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Why not build it hybrid? Make a strong pressure chamber, put a grate in the bottom to let hot gases out but not fuel, and fill the chamber with aluminum balls. Feed in LOX at a safe rate.

I favor a different set ofexplanations: one is that the galaxy is empty because everyone else has already left. By the time anybody is capable of building giant interstellar spacecraft, they're capable of building O'Neill colonies at home. By the time their home star is crowded, they're probably capable of creating their own entire f'ckn universe. So there is a high possibility that intelligent species are 'just passing through'.

Another is that the galaxy is filled with two sorts of species: the silent and the dead.

Well, for a control, we could build a second rat carrier and just leave it in LEO, I suppose.

As for the flare shelter... rats are trainable. We could build a radiation shelter with a treat dispenser with doors that can be closed (to prevent rats from escaping). On earth, train the rats to run in the shelter when a buzzer sounds. In space, sound the buzzer every so often (and dispense treats) to reinforce the learning.

If you have a flare, sound the buzzer, then close the shelter doors once the last rat is in.

As for keeping a stable population: easy enough. Either choose all rats of one gender, or seperate the two genders of rat on the capsule. If breeding rats is on the agenda, you can put RFID tags on your first-generation rats and build a chamber which is connected to each chamber and selectively opens its doors for the RFID #'s mission control sends over. Or perhaps some other trick.

Just segregating male/female rats in different parts of the capsule seems easiest, though.

As for cleaning up after the rats... well, that's where some serious hard thought needs to be put in. I have no doubt it can be done; perhaps the floors for the rats are wire mesh and some sort of automated pooper-scooper runs underneath. The engineers can earn some money there.

Kinda hard on the cork trees to use that for any sort of mass-use space travel.

Re-entry really is *the* problem for reuseable SSTO craft. The mass fraction is doable if you don't need to lug around all that cooling. Here's an idea: an aerogel heat shield protected on takeoffs by a disposable shroud. They have new carbon aerogels... trying to find the melting point, it should be lower than straight carbon, but not by much. Or perhaps... nevermind, this idea has already been looked at. NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory is looking at non-ablative aeroshells that is sort of a sandhich of carbon-carbon, silicon carbide, and carbon aerogels. No ablation, no problem - the materials have melting points from hell and the aerogel insulated very well to boot.

*kicking a dead thread, but...*

Somehow, Cobra's idea of independent alien nation-states (or equivalent) has always struck me as the most plausible scenario. To a unified, impossibly advanced alien species, a bunch of fanatic territorial intelligent primates has no redeeming use other than entertainment value, and thus would probaby be avoided like the plague except for the aliens' equivalent of National Geographic. ("Tonight, on Galactic Explorer, angry monkeys with nukes!")

On the other hand, independent alien nation states could always use some new members of the Coalition of the Willing, *especially* if they are fanatical-tending territorial killer apes.

Now, getting away from woo-woo UFO stuff... Personally, I wouldn't find it surprising if we were being monitored by aliens in a low-key means. Low-key, here, means a quiet, extremely long-lifetime interstellar probe which get sent to any star with a planet that 'looks right', has detectable signs of life via spectrum of its atmosphere, etc. Send them out, do a preliminary survey with a dropped probe or rover on the surface, then put them in some sort of semi-hibernating state unless they pick up radio signals or whatever. An alien rover dropped on Earth 12000 years ago, or whatever, is rather unlikely to be found. Heck, the aliens who sent it might have wiped themselves out in a war in the intervening time period. But I figure there's a reasonable probability of aliens having made at least an attempt at monitoring our planet.

Actually, religious feeling comes and goes in intensity, without any seeming bearing on what science is doing at any given time. Emperor Julian II the Apostate preferred then-current philosophy and science to religion, there was an enthusiastic embrace of irreligiousness by the French Revolutionaries, etc. There's always a new Great Awakening that sweeps religion back in after a while. I think that Neal Stephenson's explanation for the intermittent popularity is probably right - an intelligent person will look at how people approach religion, conclude that 90% is crap, and erroneously forget that Sturgeon's Law applies to all human endeavors. That other 10% though, it's pretty damn important.

The just-finished survey on oil deposits in Colorado, Wyoming, and Utah revealed that the reserve there is *three times Saudi Arabia's original reserve*.

Wow. That's fricking huge.

I believe the 'oil economy' will be in good shape for some time to come, given that bit of news.

EDIT: The range quoted was 500 billion barrels to 1.1 trillion barrels. Saudi Arabia's reserve is something like 283 billion barrels. Still, that's a LOT of oil.

Correct, and if you noticed, one of the other ideas I had was that the government pre-distribute evacuation plans in newsletters or fliers, telling people that if evacuation A is called people in this zip code should head up road X to locations Y and Z. Not everyone will follow this plan (because they have relatives somewhere that they plan to ride the storm out with, or whatever) but the percentage of people doing their own thing will probably cancel each other out, more or less.

Not food stamps. These cards would decentralize aid relief and disburse it to the hundreds of thousands of victims of a catastrophe who are the men and women on the spot making decisions to best save their lives and the lives of their families. It's spending less money smarter by bypassing the Big Monster Bureaucracy. What could be more conservative than that?

Anyways, do you have anything constructive to offer in terms of ideas, or are you content with being the self-appointed Conservative Thought Police today, just for a change of pace?

IMHO valid evacuation plans should be made - realistic plans able to actually evacuate an urban area within a set time period, complete with neccessary improvements to infrastructure to effect such a plan. Perhaps portable train stops - most urban areas have track running through them, and such emergency evacuation centers could efficiently get people out of harm's way. FEMA needs to network cities together so that they can assign people to different cities, and municipalities should share evacuation plans with citizens. A pre-printed flyer mailed to neighborhoods which listed suggested evacuation plans - say, Plan A for a weak storm making a direct hit, Plan B for a sidewipe to the west, Plan C for a sideswipe to the east, and Plan D for a direct hit from a monster hurricane, which advises people to either sit tight or go a certain distance to suggested destinations, would be a great help.

Another interesting idea would be to somehow get Visa or Mastercard on board and come up with special 'emergency credit cards' which could only purchase certain goods and services up to a certain limit per card when the government declared an emergency in an area. This would limit the number of people who elect to stay behind for money reasons, although fraud would probably be a show-stopper, which is bad, because that would greatly simplify the accounting for disaster relief - aid could be directly distributed to victims without much in the way of middlemen.

What could be done is float giant white rafts - a foam ring with a shiny white reflective plastic sheet in the middle - in the ocean. Anchor them out in the middle of the ocean somewhere - most of the life is near the shore. Increasing the Earth's albedo by a percent or two is probably the cheapest way to cool off.