And by applying this rule then it's all hard sci-fi: take the fluffiest "Conan" tale and just tweak the parameters of the universe until it becomes not merely possible but actually inevitable.
And if a man mates with nine women he'll be holding one baby this time next month? With both electronic devices and gestating females concurrency is common.
The difficulty of long range communications is nicely demonstrated there: "X-band with 5-m fixed antenna capable of sufficient downlink (~10 Mbit/week) at 1000 au using Next Generation Very Large Array or equivalent resource" ... "Two Next Generation Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generators for 300 W
(electric) at end of mission"
So with twice the area of radio dish and a power supply that after 50 years is still double what Voyager launched with, the data rate will be two bytes per second.
Another constrained resource is communications: the Deep Space Network dishes are shared between all of the current NASA missions and already has rationing. So before upping the pace of new deep missions factor in the time for getting Congress to back expanding the DSN (not ludicrously expensive, but also not so sexy as launches, boots-on-the-moon, etc)
Geothermal station on Io? Harvest the radiation belts somehow? (Probably both environments are too destructive to be practical, like putting a Crockpot on the surface of Venus)
Indeed - I hadn't noticed the publication date before encountering the remark about Pioneer's Jovian encounter still being in the future! High time for an update; although many of the additional moons may not be of direct interest to settlers ("By most counts, Jupiter has between 80 and 95 moons, but neither number captures the complexity of the Jovian system of moons, rings and asteroids." - https://science.nasa.gov/jupiter/moons/) but the much richer picture of the larger moons and the surprising radiation environment should either grant the Jovians their empire, or sadly banish them too.
My abiding fear is that the point where I'm sure I want no more life will arrive at the point where I have gone past the physical or mental ability to put that decision into practice. Like Lot's wife I'll be tempted to pause for one final look at the home I had, and so will all be lost.
For example, by my forgetting that the "-j" option of "make" had the number of concurrent tasks as an optional parameter, and without that it simply launches every possible compile simultaneously. Paralysis of course: given its uncanny tendency to pick the wrong target I could just about believe that the OOM killer then sniped the King
That's not just a beautiful high-level description, it's even therapeutic: the next time my HDD is thrashing I'll sit patiently and think that the Page King is too busy ruling his kingdom to grant my humble request right now.
Something that I'm not even asked to read, just shown a link to alongside the link to the privacy policy, doesn't seem like any kind of "agreement" If it's necessary for me to read something as part of an agreement then I need to be told of this, i.e. for any "meeting of the minds" to have happened.
Being the splendidly reactive stuff that it is, molecular oxygen doesn't survive very long in any atmosphere: generally there's always something that needs oxidising. So it's thought to be a good indicator of life, only arising on Earth after photosynthesis began:
Anything launched is assembled from parts that have been certified as fit for purpose, voluminous paperwork showing the examinations, testing, etc, all to try to minimise the risk of failure. Once it has been in orbit for years or decades, facing ten thermal cycles per day, bathed in elevated radiation and ions, and pitted with micrometeorites, you'd really want a thorough examination before reuse (X-ray ultrasound, etc: not yet available off-world)
Further away than non-space robot workers, and we don't really have those either (at least not in the sense of machines operating autonomously in arbitrarily complex environments such that humans aren't required at all)
Only works if the natural soil is remarkably solid or the traffic negligible. Unpaved roads with more than very modest traffic generally need routine grading (repairing corrugations by scraping it over with a levelling blade) and re-graveling
Exactly: all the sewage systems I know of process it enough to dump into a sea or river, where even if a downstream town draws drinking water from it the dilution with other water plus additional environmental chemistry reduces the purification problem.
In Singapore's case the sea is the obvious sink for treated sewage, which kicks it back to desalination. Except that I believe that Singapore's water comes across the causeway to the mainland in a pipe.
I'm curious why this would be worthwhile: since Singapore is an island conventional desalination would seem easier than either coping with the witches' brew of sewage (random amounts of random chemicals) or the expense of plumbing urine separately.
Both know where they hid the bodies, but for the designers it's a metaphor for the parts of the language they wish had come out better whereas for the killers it's a source of glee that they outsmarted the police.
It's more about how it does it: injecting executable code directly into the stack so that some other code unwittingly transfers control to it. Stack-smashing is a lot more malware-ISH than a few lines of shell script.
The word list is 40,000 long, so without plurals probably there aren't enough words that people could spell or even pronounce. A better fix would be making it "what four words" - I wonder if they'd already committed too much to the "three" concept before discovering the flaw? Either way, using phony statistics to make unwarrantable claims of accuracy is a poor workaround.
So nothing of immediate or direct use here on earth, just things that may be usable for further off-world construction or (in the case of He-3) might be an energy source someday.
Those leftovers are water soluble, so either you perform some interesting chemistry to convert them into something more durable or your buildings have to be in arid places (condominium in an old salt mine?)
Not a useful comparison, since the limitation isn't of the supply of cards overall but of particular cards that (other than the material printed) are identical to the common ones.