Carl Sagan

I wondered where that one was going! As long as @Jourdanhas remembered the PENALTY for bigamy. Two mothers-in-law!

Have a beautiful day, which hopefully includes a result that sees us all dancin'.

People will think I'm being over dramatic, but these are some of the most important games in our history. We've never spent more than two consecutive seasons in this god-forsaken league. Fail to get promoted again this season and there could be a downward spiral. Crowds will fall away, good players will leave, the academy will be ransacked again... Make it out and maybe we'll look back in a few years and pinpoint this moment as when everything changed, and Derby County rose up the leagues to restore themselves and their reputation among England's footballing elite.

I was with family in Iceland on a coach tour of the fabulous "Golden Circle", while listening to the Radio Derby commentary via the bus's excellent free WiFi. What an afternoon, with geysers, glaciers, extraordinary waterfalls and a famous 5-0 win. Followed by northern lights in the evening. I can't find it now, but the club ran a very half-baked contest for something, and I wrote the afternoon up as a story, which led to me winning Craig Bryson's signed and dated boots from that day. Can it really be ten years ago already?

Are there no more polls? I'd seen other people comment on not being able to post one and presumed it was down to their incompetence - then I was going to run one on the new England strip, only to discover it no longer seems an option to create one? Or is this down to my incompetence? Edit: now I see it above me in the thread. Seems odd as I'd have thought they drive engagement/traffic

@angieramhas been posting the international call ups for our Academy youngsters, as and when, in that thread. But I thought not everyone looks in there and we have nine kids away on this international break. An amazing achievement. Or have I missed others? The future's looking pretty bright. Here they are: Jack Thompson (GK) England U18 Keilen Robinson (defender) England U19 Dan Cox (defender) Wales U19 Cruz Allen (midfield) Wales U17 Darren Robinson (midfield) N Ireland U21 Niall McAndrew (midfield) Ireland U17 Charlie Lindsay (forward) N Ireland U21 Carlos Richards (forward) Gibraltar U21 Dajaune Brown (forward) Jamaica U23 (he's only 18 and is also eligible for England)

The good news tonight, with 10 games still to go, is we're now safe from relegation. With our 69 points, we can't be caught by: Carlisle, Fleetwood, Port Vale (obviously a crucial win today), Shrewsbury or Charlton. So the worst position we could end up in is 19th, and might even be higher with teams below us having to play each other. As we begin the business end of the season, the hope is fewer and fewer teams will be able to catch us. For instance, Oxford in 7th can now only get a maximum of 87 points, and the time will come (maybe in 5 games or so) when we're mathematically cemented in the playoffs. Let's hope we reach a point when we cannot finish lower than 2nd. Let's count it down in this thread.

I imagine a few of the academy lads will be out on loan soon, and this could be a place to keep track of them. Dajaune Brown came on in the 89th minute for Gateshead in their 0-1 win at Southend, which moved them into the National League playoff places. Let's hope he starts getting a bit more game time soon.

Am currently writing a book on AI and am curious about the forum's views. Do many people on here use the new generative capabilities? Do you use other manifestations? Do you think the world will have changed much in the next 5, 10, 20 years? What are your hopes and dreams for it? What about your fears? And will a robot footballer ever play for Derby County?

I love that there seem plenty of space geeks on here. Something that's going to come increasingly into the public consciousness over the next few years will be the work from Elon Musk's SpaceX to transport many tens of thousands of Humans to Mars to build the first sustainable settlement on another world. It sounds like fantasy, but the amazing thing is they're doing this in public view in Boca Chica, on the coast of Texas, and we can all watch. There are lots of livestreams and over the last couple of years a barren field has started to be transformed into a shipyard. But not for ordinary ships, for spaceships. The goal is ultimately to have completed ones roll off the production line once a week. And each will be able to take a hundred people at a time. The optimal time for going to Mars in terms of minimizing fuel (the launch window) comes round every 26 months and the plan is to have a fleet of Starships gather in Earth orbit that will then travel to Mars together, before returning to bring more settlers for the next launch window. Tickets will cost you about $250k but there'll be high baggage charges on top I should think. The secret to the low price comes from reusability and scale. SpaceX has pioneered rocket reusability and landed 65 or so "first stages" (the main rocket booster) after orbital insertion. No other company has done any - they're at least a decade ahead of the competition, but the competition should worry because their pace of innovation is extraordinary. The new rocket being built in Texas will be the first fully resusable craft where all of it flies again and again with minimal refurbishment, just the same as an airplane. The top section where the passengers and cargo will go is called Starship and the lower section to help boost it into orbit is called Super Heavy. In a dramatic innovation, instead of being built from an advanced carbon fiber skin these are both made from stainless steel. Making them a fraction of the normal rocket price. The Super Heavy booster is needed to escape Earth's gravity well. Once there it will return to Earth and launch half a dozen tankers to refuel Starship in orbit so it can fly much more quickly than normal to Mars (normally a spaceprobe just has enough fuel to reach escape velocity and then coasts all the way to Mars). Refuelling in orbit hasn't been attempted in the past, but is a technology we need to master to become a spacefaring species. Because Mars is smaller, with lower gravity (one-third of ours) the Starships can be what we call "single stage to orbit" when they take off from the red planet for the return journey. We'll build factories on Mars to manufacture fuel through a process called in situ resource utilization (ISRU), which is another technology we need to master to become spacefaring. And because they can carry so many passengers at a time, the price of the trip becomes a lot cheaper as it's divided between many more people. The Super Heavy booster will be quite similar to the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, just a lot bigger. So in principle SpaceX already knows how to design, build, fly and land that. They have started on the harder problem first, by developing Starship, the first ever fully resuable second stage. This week there's been a lot of work on the eighth prototype (called SN8 standing for serial number 8 ) which will probably be the first to attempt a high-altitude (15km up) test flight as the key trial of the novel landing system (the "belly flop"). Before now three different partial Starships have flown 150m on one engine only. It's been amazing to watch. Here's the Starship SN5 "hop test": While SN8 is the focus at the moment, also partly built are SN9 through to SN14, each better than the last, and also the very first Super Heavy booster (SH1) is being constructed. There's a good chance that the first Starships (without people) will go into orbit and return next year. There'll be hundreds of test flights before they start taking crew, but I'd expect the first uncrewed Starships to leave for Mars carrying cargo and experiments either late 2022 or early 2025. The reason SpaceX was founded was to safeguard Humanity's future by building a self-sustaining community on Mars, the aim to reach a population of a million by the end of this century. This is why the company is privately held and you can't buy shares, because shareholders might look at the amazing technology and say Mars colonization is a waste of money when we can do a lot of profitable stuff closer to home. However, NASA wants to return to the Moon by late 2024 (though after the US election this date will slip) and are contributing funds to create an adapted Starship to land on the Moon (the normal engines are too powerful for this because the rocket is so big, so SpaceX are going to add smaller thrusters higher up to do the job). However, Elon Musk has said it's easier to just go and land on the Moon than jump through all NASA's certification to say they'll allow someone to launch astronauts safely to the Moon. I hope we'll be able to keep this thread going over the next decade while we watch developments until the first Humans get to land on Mars, and it can be a wonderful record of the progress that took us to that point.