I like how the last four posts aren’t directly addressing the git.
I’m glad that I didn’t see that thread. I’m itching to jump in, but I think it’s better to let it lie.
Yeah, prolly so. 
You’re in good company. This board has many experts and professionals from a wide variety of different fields and Sammy has argued with all of them. He even explains his SOP here. Basically the way it works is that Sammy stumbles across some idiotic factoid in some discreditable pseudo-scientific garbage like SuperFreakonomics, applies his giant throbbing brain to extrapolating this factoid to comically simplistic and grossly incorrect conclusions about how the world works, and considers that to be a sound basis for arguing with people who have devoted their entire careers to a specific field of science or technology. That’s just how Sammy rolls. That is in effect what this whole lengthy Pit thread is about – not that Sammy deserves the attention, it’s more that in this world of sin and woe, we can always use a laugh, and Sammy’s solemn pontifications are always a boundless source of comic relief.
Although since quietly returning from a 30-day suspension Sammy has been cranking up the idiocy to such a fearsome extent that I suspect it’s deliberate trolling, because not even Sammy could be that stupid.
Cool. Note my definition of feasible is “given a budget up to the NASA Apollo program budget in constant dollars, and customizations of existing technology, the project could be completed”.
I see it as physically realizable under those constraints. It could become real, it’s not impossible.
Then for this problem I just need to note that:
You can skip the glaciers with suspension links
You can build 100m of cableway starting from the base town.
With space suits, you could build the last 100m to the peak of Everest, given limitless supplies and equipment from the past 15 kilometer cableway.
Rest is just extensions of the above two cases. Dynamic programming.
So to disprove it you would need to come up with a possible problem that NASA of 1969 couldn’t solve.
Good luck.
Sammy, you are too dumb to even argue against.
I see this kind of thing in lots of places. One other site I hang around has had a number of discussions about self-driving/autonomous cars. there seems to be a depressingly large number of geeks (usually ardent Elon Musk fans) for whom the solution to everything is machine learning/neural nets and those solutions are easy and will be ready in a couple of years because of course they will. “Elon said they’re collecting tons of data, so you just use machine learning with neural net and Full Self Driving will be here in 2020!”
Oh, and regarding Orion propulsion charges: these are nukes with propellant on one side of the weapon. When the nuke detonates the light and heat vaporizes and accelerates the propellant.
This cone of high velocity propellant hits a metal plate on the rocket and transfers momentum.
This sudden impulse has the advantage, allegedly, of more ISP than NERVA (it’s hotter gas)
Umm in reality as a paper study I am not sure if they addressed heating or ablation losses, ablated material “counts” as part of the propellant efficiency (ISP) calculation.
Anyways you could in theory anchor an Orion drive engine to an asteroid and push it, or if it’s a nickel iron asteroid, skip the engine and use the propulsion charges directly. (Aim the high velocity jets of each detonation at it’s center of mass)
Given the fact that Orion drive works incredibly well in atmosphere it would let you launch enormous spacecraft with massive payloads. This seems like an obvious thing to try if a civilization ending astroid is coming.
But sure, we all die eventually, why bother trying. Just accept our fates. That’s you. Everyone in this thread.
No, please, you are mankind’s last hope! Never give up!
Are you now saying that we can achieve immortality?
“He’s been pretty milquetoast”
Well, shit. See, I don’t want to get banned. Not because it would affect me in any real way, but because I don’t want to read the post where the Cheetos winner posts a selfie of his/her cheese covered hands and gloats at how delicious they taste on such a glorious occasion.
But now I wonder if maybe that was your plan all along. I mean, you were a military officer, you know how to lead difficult to lead soldiers with mixtures of positive and negative reinforcement. Maybe you planned it this way and by staying within the lines on here you’re getting exactly what you wanted…
Finally, what’s “thinly veiled” about talking about making illegal immigrants not depress the labor market for red blooded American citizens that you once swore to protect? If you read further I even conclude that the ones who have been here a long time were de facto paid to be here and I coming to the obvious conclusion that illegal immigrants shouldn’t be thought of as these hordes of “others” invading the USA.
They should be thought of as cigar smoking assholes in large business flouting the law on minimum wage and hiring citizens and these villains are paying the hordes of third world residents to evade the border. They are the actual criminals. Not the poor, destitute illegal immigrants seeking a better life.
This might be the first time I’ve read something you wrote and agree with you. I share this opinion.
Technically if my ignorance level goes from 100% (the opinions of the posters in this thread) to 99.9999%, ignorance has been decreased.
That’s like something from the Who Shot Montgomery Burns cliffhanger!
Tripler can I have September 13 in your pool? It’s Friday the 13 th and I have a good feeling about it!
I might agree with you more if I didn’t think “cigar chomping assholes” was just an attempt to distract from your racism. “Red blooded American citizens?” What color blood do you think the immigrants have? Oh right, they’re different from us.
If you spread 0.0001% less ignorance, you are still increasing the amount of ignorance by slightly less than one metric shit-ton, rather than full metric shit-ton you usually spew.
In the future, they’re gonna thaw his brain out just for the LOLs.
CMC fnord!
I think the written record will be good enough.
Maybe we could convince Sammy to freeze himself, like, right now, thus preserving his enormous throbbing brain for the benefit of future generations. I know it’s a horrible thing to do to blameless future generations, but the appeal of shutting him the fuck up is irresistible. I say let the future take care of itself – maybe they’ll invent a miracle therapy that replaces the obsessive need to bloviate with some maturity and humility.
But it’s a common term:
https://www.reddit.com/r/NoStupidQuestions/comments/8qrn9m/what_is_meant_by_the_phrase_redblooded_american/
Good grief I’m defending SamuelA (shudder) but in this case the terminology fits, since it’s evoking patriotism (ironically?) and wasn’t intended literally.
Can somebody change the subject? I don’t like doing this. 