which releases a huge amount of energy (it's what the sun does). Heavy metals are relatively scarce and the by-products of fission are lethal long after they stop being useful - half-lives of billenia (except for thorium, where the nuclear "ashes" have very short half-lives and are safe after mere decades). Heavy water is plentiful and the by-product of fusion is much safer - we can do it (in H-bombs and particle accelerators) but only for a split second. We can't sustain the field required to generate plasma - yet. Muon catalysis works but muons only have a lifespan of milliseconds.
WM BARR . =ABSOLUTE TRASH 