The soviets collapsed and it only gave the North Koreans access to ICBM capable rocket engines a few decades early. I’m sure nothing bad will happen again this time.
Ah, who am I kidding, some general will probably sell a nuke to the saudis and we’ll all die the next time there’s an oil fiasco.
I was wondering how the scientists went from proposing a planet that was 1.5 to 2 times the size of earth, to proposing it being 5-10 times the size of earth.
You Should Really Considering Explaining Acronyms Before Posting, obviously.
A remote command from some random phone to reboot does sound like the a wonderful vector for malware, though
YSRCEABP
Genghis didn’t have access to thousands of poorly assembled Humvee knockoffs and millions of poorly trained mechanics to make them somewhat functional. I’m sure some of them could survive the drive.
You know, it would be a horribly evil plan to try and start WW3 while the new president is being confirmed.
Hell, given today’s modern technology, a leader may be able to plan the opening shots for a few minutes before or after the transition of power, essentially starting a war while the US is asleep. A traditional war may not be really affected by a transition of power, as all of the US military leadership is still able to make limited decisions about how to respond to being fired at.
However, use of nuclear weapons could be severely limited by a presidential transition. The US nuclear arsenal can only be used at the sole discretion of the acting president. The president is the only one with physical access to the launch codes, and the only one that has the authority to order a launch. So what would happen if say, North Korea or Russia launched an ICBM or dropped a nuclear bomb from a traditional bomber, or worse, launched a sub launched ballistic missile that can hit its target in under 20 minutes. MAD dictates that any use of nuclear weapons requires an immediate and proportional response. But with the president having just been confirmed, how long would it take to get them to a secure location, get the codes, order a launch, and have it be carried out? Probably too long. In the case of an ICBM, it only takes about 30 minutes to get from the launch location to anywhere in America.
Now NATO does have some nuclear bombs, but I am fairly sure most of them are provided by the United States and still require US presidential orders to launch. Britain and France have their own nuclear weapons, but far less than the US possesses. Maybe there is enough of a difference where taking the US out of the picture could allow an attacking nuclear country to not be totally glassed.
I could see how an absolutely insane leader might want to try something like that. There’s no way to win a nuclear war, but there may be a way to crawl away alive from one in the form of decapitating your enemy while they’re busy figuring out who can actually launch the damn bombs. Maybe enough of your government can survive the exchange to rebuild an 18th century style empire. The empire will have holes in it like Swiss cheese because of the cities that are now unusable wastelands, but it’s still technically an empire. And of course, the course of human history will now be irreparably altered, setting the species back by centuries of technological and industrial innovation due to all of the EMPs and human knowledge that got turned into carbon dust.
Could be insane enough to work. But I’m sure there’s some ultra classified, so top secret you get shot for seeing the folder, type plan that magically fixes this by giving the Strategic Commander sole launch authority for one day while the president transitions. I mean, the government wouldn’t be so stupid as to leave a glaring hole in nuclear security for decades, right? They fixed the issue with all ICBMs having to fly over Russia to get to Korea, right? Oh wait. Well at least we have anti ballistic missile platforms all along the coast, right? Oh those are all in other countries. At least the Exo-Atmospheric kill vehicles work 50% of the time in the simulations. And we’ve got like 40 of those, so I’m sure that’s enough to deal with hundreds of warheads.
I remember doing the bear grills one, and one of the choices was to jump over a ravine, or walk over it using a fallen tree as a bridge.
Being the hiker I am, the obvious choice of walk around it being missing kind of annoyed me, but I chose the tree option.
Bear died.
So I got to go back and pick the jump over option, which was apparently the right one.
Who the fuck does running jumps over a 15 foot deep ravine.
I never bothered with the choose your own adventure things again. When the correct choice is just not available and the next logical choice just means an instant loss, you don’t have a very fun game
If you’re a government, you can pretty much put anything in a rocket fairing and call it a reconnaissance satellite.
The only warning that actually has to be given is that a rocket is being launched, so you don’t accidentally trigger WW3 by setting off launch detection satellites without warning. After it’s in space, no one can really tell what was in the fairing. Could be a spy satellite, could be navigation. Could just be a box with a bunch of little rockets in it, designed to slam into whatever you want at ridiculous speed.
But it’s way more likely that this was just Boeing having a tiny leak in a propellant tank, or a bad thruster and as soon as the concentration of propellant and oxidizer got high enough, it triggered a detonation. They certainly have a history of not leak testing their shit: airplanes falling apart, space capsules with leaky thrusters, and now a blown up satellite point more towards incompetence than malice.
One of those fancy plasma lighters, sure. But butane lighters have been around for decades
Man this three day special military operation has kind of gotten out of hand.
There was a big idea a couple decades ago that corporations were going to copyright natural genes and sell them for massive profits to other biotech companies that could use them to make cure for diseases and other things.
Michael Crichton wrote a few books about it, pretty good reads.
They did do the gene copyright thing in the real world, but it turns out that doing anything with a random gene is pretty hard and the genome isn’t just something you can copy paste a gene into and have it cure aids or cancer, so no one wanted to buy genetic sequences that they would then need to do a whole bunch of work on anyway to make it useful.
Pretty much all 23andMe did was increase the size of the Law Enforcement dna database by letting cops send in samples of suspects and get back their family members info. Of course the company said that was very naughty, but no one got into real trouble for it. And now 23andMe owns a lot of other people’s genetic code, and it’s not worth the hard drives it’s stored on.
I could actually see this being useful for dangerous working environments like steelworks or inside nuclear facilities. As long as the control system is on a separate intranet that’s properly air gapped.
You should still pay the operator their full wage though. The human still needs all of the technical knowledge to do the job, you’re just removing most of the physical risk.
That’s kind of like saying that ford can’t make a model t anymore.
I’m sure they could, there’s just no reason to.
I’m also sure the contractors that built the Saturn V, those that are still in business, could build equivalent parts today if the government asked.
The Saturn five was an absurdly large rocket designed specifically to get 3 people from earth to the moon. It was insanely expensive per launch, and the only reason it ever flew was because the government was writing nasa blank checks in order to beat the soviets.
Today the government wants a reasonable dollar figure for a launch, and the days of spending a billion dollars per launch are long past.
That’s an extremely bold assumption.
The space shuttle was designed originally to be rapidly reusable, but its shortest turn around time was still measured in weeks, not days.
And its main engines only produced water as a by product, no soot or carbon deposits to worry about.
The US did it.
We were invading the Middle East since before I was born, and I almost signed up to get free school when I wanted to be a doctor. I would have likely treated soldiers that were still being wounded in the Middle East.
Oh we have generics all over the place.
The problem is that large drug companies abuse our patent systems to keep their drugs exclusive for longer than should be allowed.
Look at EPI pens. The drug is just Adrenaline, you can get a vial of that anywhere as long as you have a prescription. But the EPI pen mechanism itself is patented. So no other manufacturer can sell an easy to use, pre measured dose of Adrenaline without violating the patent. That’s why EPI pens cost hundreds of dollars instead of the 20 bucks they probably actually cost to produce. And you need that mechanism, because no one with a throat that’s closing is going to be able to calmly pull out and ampule or vial, measure the right dose into a syringe, and get it into their system before they pass out from anaphylaxis.
Can they wait until Saturday to drop the nukes?
I want to sleep in before I get turned to dust
Oh they definitely did.
Before the pandemic, I’d see one or 2 highly questionable moves in a drive.
Now it’s like a dozen.
I see people making lefts on red, cutting off semi trucks, weaving in and out of traffic, driving with absolutely no lights at night, and my god the speeding.
A few years ago it was normal to see people doing like 5 miles an hour over the limit, now it feels like half the people want to do 10 or 15, even on surface streets.
I wonder if it’s that most people drove less during the pandemic, the fact that cops around here were told to only pull people over if they were a direct threat to the public, or if the social isolation just made some people way more self centered. But driving has definitely gotten worse since the pandemic.
Dirty bomb will still render half a city uninhabitable for generations.
And, there is a decent chance the Russians have been recycling spent bomb cores for their current bombs. Just because a core loses its potency, doesn’t mean you can’t refine it again and mix it with other refined cores for a brand new bomb.
Is true that the tritium for hydrogen bombs would be basically impossible for a non nuclear nation to get, but conventional fission bombs are readily recycliable.