I read a paper on the topic a few years back. My recollection is that once you go faster than about 0.3c it becomes impossible to shed heat faster than you gain it from collisions with Helium. I'll try to dig it up.
The conservation of momentum means that whatever system you devise, the spaceship would have to eventually withstand the forces related to the total dP/dt required to get the obstacles out of the way...
You could change the distribution of the forces at best but I'm not sure whether that could be enough...
This is the camel's nose in the tent. If this is adopted, the threshold will move down and the percentage will move up and eventually will touch everyone.
Liberal politics turn everyplace into a disaster. CA was at a high bar so it is taking a little longer.
Clearly marking it, might be. Much like you can buy all manner of food supplement, but they don't pretend to be drugs, because they are marked with "efficacy is not clinically proven". (Even if "objectively" some of them are efficacious.)
But this ends up with an unsexy task of picking a conspiracy theory to pieces and marking unconfirmed pieces as such, logic contradictions as such, etc. I'm very grateful to people who take take the time to do that. But definitely there are fewer such people than conspiracy theory outlets.
It might be great to have a central repository of such analyses and refutations, crowd-supplied and peer-reviewed, like Wikipedia. The Lesswrong site could be part of it, but it has its own ...biases. TVTropes can be surprisingly useful for learning about and detecting common narrative devices used to drive the narrative and fiction, as opposed to trying to describe reality. But a level-headed, balanced site with systematic analysis of conspiracy theories either does not exist, not not publicized nearly enough.
I think because H2 is so common. Given that and how gravity works, let's look at the possibilities:
small thing (say up to size of smaller planets): only solids can clump together and stay together, gas would just fizz away
medium thing (earthish to gas giantish, say): solids clump together and that provides enough gravity (and sometimes magnetics) to capture/keep some gas too
large thing (star sized): you can just capture everything around. Sure that'll contain some metal, but since most of what's out there is H2 and you're gulping it all up, you end up mostly gas
I grew with floppy disk (5.25 inches) and, yeah, it's perfectly normal (and fortunate) and the people have forgotten them.
AFAIAC, I have fond memories of them : the sound of the drives (anybody remembers Locksmith, CopyII+,... ?), the hope that the copy you made would work (those floppies were not that reliable), my first experience in cracking, etc.
The seismometers were part of the Apollo Lunar Surface Experiments Packages (ALSEPs), which were powered by radioisotope thermal generators. RTGs use the heat from decaying radioactive elements to produce power, and gradually produce less energy over time as the isotopes decay into more stable elements. By 1977 the ALSEP RTGs were only producing enough power to run either one experimental package or the radio transmitter at once; they probably would have stopped working altogether in a few more years anyway and it's better to have a controlled shutdown rather than a failing radio transmitter cluttering up the airwaves. Wikipedia also mentions "budgetary considerations", and apparently they wanted the ALSEP control room for another project as well.
Edit: I've just found [1], which adds a few additional details: first, they were designed for a lifetime of one year, so 1977 was well beyond their expected activity; and second, after they were decommissioned they continued to send carrier signals (but no data) which were used for various purposes.
They were using Plutonium 238, which is the most common RTG fuel. The Wikipedia page on RTGs has a fairly comprehensive overview of the possible candidate fuels[1]; one advantage of 238Pu is that it requires the least amount of shielding, an important consideration when launching things into space.
Pages 101-105 of the termination report I linked to above have the power output curves for the various RTGs, showing the decay curve (1 lunation ~= 1 month).
