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Senor Tron posted:It's cool they did it if it was a "hey, we have some spare payload, what can we chuck on board?" afterthought, but did it really demonstrate anything we didn't already know? Sure, but there's always some value even in testing things that you think should be obvious. Plus, the headline "CHINA FIRST TO GROW PLANT ON THE MOON" is probably pretty good value in terms of propoganda vs. cost.
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Jan 17, 2019 00:44
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Bug Squash posted:I don't know why people are just assuming they put a bunch of seeds in an unheated container and just went "for science, I guess". The US wasted 20 billion dollars to slightly adjust their weapons technology in order to send a few people to the moon in a rickety tin can. When they got there, they hung a flag, grabbed a few rocks, put up a plaque that said "We came in peace for all mankind," brought them back home and continued bombing brown people. Don't get me wrong, I'm really glad we did go to the moon, but I can't avoid seeing that there's a lot of 'for science, I guess' cynicism in these things. Edit: Something like MSL, that's pretty much devoted to\entirely developed for the purpose of doing science. China's moon stuff is mostly about engineering and propoganda. If they can throw a little science in there, hey, why not. ashpanash fucked around with this message at 21:51 on Jan 17, 2019 |
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Jan 17, 2019 21:47
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Sure, but we could have done that a lot of that with robots at considerably less expense. Not all of it, and not with the volume they were able to do it, sure, but I'm not suggesting they didn't learn anything or that no new science was done. Just that it took a major backseat to propoganda and applied engineering.
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Jan 17, 2019 23:11
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Calm down man, I'm on your side. I love space exploration. I want more. In my universe NASA would have the money the defense department gets. I don't live in my universe though, I live in this one. I am not endorsing cynicism, but I'm recognizing its existence and the role it plays. You can't do good science without adequately understanding the background.
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Jan 17, 2019 23:28
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Clearly, I didn't do a good enough job here of making my point. I'm in agreement with all of you. My point is not that no science was done on the moon or that robots could have done what was done better. My point was with regards to the question 'why are people assuming that science was an afterthought in the Chinese probe,' the answer is 'because science often is an afterthought on these sorts of things.' Did we do some good, maybe even great science on the moon missions? Yeah, totally. Was it the reason we went to the moon? No. Not at that expense, not on those timetables. Was planetary science an afterthought on the Apollo missions, when compared to propaganda and practical engineering? Yes. Is this life growing experiment an afterthought in Chang'e's mission? Yes. I mean, that's why the experiment was ended - it wasn't worth the upkeep.
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Jan 18, 2019 01:56
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Flowers For Algeria posted:So given that only some sort of deus ex machina is going to be able to get us out of the poo poo we’re in in re: climate change and species extinction, has there ever been any major attempt at sending SOS messages into outer space by governments or something? So it's hosed up what we're doing to the environment and everything, but we're nowhere near the point where it's "gently caress it, we're all gonna die!" Right now we're basically starting to hit "gently caress it, we're all gonna be miserable for a long time, and lots of people are gonna die."
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May 31, 2019 20:25
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Helsing posted:The aliens know that if they wait till we're all dead before responding then the law of salvage entitles them to take all our poo poo. The aliens didn't achieve interstellar travel by being chumps. 
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May 31, 2019 22:46
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A big flaming stink posted:is math really that sort of a universal language? I would say not really. Math is a system of tools we have created to formalize concepts and how they relate to each other with exacting specificity. Some of those relationships represent how reality seems to work, and those relationships seem to be universal, as far as we can tell. There are only so many forms a 2-dimensional, three sided shape can take, and that's all covered in the geometry of triangles. But the usefulness of this knowledge to an alien mind is an unknown quantity. It's important to us because one could make the argument that the creation of our system of mathematics is basically the Pythagorean theorem applied to increasing levels of abstraction. There's no reason to suspect that every system of mathematics that can be created will grow from the same concepts.
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Jun 2, 2019 00:19
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At its core, our system of math isn't about numbers, it's about relationships. Numbers are just a representation of some underlying structure.
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Jun 2, 2019 02:28
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"Oh poo poo, that one knows triangles! Kill it before it tells the others."
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Jun 4, 2019 19:06
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If they exist, there's every reason to believe they'd be absolutely nothing like us.
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Jul 9, 2019 14:49
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The aliens have already arrived. Three billion years ago. They were fungal spores. They've since integrated and intertwined with us. They eat our dead. We eat their fruits on salad and use them to make beer.
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Jul 10, 2019 04:45
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soy posted:Fungal spores are my favorite living organism. Don't forget mushrooms! I didn't, those are the fruits (technically, fruiting bodies) that I talked about eating on our salads!
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Jul 10, 2019 14:44
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Stoner Sloth posted:Again, nope. Carbon chemistry is pretty unequivocally the norm. Seriously based on the basic physics and chemistry of this alone - there really isn't a realistic replacement for it. More than that oxygen, water and carbon chemistry seems to be not only common but probably the only conceivable way to make life that we know of so far. This sample size of 1 stuff ignores things that we know with greater certainty than how gravity works. Not only that but we have a fairly good idea of many of the limiting factors of life. Temperature is a big one but surprisingly pressure is not a problem. Free water is huge, but pH is probably not. I understand this argument but frankly I don't buy it. I agree that carbon-based chemistry seems the most versatile, and water seems to be an ideal solvent, but there's still plenty of unknowns. As an example, we haven't done a lot of testing in high pressures where chemistry can behave very differently. Same with extreme gravitational fields. We tend to work with things at low energy densities because that's our preferred environment, but you can even do interesting chemistry with fluorine at very high pressures. The corollary to this that I've seen, that biological systems will tend to be brain-in-head based, audio-visual biology, strikes me as demonstrably wrong. Most life on Earth doesn't have brains, the most intelligent non-vertebrates on Earth have distributed brains in their limbs, many animals on earth have much more sensitive chemical detection (taste and smell) senses than auditory or visual senses, different stars and different atmospheres/mediums would produce different potential spectrums of visible light that would give different evolutionary pressures, etc. I think that this sort of thinking betrays a very human-centric bias towards a much stranger universe than we regularly admit.
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Jul 11, 2019 20:17
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Stoner Sloth posted:but it'd be really, really specialized conditions. There's the rub, isn't it? Earth seems to have really, really specialized conditions. There's a lot more out there that is unlike Earth than is like Earth. And we just don't have experience with chemistry under those conditions. Even from a theory perspective, we tend to do most of our chemistry under standard atmospheric pressure at low but not incredibly low temperatures. There's a lot more universe out there that is extremely low temperature and extremely low pressure, or the opposite. Much much more. Yes, I suspect that life coming from Earth-like planets will probably be carbon-based. That's begging the question, though. What about potential life from other circumstances? What about life that evolved on the surface of a neutron star, or under the surface of a 'super-earth' that's partially molten and tidally locked to a gigantic blue giant? Yeah, Earth-like life can't survive in those circumstances, agreed. But highly energetic systems with constant energy input will tend to organize in ways that distribute that energy more effectively and quickly, and that's probably a decent description of at least the building blocks of life. Who knows what's happening inside the constantly churning plasma of our sun, for instance? It's 99.98% of the mass of our entire solar system, and we are just ignoring it when considering these kinds of questions. Do you really think that some sort of organized behavior in all of that miasma is completely impossible?
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Jul 11, 2019 20:38
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Stoner Sloth posted:I'd say that no, earth seems really generic for a planet capable of life. I don't agree with this because as far as I know, we haven't found a single planet like Earth yet. Not even one. Seems pretty rare for something that is supposed to be so generic. Sure, we've only looked at a tiny, tiny piece of a much larger galaxy and impossibly larger universe, but if one were to assert that Earth is generic, you'd think we'd have found a couple in almost any search. Right now, the most demonstrably generic thing seems to be hot jupiters.
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Jul 11, 2019 20:51
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Stoner Sloth posted:I guess I mean 'generic' in the sense it's well within predictable ranges. It's not based on exotic chemistry. From basic principles we could predict a planet like this would evolve life. Right. Because we evolved on Earth. The chemistry isn't exotic because it's chemistry we're familiar with. The basic principles are there because those are what we have experience with. But take, for example, plasma. We're basically still in our infancy with plasma chemistry and plasma dynamics. There's reason to suspect that there's an amazing diversity of interactions in high energy plasmas - we see some of it just on the surface of our sun. But we can't replicate the high pressure, high gravity environment in the sun. Our experience with plasmas therefore is relegated to low density applications even in very high temperatures. And our theory is still iterative and based entirely on computational and numerical methods, because we don't have a good enough understanding of the dynamics to work with a more general theoretical framework. If we're really committing ourselves to 'looking everywhere' - to the idea that just because we've seen absolutely no evidence of intelligent life anywhere, it just means that we aren't looking in the right place - then we need to start thinking outside of Earth-sized boxes as well. "There are more things in heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy."
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Jul 11, 2019 21:21
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Stoner Sloth posted:Like I mean... sure... but then we might as well suggest Santa Claus as a plausible hypothesis? There are people in this very thread not only speculating but almost outright declaring that blurry infrared images and a handful of second-hand stories of mistaken eyewitness accounts of misidentified jets are actually interplanetary starships or probes. Like, that’s the level this thread is on. That’s not to mention the near assertions that intelligent alien life exists despite there being absolutely no evidence for it whatsoever. None. If we’re already at that point then speculating about chemistry that we don’t yet understand to a reasonable degree doesn’t seem like that far of a diversion. Edit: To the 'art major' remark. Any decent science curriculum will also include a healthy does of the humanities. It's worthwhile to know both. It annoys me to no end that Liberal Arts majors can get away with actively shunning any math. There's just as much beauty in Euler's identity as there is in Mozart's Symphony No. 40 in G minor. A good education should mean exposure to both. ashpanash fucked around with this message at 22:04 on Jul 11, 2019 |
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Jul 11, 2019 21:44
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mycomancy posted:Except that Fungi are clearly related to Kingdom Animalia. That's what they want you to think, maaaaaaan
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Jul 12, 2019 00:59
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Axetrain posted:Hi I'm the lifeform that evolved up on a loving neutron star. I'm 2 millimeters tall, made entirely out of neutrons somehow and my body temperature is roughly a million degrees kelvin AMA. You realize that the outer surface of a neutron star is not degenerate matter, right? lllllllllllllllllll posted:I too read Dragon's Egg by Robert Forward. Exactly. You guys need to read more.
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Jul 15, 2019 00:38
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I wouldn't exactly call what ants do problem solving, at least not in the sense we're thinking of it. Ants can, for instance, build mighty anthills, however they would not 'think' to build an anthill in order to get access to a food source. It would take thousands of generations for a behavior like that to emerge.
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Jul 15, 2019 06:44
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I really think everyone here should read Jeremy England's work on the subject of the statistical physics underlying self-replication and energy dissipation.
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Jul 17, 2019 15:15
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Unless radiation-avoidance tech becomes much cheaper or much lighter, I don't see any future for Mars or Moon colonies that aren't completely underground. And even then, the effects of long-term low gravity on humans will cause huge problems.
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Jul 17, 2019 15:38
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Axetrain posted:Uhhh is Time Symmetry an actual thing. CPT (Charge-Parity-Time [Reversal]) symmetry is, as far as we can tell, a preserved symmetry in the universe. There are known violations of other combinations, like CP, P, or T symmetries.
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Jul 18, 2019 03:00
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Lumpy posted:Here's a stupid question / cool story plot: what if the answer to "Why is there matter and no anti-matter?" is that the anti-matter went and made it's own universe that's moving away from the big bang in time in the opposite direction? It's not at all a stupid question. It's one of the central problems with our current understanding of physics. The technical name for it is the "Baryon Asymmetry" problem. Our theories say that antimatter and matter should have been produced in equal amounts. We have seen some small CP violations in current physics that indicate that 'matter' is more preferred than 'anti-matter' - but we don't know the reason why that is true, and more importantly, the CP violations we can experimentally investigate isn't enough to explain the current state of the universe.
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Jul 21, 2019 02:26
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It was a bunch of reasons, but the process being very expensive and the moon being desolate, resourceless, and toxic to both men and the machines we sent alike were certainly among them. We went to the moon before we were really ready in order to prove a point. We strapped men in tin cans onto heavily modified and augmented weapons technology. We did amazing things in getting there and even more amazing things in keeping most of the people who were in the machines alive. But we didn't have the technology to stay and do actual resource collection or form a long-term habitat without it being even more expensive and life-threatening than it already was. And Mars is way worse. Imagine all the problems of the moon, but instead of Earth being three days away, it's 2 years away. ashpanash fucked around with this message at 00:32 on Jul 25, 2019 |
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Jul 25, 2019 00:30
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Owling Howl posted:I do take issue with notion that the Moon has no resources. There's water, regolith contains iron, aluminum and magnesium along with volatiles, oxygen, co2. If you could extract a metal it ought to be possible to manufacture heavy and bulky structural parts for probes, telescopes,, ships. Oxygen and hydrogen could be used for fuel depots. The moon is good and useful. To be clear, my intention is not to suggest that the moon is bereft of resources. As you rightfully point out, after we have done significant analysis and reconnaissance of the moon for 50 years, and after we have considerably improved our understanding of manufacturing science, there are clearly avenues that could be explored for material extraction and potential fuel resources. However, at the time of Apollo, we not only lacked the detailed mapping and analysis of the potential resources on the moon, we also lacked the technology for extraction or utilization of said resources with any sort of efficiency.
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Jul 25, 2019 16:24
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Raenir Salazar posted:Mars isn't 2 years away. It's 90 days if you use some big ship you built in orbit, 180 if you use some hypothetical Saturn V. Remember, Mars doesn't share Earth's orbit like the moon does. At times it's relatively close. At other times, it's extremely far away. As dex_sda mentioned, by far the most efficient method of travel is a Hohmann transfer, and an alignment between Earth and Mars that favors that method happens roughly once every two years. quote:Mars is also better than the moon in some ways, since it actually has some sort of atmosphere so there's more protection from cosmic radiation. I think we do have the technology *now* to make either Moon/Mars work, it just needs engineering and testing and the money to make it happen. Mars' atmosphere is about 1% of Earth's give or take. It is effectively a vacuum as far as our bodies would be concerned. In fact, the atmosphere makes Mars an even harder target, because it's so rarefied. There's just enough of it that if you ignore it and barrel into it, it will burn you up - but it's not enough to float you down with parachutes once you drop below supersonic speeds. That's why Mars landings have required such interesting engineering solutions. And again as dex_sda pointed out, a 1% atmosphere is not going to protect you from cosmic radiation. Mostly it just makes a Mars mission harder. If there's any benefit it probably only comes in the form of some relief from temperature issues through convection.
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Jul 25, 2019 16:36
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Raenir Salazar posted:It is two years to *come back* if for any reason you need to abort, without concern for fuel. Sorry if I was unclear, but that was my main concern. Not the time it takes to get there when it's planned - but rather the time it may take for an emergency abort or resupply.
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Jul 25, 2019 19:13
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WAR CRIME GIGOLO posted:Can we communicate with mars or the moon in real time?id love a good read on inter space communication. There's a light-speed delay of a little more than one or two seconds in general for round-trip lunar communication, and anywhere from 14 to 50 or so minutes for round-trip communication to Mars, based on the orbits.
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Jul 25, 2019 23:21
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Bug Squash posted:I think Dark Matter is still going strong as the best explanation of the structure of galaxies, at time of writing. It's pretty unsatisfying compared to other nice elegant theories, but when there's gravitational lensing and no apparent matter in regions of space, plus the other general assorted evidence, we're stuck with it. Yup, and inflation is still the best explanation for the current state of the universe. And to me they are both very unsatisfying theories - particularly inflation, because there's literally no evidence for what caused it. For dark matter, we see its effects but every attempt to look for its cause based on even speculative theories has failed completely. I too feel that a new way of approaching the problem is in order. However, I basically have no choice but to tentatively accept the current models as any other speculative model for the phenomena has more holes and caveats than the current models.
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Jul 30, 2019 01:03
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So this reminds me of this recent article: https://www.wired.com/story/best-algorithms-struggle-recognize-black-faces-equally/ And, to be clear, I don't want to get into the racial mindfield in here. I'm more interested in the process of solving a problem like facial recognition and the potential issues that arise from it. And then see if we can apply that reasoning (or, to be honest, speculation) about the problem to problems like human space travel and colonization, fundamentally hard problems with a lot of variables and which need a lot of computational power to maximize their potential. From that perspective, one of the things I find most interesting here is that the algorithms can be tuned to be more successful for white faces or for black faces, but not both at the same time. This strikes me as a particularly hard problem to solve. Humans are in general very good at recognizing faces, but we've all encountered those face-blind goons or the people who see 'crisis actors' because some features are the same or look slightly different from a different angle. A computer should be, in principle, capable of getting around both problems with machine learning. Indeed, these programs are showing success at the problem, but they still run into obstacles such as the racial problem that is the subject of the article. It's easy to speculate that the issue has to do with more white programmers or more priming with white faces - and I can't say I doubt that some of that has some effect - but I'm also left with a sneaking suspicion that this problem may be a lot harder than it was originally thought. Surely something around 90% is relatively easy to hit, but 90% is nowhere near good enough for the applications this software is designed for. Something around 99.99999% recognition would be ideal, but I wonder if maybe, just maybe, that's not possible. I don't quite have a legitimate reason to think it is impossible other than the fact that it so far has eluded the best algorithms, which is not enough evidence to draw such a conclusion. But I have my suspicion. I think that problems like these - hard problems that seem easy but are actually intractable - are reasons why we will likely never see a "Superintelligent" AI that some people fear. I suspect that infinite general intelligence is simply impossible. It's not an issue of the speed or numbers of computation, it's an issue of trying to solve equations that have no actual solution. We can use numerical methods to iterate permutations on many-body problems, but we can't actually solve them - and it's entirely because solutions are (with the tools we have developed) impossible. All of this makes me wonder about the extreme number of variables and potential pitfalls that would be entailed in making a self-sustaining biosphere capable of carrying humans long-term outside of Earth. Even with something like an O'neill cylinder, I can list off scores of issues. When we get to Mars, I can only imagine more problems. And just like facial recognition - it may be that those problems are much harder than we thought. And it's possible that they may be fundamentally impossible - at least, again, with the tools we now have for analysis and development.
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Jul 30, 2019 20:28
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I love the idea that you can just make everything into a gay communist utopia and poo poo will just work out because *ideology*. Like, how's your utopia going to take its first cult or first serial killer when it turns out oh, yeah, there's variation among people and culture is not stagnant? This simplistic 'just do this and everything will work out, it's not hard' poo poo doesn't work on loving Earth, why would it work on Mars?
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Jul 31, 2019 00:53
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:Are you asking if a society at all can exist? or like, taking the gay communist thing literally and asking how a gay community would work? I'm responding to Raenir Salazar - "Is not a difficult and insurmountable problem" and using a Star Trek reference - 'full luxury gay space communism' is Star Trek TNG. No actual disparagement of gay people (or, for that matter, straight people or otherwise) is intended. Maybe not insurmountable, but sure as gently caress it's difficult. ashpanash fucked around with this message at 01:21 on Jul 31, 2019 |
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Jul 31, 2019 01:19
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:Space gay communism is just a meme based on the idea that a new society built from scratch would be more progressive and leftist than our current legacy systems allow. It's not like, a proposal that we are going to enforce homosexuality or something literal. No no, I'm not implying that, I was making a joke. It very clearly didn't land - so mea culpa. But I guess that's why I don't get paid to write human humor jokes. Owlofcreamcheese posted:Societies exist on earth that already deal with serial killers and cults without having to utterly abandon the planet. That's exactly my point. The very idea that such societies are easy and, in Raenir Salazar's words, 'not difficult.' Of course these are difficult problems. Acting as if some political change will make the logistics of inhabiting Mars and the psychology of Martian inhabitants simple and easy to deal with is absurd.
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Jul 31, 2019 02:19
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Raenir Salazar posted:Kerning Chalemeon said colonizing Mars and forming basic human society there as "at odds with the fundamental laws of the universe" i.e physically impossible; my response is meant as more of a general refutation, a general gist, without getting bogged down into the details. That's fair, and you make some decent points. I don't know if I agree with everything, but I'll give you that perhaps it's less an obvious recipe for disaster than what I was thinking.
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Jul 31, 2019 05:22
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Heck Yes! Loam! posted:particles literally popping into existence and then self-annihilating back to nothing This doesn't happen. At least, not in the way you are likely picturing it in your head. dex_sda posted:You basically need the math, and thinking it's not necessary is the biggest misconception about it, I think. I can't think of a better answer than this. I thought I had a good idea of what was happening when I had absorbed all of the pop sci knowledge I could have. I was very wrong. But, not to put too fine a point on it, here's another misconception: You can't learn the math. That's just not true. Anyone here can learn the math. It takes time, effort, and patience. You have to want to learn it. But if you really do, then it's like learning an instrument. Practice, practice, practice. ashpanash fucked around with this message at 20:39 on Aug 5, 2019 |
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Aug 5, 2019 20:36
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You definitely want it in an Earth-related orbit, otherwise navigating to and from gets way too complicated. I say stick it in the Sun-Earth L4 or L5. Stable, suitably far away and in a potential well so it’s unlikely to be perturbed by interactions with other objects into Earth-impacting orbits over a reasonably long timeline.
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Aug 9, 2019 00:09
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Warthur posted:Yeah, I've never 100% understood why the Fermi paradox gets the weight it does. Wouldn't you need an enormously powerful transmitter for your radio broadcasts to even be meaningfully detectable at interstellar ranges? The Fermi paradox isn't about radio. It's about the idea that interstellar civilization should be common. If that were true, where are they? After all, even if you take into account the paper above, I don't think it solves the Fermi paradox at all. If civilizations are really rare, that itself is an answer to the Fermi paradox. If civilizations are really common, the above 'answers' shouldn't really matter - all you'd need is a tiny few of the very many civilizations to buck the trends of the others, and of course you'd expect outliers in any existing population. So, where are they? Thousands of millions of years, and we see nothing?
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Sep 16, 2019 19:15
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Libluini posted:I'm always feeling people bringing this up simply do not understand the scales of time and space involved. Space is impossibly huge and the universe is old enough in comparison to the time we're searching we basically haven't started at all. You really think Enrico Fermi didn't understand that? Even if we were to find nothing alive right now, if there were any alive before now, and they were widespread, we'd expect to see their debris. Maybe their leftover handiwork in some form. We see nothing that is not entirely consistent with natural forces. Keep in mind, the whole point is that there should be a lot, but we don't see any. So even if they are too alien, well, if there are a lot, then we'd expect *some* to be enough like us to recognize. If they avoid younger civilizations, then we'd expect *some* to not do that. If they hide well, we'd expect *some* to do a worse job of it. If space is too huge for any of them to get anywhere - well, that answers the paradox. None of them get anywhere - or at least, not enough for us to notice. If the ones that get through are too alien, again, that answers the paradox. Space is too big and it's too rare for civilization to get past some filter. The whole point of there being a 'paradox' in the first place is that our assumptions tell us that one thing should be true - in this case, there should be tons of civilizations all over the galaxy - and yet our evidence tells us exactly the opposite. If our assumptions that lead to the conclusion are flawed, then there is no paradox.
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Sep 16, 2019 21:07
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