I suppose my question is: How do you know this? Alexander was surrounded by hand-picked men his father had groomed for decades in some cases. Offering council on every part of war fighting, from tactics to strategy to logistics. Isn't it entirely possible Alexander simply went with the flow of wiser, more experienced men telling him what to do?

Earlier in the article the author mentions alexander's perfect track record of logistical balancing. Surely that, if nothing else, is far better attributed to his officer corps then him? They'd been doing this successfully for 20 years before he took over, they had lots of practice at it and all Alexander had to do was not upset the apple cart.

Or another example - one man cannot organize a cavalry detachment mid-battle and send it to aid a failing flank. That takes the work of many dozens of officers, and well trained soldiers drilled to follow orders even under intense stress.

Of course this is all speculation on my part, as we simply can't know due to the mythologizing of the man and his life. But it's a question I find interesting to ponder.

> But the Anthropocene’s future as an informal time period is assured. It’s too apt—and too important—a term to be abandoned. As Paul Crutzen pointed out in 2002, barring a “meteorite impact, a world war or a pandemic,” humans “will remain a major environmental force for many millennia.” Science recently summed up the situation this way: “the anthropocene is dead. long live the anthropocene.”

If this was all the justification I would be against the anthropocene being accepted. As the anti-anthro crowd says, geology is not the study of "maybes" or "if this trend continues".

Instead I am pro-anthropocene because even if humanity died today, there would still be an extremely weird layer of rock that would need to be explained and the existing human impacts on the enviroment would still take millions of years to dissipate. Further, '1952' is in the past. It's very recent, but it is in the past. Stratigraphy is the study of layers, and humanity has undeniably created a clear and very odd layer in the rock. Therefore, a new age is justified to me.

http://toughsf.blogspot.com/2016/10/the-hydrogen-steamer-ste...

Very straight forward solution one person came up with, I'm sure there are dozens of other approaches to achieve the same result. Especially if you put military level budgets into figuring this out.

The most logical form of space combat is, as boring as it sounds, undetectable suicide drones. Space battleships are both super cool sounding and also alas probably utterly impractical.

Edit:

"In terms of military tactics, introducing stealth ships is the equivalent of punching a hornet's nest. The standard fare of bright, bold warships pumping out gigawatts without care, streaking across the Solar System laden with weapons, are forced to become meek and paranoid affairs, as a stealth ship can dump a thousand tons of weapons out of nowhere, at any time."

As an aside, this is something I wish scifi writers understood - don't include stealth ships in your stories without recognizing how they change the mechanics of war completely.

This is my biggest issue with all McCarthy's works. They feel like pointless exercises in sadism and cruelty, where the forces of evil are literally superhumanly powerful (like the judge) and nihilistic misanthropy is the only sensible philosophy.

But, in the novel's defense, I grew up after the myth of the west was dead. I have only ever thought the frontier was a miserable, lawless place full of bandits. So perhaps if the novel's goal was to 'bust the western myth', that's why it failed to engage me in any way except utter disgust.

This was actually a safety design feature:

> Walske also stipulated that all nuclear weapons in the stockpile must be “one-point safe;” that is,the weapon must have a probability of less than one in one million of producing a nuclear detonation if a detonation of the high explosives originates from a single point

In fact this entire article seems to not recognize this fact. Even if one of the bombs detonated, it was always going to be bad for the people near it but not catastrophic or anything. It would almost certainly not have been nuclear.

That doesn't seem jerkish. Second hand smoke in the work place is bad for everyone.

I can find a cholera outbreak, and tell whoever will listen to stop drinking water from the local wells and eating from the local markets. Go to another part of the city for water and food. Those who listen, even if only one, will be my proof. I can also do a cool science experiment with seaweed agar, silver and bacterial growth but that's not as dramatic.

The earth being a sphere that orbits the sun can't be proved without a telescope, but I can propose a vastly simpler and just as accurate approach using kepler's laws. If I was paying attention in high school physics, I can even do cool stuff with Newton's laws of gravitation to show that "As above, so below" (the planets obey the same law of gravity that we earthlings do).

Yes people might still not believe you, as we can be a stubborn and prideful species, but you know the 'why' of many things and so can keep making correct predictions based on that.

> You won't introduce quarantine just because of germ theory: book of Leviticus already has a version of quarantine, "the law of the plague" well before germ theory.

The bible simply lists procedures, it doesn't explain why you do these things or allow you to extrapolate to other situations and scenarios. By contrast, simply by knowing the "why" of infectious diseases, a smart person or government could isolate the cause of - for example - the black death fairly rapidly (rats w/ fleas) and begin taking steps to solve the issue.

A modern person has a head full of correct answers for questions people 2,3,4000 years ago have yet to even ask. That's powerful stuff, and once they've proved their credentials in some way the books they write will advance humanity by millenia.

>It's likely that ancient humans were adept at many of these things, like salt preservation, warm clothing, contraception, spun fibers, and boats. Many of the others (agriculture, wheels, etc) simply wouldn't make sense outside their native cultural contexts.

For people this primitive, even elementary metalworking would be revolutionary. Yes you'd have to do a bit of tinkering to work out the kinks, but iron ore pre-modern-extraction was everywhere, and once you have the foreknowledge that heat special rock -> smash into shape -> better-than-rock tool it's not hard to figure your way to something groundbreaking.

I do think you'd be limited in how much you could change things by how far back you go, but mostly due to human life span. The more new technologies you need to personally 'invent' the longer this stuff takes, as you'd need to experiment with on-the-ground resources and techniques until you can successfully realize your conceptual understanding. I know what a blast furnace is, and because I have the key concepts I can eventually build one with some trial and error. But it would take years if I had to start from just sticks and sand.

Another thing is hospitals adopting air industry style checklists, which doctors fought tooth and nail as 'insulting'. Despite every ounce of evidence massively pointing toward this saving lives.

Bronze league players (lowest) know they're bad and that they don't understand the game.

Silver and Gold league players (2nd and 3rd lowest) think they're better and are really starting to get a grasp on how Starcraft operates

Platinum league players think they basically know everything and just need to work on a few minor issues

Diamond league players begins to realize there is so much more depth than they imagined, and those 'minor issues' are actually oceans of complexity and depth

Master league players fully comprehend the depths of their own ignorance and lack of skill, as they are now finally able to look at the professionals and grasp the massive gulf between themselves and the pros.

Reddit has bronze league understanding of physics, HN has platinum level understanding.

http://toughsf.blogspot.com/2018/04/permanent-and-perfect-st...

Note that this is for strategic level stealth, which is to say your enemy doesn't even know you're in system. Tactical level stealth is vastly easier, and can be as simple as launching several hundred thousand heated decoys into system before entering yourself - one of these is the attacker, can you find which?

This last strategy is actually what we'd implement if ever anyone tried to seriously develop anti-ICBM technology.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buran_(spacecraft)

In retrospect I think it's pretty obvious the actual point of the space shuttle was national prestige. Studies done at the time pointed out it would take something like 60 launches a year for a reusable system to beat the cost of expendable rockets with available (1970s) technology, and yet the project was pursued regardless. Because the real, actual, honest reason we went with the STS was simply - the shuttle was a space ship, like in sci-fi, and was therefore cool and therefore a public darling. Even if it made no financial sense, people still loved it.

It's similar to the USS Missouri and USS Wisconsin serving in the Gulf War. Made absolutely no sense whatsoever, and was a total waste of money and time. But battle wagons are cool, and therefore people bent over backwards trying to justify it. They even invented "armored" pods for the tomahawks going on the Iowas:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armored_Box_Launcher

To try and pretend there was some kind of operational point to using thickly armored battleships instead of something more modern.

Rule of cool is strangely powerful in real life in turns out.

First, it would save you having to build very expense and complex steam turbines. Like Chernobyl had 4 nuclear reactors powering 1 steam turbine, because the engineering required to build a high quality high capacity one is super expensive. With aneutronic fusion you could just use the energy from the generated charged particles and directly turn that into juice.

The huge, huge, huge thing though would be no more neutron radiation. It would vastly simplify reactor construction, reactor cleanup, biological shielding, etc. etc.

Aneutronic fusion would also us to just spam power plants, safely and cheaply, in a way that's difficult for modern society to even understand. Assuming the aneutronic reactor itself isn't mega expense of course.