The top-most gear in a modern car locks the torque converter so you get the same efficiency as a manual transmission in the same gear.

Doesn't matter. They have little choice. The ones that aren't suicidal WILL do the best the can. It helps that they'll be indoctrinated from birth about the heroism of the mission.

You said it yourself: the heritability is 0.8. When you start with people at the top of the scale, the second generation won't be average but they also won't be as smart as their parents. The third generation will be dumber still.

Yes, after multiple generations they eventually reach a new stability point with higher than the original average intelligence of the human race. But that new mean is far below the intelligence of the original group that set out, and includes a significant number of individuals who are not mentally competent to maintain and operate a spaceship.

The classic problem with a generation ship isn't engineering, it's biological reversion to the mean.

You pull 400 crew from the brightest, best qualified of the 8 billion people on Earth. Their children will be smarter than the average human, but not nearly as smart as their parents. And the third generation will be dumber still as the average intelligence and competence ebbs toward the overall human average.

Can a team of essentially random people plucked off the street keep an interstellar spaceship in good working order and successfully deal with unexpected crises? It seems unlikely. Our best and brightest could, but they'll only be around for the first half century.

Feed UTF-16 to the C compiler and let me know how that works out for you.

The second while loop doesn't run because the character at the pointer is zero? That part is only obscure to a python programmer who expects a particular formatting.

It's not a true C obfuscation, it's a Unicode hack. The compiler treats the code as a series of bytes but your text editor sees UTF-8. The code which actually executes is hiding there.

The C code itself isn't obfuscated. The problem is that your text editor isn't showing you the code.

If you look at the C code in a plain ASCII text editor, you'll see everything. But a text editor that interprets UTF-8 hides a bunch of stuff from you.

If you happen to be viewing the entry in VIM, use ":set encoding=latin1" to see what's really going on.

Are you being deliberately obtuse or do you just not know the history of waterworks projects in Hawaii?

Like ships and aircraft, spacecraft fly a country's flag. Where those countries fail to assert sufficient control over spacecraft operations, they are subject to their neighbors' displeasure. But first, someone has to do something sufficiently displeasurable and escape their own country's legal ire.

There's no Maui water rationing "due to a drought." If there's water rationing, it's because the natives have obstructed the construction of sufficient aqueduct capacity to match the increase in population. Plenty of fresh water falls in the rain forest and uselessly empties into the sea. You just have to pipe it to where the people live.

The last time I paid a premium for a computer product because it was made in the USA, it turned out to be garbage. It was a 386 motherboard. It had a "quality feel" to it, but the cache ram circuit promptly failed bringing performance into the toilet.

Because protection mechanisms for HTTPS are on the lookout for code broken into chunks and sent in hexidecimal while the DNS protections are not. Sure. Pull the other one.

All of this presumes that Quantum Computers will work as predicted. That's like assuming that real computers work just like Turing Machines. They do not. Not only do real computers work differently, no real computer can fully implement a Turing Machine because Turing Machines have infinite memory. While most algorithms proven on a Turning Machine can in fact be usefully implemented on a real computer, it's not universal.

If real Quantum Computers don't match theoretical Quantum Computers, and I think it unlikely that they will, then it's not yet clear which algorithms will work on them and which require assumptions that won't end up being true.