The Europa Clipper will have taken high resolution images of Europa before the lander arrives, which would help choose a suitable landing spot. It also takes a lot longer to get to Saturn / Enceladus which would extend the mission timeline and costs. Enceladus is a lot smaller so less delta-V and a smaller spacecraft, and maybe that is really what is pushing for this change?

Enceladus is interesting, but it seems its smaller size and lower energy environment (less tidal energy, less solar energy, less radiation) makes it less likely to have life in its oceans.

Of course the right answer is to build 2 and send them to both. The 2nd probe costs a lot less than the first because you save on R&D.

It could work, but I worry that govts are so risk averse that they would restrict content until the site was useless.

The US has too much nuclear regulation relative to the risks when compared to fossil fuels.

As long as the scanning mechanism doesnâ(TM)t stop. It might be interlocked to the laser which would reduce that risk.

There have been enough cases in the media that any lawyer should know that AI generated statements can be false. In addition the EULAs for AI almost certainly say that they cannot be used in this way, and if attorneys aren't reading the EULAs then what is the point?

This sort of mistake can lose someone their life's savings, send them to prison. The AI did not make this statement, the attorneys did, and so they made false claims in court. At an absolute minimum they should be disbarred, and possibly charged with making false statements under oath.

This sort of behavior cannot be tolerated. A world where people can pass all responsibility off to an AI leads all sorts of bad places .

Yes l, that is yet another source

The government has too many different was to track people: Face recognition, cell phones, online activity, credit cards, cars, DNA, fingerprints, Real ID, traffic cameras, social media, home "smart" devices that monitor audio, doorbell camera, etc etc. Combine that with the rapidly advancing technology for processing and finding patterns in huge data sets and privacy from the government no longer exists. It might have been possible to stop this 20 years ago, but that ship has sailed and gone over the horizon, but from where we are now, I see no practical way to roll this back.

We have created the machinery of tyranny, all it takes is for someone to grab the controls and freedom as we know it will vanish.

It should be at the national labs, and the labs have the best scientists in the world. I worked at a national lab for many years and early on it was fantastic, but eventually left because the politics made it impossible to get things done. The political hierarchy wanted certainty where none was possible. High or even moderate risk experiments couldn't get funded because they might *fail* and that would look *bad*. Projects became extremely conservative, and people were promoted for doing simple things on-time and on-budget, so few people wanted to touch any innovative projects. It became a very similar situation to NASA - which also has fantastic rocket scientists, but they are restrained by overly cautious leadership.

So national lab fusion became huge sure-thing projects like NIF and ITER. "Sure thing" not meaning sure to get fusion, but sure to meet the project TPPs (threshold performance parameters) which most certainly do not include actual break-even fusion. Even so, the excellent scientists on those projects continue to make progress despite the restrictions of upper management. Take off the restraints and I think they could solve fusion, but politically I don't see that happening. Instead the innovation is at startups who have better management, but less knowledge or resources to work with.

The problem is that its easy to come up with a fusion idea that sounds plausible. Careful analysis is needed to find the fatal flaw, but that analysis requires experts in the field. My impression is that VCs are not finding and paying those experts to verify the startup's claims, and I know of specific examples where that is the case.

My best guess as to the root cause is that plasma physics is extremely complicated and specialized. Simply hiring physicists to evaluate a proposal is not enough, you need to hire plasma fusion experts. The best experts (at least in the US) are still in the national labs, but for some reason the funders are not going to those labs and finding those experts. That is especially frustrating when the "new" startup ideas are basically retreads of old national lab ideas that we abandoned decades ago when it was discovered that they couldn't work.

It drives me crazy. There are a few good fusion startup ideas out there, but a log of funding keeps going to projects with no hope of success. Some of those likely to fail projects are being run by honest people who don't understand how serious their difficulties are, but others feel a lot more like fraud to me.

Iâ(TM)ve seen the same. Some people are very productive from home, others get very little done. Most managers hate firing people and slackers can get away with minimal work for a long time. (But word does get around).

Of course many people have jobs that canâ(TM)t be done from home, so to them people complaining about 3 days a week at work donâ(TM)t get a lot of sympathy.

Despite their many problems, standardized multiple choice tests seem like the least biased way to measure student ability. There is too much range in essays, and its too easy for some students to be coached. Essays also emphasize language skills which are important in some fields of study, but not in others. Essays can also prioritize applicants whose families could afford to provide broader life experiences .

From the point of view of climate change, Nuclear produces low CO2 relative to the amount of energy generated so it makes sense to call it "clean energy". There are issues of waste, proliferation, and cost, but countries like France have shown that nuclear can be operated successfully.

I'm glad you were able to keep reviewing, its vital to science. I was at a national lab for many years, and over time the increasing pressure to account for all of our time, and to rush underfunded projects made it more and more difficult to do reviews. Doing it on "my own time" was great in concept, but "my own time" was already dedicated to my projects at the lab.

I think the idea of paying reviewers or having professional reviewers is a good one

The 3rd option is that they were looking to sell the marketing information, and the 4th is that they plan to sell advertising space on the display, 5th is that they plan to integrate with some food ordering / delivery service.

Samsung has lots of valid reasons to do this, but as a consumer I don't see any reasons to buy it.

Manufacturing fuel on Mars isn't crazy, but its yet another complex technology that needs to be developed before there is manned mission.

I'm very much in favor of manned space exploration, and regardless of Musks's politics, I hope he succeeds, but I think its a much harder problem than he thinks it is