A quiet morning on 1 January 2015, mortals from 2014, and so much has changed here with our atomic powered exoskeletons and that invasion from Alpha Centauri.

We had a quiet one, dictated by having small children, and went to the house of some of the kids' friends' parents where we drunk some champagne and called it a night at 10:30pm.

It seems quite odd to be in 2015. When I was a kid, in 1983 I was convinced the world would end in 1987 in a nuclear war. I remember the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 being like something out of science fiction.

Presently a robot vacuum cleaner is doing it's job in the lounge room, and I'm using a small flat device to instantaneously write messages to people in other parts of the world. Crap, it is the future after all.

See http://gizmodo.com/sci-fi-visions-of-2015-ranked-1676837458

Happy New Year, the future here is full of smoke and explosions, and kids and adults being sent to the ER due to fireworks-related injuries. People never learn.

It's cold and windy here. Nothing new here.

It's still 2012. Nobody has learned. Nobody cares. The clock ticks, the second hand moves to 61. A couple kisses under harsh lights, a couple fights under soft fluorescents. the only change is a calendar that flips from December to January. Other than another month flitting away the only fulfilled memory is of another year of regret; a year without border, without love, without completion. Happy new year.

It's not 2015 until the ball drops in NYC. Because only American New Years counts. your faux Eurotrash Aussie probably metric system calendar might as well be the Jewish calendar.

I love going to New York. But the only place in the planet which is more conceited about its importance is Beijing. Something to do with the Qing Unification and being Han Chinese.

It must surely now be 2015 in Dystopia...?

Lunchtime here. Swordfish burger. Highly recommended.

Happy New Year!

....Though....I'm not exactly going to be "happy" with it though until I'm at my new job, successfully absconded from the monotony of the past two years.


Anywho, my colleagues and I had bunch of conversations over the past year over where we are as opposed to where we should be in terms of cultural development and technological advancement. When it came to the former, it was always me listening to the same old shit about how right wing authoritarian governments and evil capitalists slowed us down, thus preventing us from having colonies on the moon and the political/racial/sexual harmony that's standard of your typical Roddenberry-esque utopian sci-fi pulp fantasy. When it came to the latter, it was always me going on a tirade about how inflation, massively increased regulation, uncontrolled immigration, and social engineering commie fucks have hurt our ability to maintain what we have much less cultivate a general desire and a means to design and invent more.

I absolutely believe that, had the west not suffered such a severe cultural and industrial slowdown, we would have had enough time and resources on our hands to develop the technology required for interplanetary space travel and already have a craft made that could travel between planets at practical velocities.

More importantly though, I believe there would be far more efficient farming technology like crops and orchards that use robotic pickers/maintainers.

We agreed, however, that the only thing that hasn't slowed down (and probably won't) is our computing technology. We all agreed we'd get to see and use a fully high function quantum computer around the next thirty years or so.

.....Then again, holographic technology probably got short-changed by the economy even if computers haven't.



Why on earth would Frank Miller feel compelled to come to this obscure, archaic messageboard and guess Doog's password?

He touched Frank Miller and absorbed his memories, Rogue-style. He is now Frank Doogler.

Hardly. The only reason we went to the moon was as a big 'Fuck you!' to the Soviets. The heavy investment in new alloys, engines, and such could never have been justified in a commercial setting. It took the government funding the developments and then turning around and recouping some of the money by selling those break throughs to the corporate sector that allows companies like Virgin to play around with space tourism for the vastly wealthy as a mere novelty.

Isn't China's economy strong these days because they have all the industrial and manufacturing shit? Also, every morning they kung fu chop hot sand repeatedly.

Love swordfish. It's not often on the menu here in the states these days. Something about overfishing.

Where did I say that governments wouldn't be involved in developing spaceflight? Obviously, ours already kicked off the trend, so it would be rather academic to argue for or against the idea that huge corporations and egoistic billionaires would have got there on their own. Regardless of where the seed came from though, the space exploration idea and its accompanying R&D isn't monopolized by any one sector, and both have considered advancing it. As such, assuming the culture wasn't predisposed with the Cold War and still fascinated by the idea, either one could capitalize on it--and probably would have.

I would point out, however, that just as the development of the military space shuttle that orbited the earth not too long ago most certainly involved private contractors that pursued educations for non-public sector purposes, so too did the original space program.

Here it is. Project Orion. Massive propulsion without the burden of internal combustion. The idea was very promising, but was axed due to *drum roll* politics.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Orion_%28nuclear_propulsion%29

there was also the hurdle of developing mass-efficient radiation shielding for the open-cycle systems; most prototypes used the [usually] liquid-hydrogen fuel or water produced by the onboard fuel cells simply because there wasn't a cost-effective way to actually have solid shielding without adding tremendously to the aggregated payload (remember that the main advantage of nuclear rockets besides the higher exhaust velocity is a lower gross liftoff mass) and thus the delta-vee needed for a trans-planetary injection on a realistic timetable. of course, as these consumables were, well, consumed, there went the shielding for the crew and sensitive payloads. a closed-cycle "nuclear lightbulb" propulsion system would've been even more efficient in terms of both effective exhaust velocity and payload mass, in addition to generating far more electrical power than fuel cells, and the quartz-window containment system would've been much lighter than the layers of graphite and lead needed to shield the crew from radiation.

Is there a possibility of Project Orion giving me orange rock-hard skin and class-75 super strength?

There's already plenty of other products on the market offering to make you bigger and rock-hard!

When the Chinese get to the moon, as they're planning to do, and if they find a very large cavern, seal it, and establish a permanent base, then we'll see the development of interplanetary travel as part of a resources grab.

I can't imagine that whatever ore they find up there could possibly be worth the logistics of creating an outrageously expensive supply line from earth to the moon--especially in this world economy.

they could find the legendary dragon ore, which boosts their kung fu by a substantial amount.

Dragon ore? Is that really a thing?

It's not like Black Belt Magazine to lie to us.

Black Belt Magazine is the last remaining bastion of journalistic integrity.

Next to Kotaku of course.

Helium-3. http://theconversation.com/why-we-should-mine-the-moon-34285

It's just a cheap way to cash in on the Helium franchise after the success of the sequel H2 and the crossover with the Oxygen franchise in H2O.

He He He.

Which is now officially my lamest pun ever.

there's nothing inherently wrong with puns involving noble gases, just don't expect much of a reaction.

goddamn nerds! i'm going to take so much of your lunch money that i'm going to be legally classified as a cafeteria.

Your post leaves me inert.

I guess we just don't mix well, then.

You can still bond.

IN THE ASS

Argon Sulphide?

Noble farts!

This thread has become unstable.

Maybe it's just moving through time!

AND ASS!

IN THE SPACE!