|
ashpanash posted: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. Well we don't need people to be there long term for science and research missions. Working in shifts is fine and probably cheaper than building something they'd be comfortable in for years.
|
#
¿
Jul 17, 2019 23:14
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 9, 2024 22:52 |
|
|
Raenir Salazar posted:For science stuff that makes sense, but eventually the goal would probably be to either setup a colony (a backup in case of asteroid seems useful) or to terraform Mars. Eventually maybe but that's a very long way off. If you wanted to do it within say a century we would have to massively expand public funding and I doubt you'll find much support for that from either side. It would have to be private enterprise but there's no economic incentive to build a self-sufficient base on Mars.
|
|
#
¿
Jul 18, 2019 10:00
|
|
|
Raenir Salazar posted:Every fancy vaguely plausible cool sounding scifi thing has two variables that are a function of "money" and "political will" tell me something I don't know. Yeah and I'm saying the political will to spend trillions of dollars across changing administrations on an essentially altruistic project for the greater good of the species at the expense of tax cuts or social spending right now won't manifest ever. One lesson of the Apollo Program is that the public lose interest real quick when the big Firsts are done. You can get people behind flag and footprint missions and maybe even a science outpost but when it comes time for the mundane sustained effort to expand the base from 50 people to 100 and then 200 and so, you'll need something more convincing than "It'll be useful if everyone else dies."
|
|
#
¿
Jul 19, 2019 06:36
|
|
|
Raenir Salazar posted:Another post with zero basis in objective reality. How do you propose maintaining even a second world standard of living when we have another 6 billion people within 100 years? We can't mine the Earth forever. It'd be LESS emissions not more to get resources off world. What do you base that on? If we can mine and refine stuff in a vacuum then clearly we have perfected electrical mining equipment and can refine without burning coal. At that point there would be no emissions at all apart from launching rockets.
|
|
#
¿
Jul 20, 2019 22:25
|
|
|
The Moon landing is a great analogue to a Mars landing. We went there for that big epic first, studied geology for a bit, lost interest and then left the place. No reason to think Mars will be different. NASA's strategy with the gateway and lunar base is great because afterwards they'll have infrastructure which might be useful for all the other stuff they need to do. Politics may dictate NASA's direction but this time they'll have more than a story and a box of rocks to show for it.
|
|
#
¿
Jul 24, 2019 21:59
|
|
|
Raenir Salazar posted:You don't really have a means of knowing this. Part of the reason why the US lost interest was because the USSR collapsed. Maybe China might step up and spark the US to renew its interest in space out of spite and this time since China seems wholly unlikely to collapse anytime soon maybe that will keep things going; but even so putting that aside I don't think you're reasoning is correct and seems based off of a flawed inductive hypothesis. At a minimum there's a few reasons off the top of my head: No we can't predict the future, only learn from the past. If Congress directs NASA to build a permanent base on Mars NASA will do that pending funding but I have seen no indication congress will do that. Trump wants to go, and fast, but AFAIK he never talked about staying there. He may simply want a JFK moment in history and will then promptly stop caring. Remember he doesn't want to go to the moon because we have already been there. Well once we've been to Mars, we've already been to Mars. The private sector depends on a profitable venture materializing. The best bet may be mining but there's a lot of stuff that needs to be developed and put into space for that to get started. Raenir Salazar posted:For the purposes of a Mars mission the Moon is a "siren" leading sailors to their death. A moon base provides no scientific or direct benefit towards the success of a Mars mission. I think a Moon base might potentially have other benefits, such as iirc H_3 for fusion research and maybe infrastructure towards large orbital structures? But I don't view these things as overlapping from a technically specific mission perspective. The moon is only a siren call if your only objective is to go to Mars. NASA got lots of other stuff to do so taking a broad view and developing infrastructure that can be useful for a variety of missions is sensible. Since NASA may only get to go to Mars once it also makes sense to prepare well to both minimize risk and develop the tools that will maximize capability of the team that goes there. We may need new tools to aid people working in constricting spacesuits in reduced gravity in harsh environments for months. New suits, rovers, medicine tools, who knows. Besides going to Mars is not time sensitive so there's no reason to rush it. There will still be geology to study in a few years. 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.
|
|
#
¿
Jul 25, 2019 16:10
|
|
|
DrSunshine posted:What if we start working on Mars colonies and so on, and people just start coming over because they just think it'd be cool to live on another world? Well if we build underwater cities, floating sea cities or flying blimp cities I guarantee you people will move there. If you supply housing and organize transportation people will go pretty much anywhere I imagine. It's only a matter of convincing people that the government ought to build a blimp city and then tasking NOAA to do it.
|
|
#
¿
Jul 31, 2019 01:19
|
|
|
Raenir Salazar posted:The main "cost" of subsidizing a settlement is keeping it supplied until it reaches a critical mass of people capable of sustaining themselves (and by this point the government can probably find plenty of private companies to outsource the costs to). What would it require for a colony to be able to sustain itself?
|
|
#
¿
Aug 1, 2019 11:17
|
|
|
Owlofcreamcheese posted:I feel like the most depressing thing on earth is watching someone slam the table demanding "what profit will there be!?". Like not even a person in a position that they would be getting the profit. They are just demanding some sort of first quarter direct return on investment profit exists abstractly for anything to exist or be done. Like silence kit wouldn't get the money even if there was a profit, but unless someone is getting rich off this he won't allow it. It's the scale of investment. I have no problem with scientific exploration of the seafloor or even a research base there. But if someone suggest we should expand such a base to thousands of people it's reasonable to ask why. The same arguments apply - it would be really neat, people would want to live there and other things are more expensive.
|
|
#
¿
Aug 1, 2019 12:45
|
|
|
Raenir Salazar posted:Again, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, when you admit you're not an expert in the field, but pass it off like you're some kind of expert, stating that there is no demonstrably useful technology; you're pinging my bullshit detector, especially considering your previous posting in this thread being a contrarian jagoff. You are aware that the South China Morning Post also got an article about engineering a superhuman revolution and cheap bio super missile fuel right? It's cool if you want to assume it can be done but getting bent out of shape because someone doesn't accept that article as gospel is a little silly. Again, nothing wrong with assuming and speculating but if you want to lean on science better to use actual peer reviewed studies. Journalists frequently misunderstand the science and scientists routinely try to make headlines to get funding for their research. Too many incentives for articles like that to be about vaporware.
|
|
#
¿
Aug 3, 2019 05:41
|
|
|
Raenir Salazar posted:No one is claiming that the technology is around the corner. Any reasonable person is aware it'll probably take a long rear end time, probably years, before we see quantities produced of the material with sufficient quality to do much at all. Basically, what is your point, what are you saying the thread at large doesn't already know, and can you say your point in a way that doesn't engage in science skepticism? Ok. The South China Morning Post is as reliable at science reporting as Mad Magazine and it's not indicative of anything. It doesn't matter either say since some unquantifiable measure of progress doesn't mean we'll develop the relevant technology and lack of progress doesn't mean we won't. It just seems pointless but you do you.
|
|
#
¿
Aug 3, 2019 19:02
|
|
|
silence_kit posted:A Mars colony is costly for what benefit society will gain from it. There are better things the government money can be spent on. There's st least good reason to study Mars' geology and climate. You only really need satellites for the climate part but manned geology missions makes some sense. Finding or not finding life beyond Earth is significant and important and Mars is a good candidate so I'm on board with that. NASA's Moon to Mars plan is somewhat optimized for multiple trips which makes sense in that context. If you want to study the geology of Mars you want to put people in as many different, interesting places as possible rather than just sitting in one place for a long time. Maybe 4-5 missions then shift focus to Enceladus or Titan. That and telescopes are probably where most of the low hanging fruit in terms of scientific discoveries are.
|
|
#
¿
Aug 12, 2019 21:55
|
|
|
For a paradox to be valid it should be based on valid reasoning from true premises. The Fermi Paradox isn’t. First, the size of the universe and total span of time is irrelevant. It’s plausible that intergalactic travel is impossible, so it’s not surprising that we haven’t been contacted by civilizations from other galaxies. It’s possible that billions of years had to pass to create the right conditions for technological civilization. Considering all of space and time is asinine. What we’re really concerned with is our own galaxy which is big but not practically infinite. We have no idea how common planets that can sustain large complex civilizations are, what the probability of sapient life evolving is and how likely those are to develop technological civilization. The answer to all of those could be 1 in a billion and the probability of all 3 being true at the same time could be infinitesimally small. Of course small probabilities translate to abundance if you consider the entirety of the universe as in Fermi’s Paradox. On average 1 in 10 galaxies could have a technological civilization at any given time, and the known universe would then contain 10 billion of them. But is it paradoxical that a civilization 10 galaxies over haven’t contacted us? Is it really? Even if you are immortal and can travel at lightspeed that has to be inconvenient. Bottom line is we have no idea how likely technological civilization is but it could be very rare and if we only consider our own galaxy, as we should, it’s not weird that we haven’t been contacted. We can speculate that the probability is very high but we don’t have the data to make a reasoned claim either way. It’s not a paradox 
|
|
#
¿
Sep 18, 2019 06:46
|
|
|
ashpanash posted:A problem I see with that is that most long-lasting radioactive sources are dense and therefore collecting a lot of it would be quite massive, making it that much harder to go anywhere. Minimizing mass is a goal in itself to keep costs down, go faster with less energy and limit complexity/risk. When you’re talking about time scales of hundreds or thousands of years, like people do in this thread, you need to take into account advances in genetics and medicine. No particular reason to think we can’t substantially increase lifespans or perhaps outright gain immortality in some form over the next few thousand years. So incentive to limit mass and longer or indefinite lifespans means the most likely interstellar craft is small. Even if someone wanted to build a generation ship it would be far outnumbered by its smaller and faster counterparts. If you really wanted to conserve energy and mass you’d try to engineer people to be able to sleep through the whole journey or spend it all in a simulated environment. Expend as little energy as possible to conserve fuel mass and then boot everything up when you arrive at your destination using energy from the target star.
|
|
#
¿
Sep 19, 2019 20:42
|
|
|
Raenir Salazar posted:That's possible but also technological development also isn't a linear tech tree and sometimes you only got what you got. We can only consider the tools and knowledge available to us and make assumptions from that. We don’t have the technology to build O’Neill cylinders or do asteroid mining but based on what we know there’s nothing in particular that would prevent us from developing those technologies. Similarly we have all the tools needed to manipulate the genome and know of the potential just from the species alive and around us today. There’s no reason to think we can’t or won’t.
|
|
#
¿
Sep 20, 2019 12:32
|
|
|
It’s a bit morbid but I see no reason why the explanation should be different from crop circles: people doing just to gently caress with other people. At any rate “we don’t know” is not a reasonable argument for aliens. It’s as a valid to say mole people or the Illuminati did it.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 13, 2019 03:21
|
|
|
Yeah ask him to show you his probability calculations. It’s going to be a bunch of wild assumptions and generalizations based on tentative findings. We. Don’t. Know.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 17, 2019 16:53
|
|
|
Captain Monkey posted:*adjusts glasses* you see they don’t currently exist, so talking about them and what they might be like Well maybe teleportation is possible so we'll just beam directly to other star systems. If we assume that's possible then it's a conundrum why we haven't been visited by aliens. What does it all mean?
|
|
#
¿
Nov 28, 2019 07:07
|
|
|
Antifa Turkeesian posted:Why do so many people talk about the great filter like it’s particularly likely or that it answers the question it was designed to solve? We haven’t been looking at space very long and don’t have a very good idea of what we’re looking for, and there’s no evidence that a sufficiently advanced technological civilization gains any particular benefit from spreading out across an entire galaxy. It seems like it would be a lot of effort for almost nothing in return, unless you were robots that could live in space. Without instantaneous communication or travel faster than light, what’s the point? Your home system or one nearby would have enough resources for many times the number habitable worlds there. Well the simplest explanation is that advanced civilizations that want to communicate rarely come into existence in the first place. Assuming they come into existence and are then destroyed is a weird complication.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 12, 2020 07:02
|
|
|
Raenir Salazar posted:Imagine how silly this would sound. Settlement of the Americas and Australia didn't benefit people in the old world at all until technology got to a point where trade was possible some 12.000 and 80.000 years later respectively. By your own analogy it won't be useful until trade is possible.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 12, 2020 15:44
|
|
|
WAR CRIME GIGOLO posted:3 billion people live without internet. Exactly which major internet companies are working hard to alter that fact? Most of those people lack internet access because they can't afford it. Starlink will set you back $100-300 for the dish + an undetermined monthly subscription. Which is to say whatever problem Starlink is aimed at solving, it's not to provide cheap internet for the global poor.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 24, 2020 08:07
|
|
|
a pwn cocktail posted:Well it was nice of the pentagon to confirm some of their not long ago leaked UFO videos - https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-52457805 Would like to see the fairly simple solution that gets us from "Here are some thing's we can't explain" to "it's aliens".
|
|
#
¿
Apr 29, 2020 07:19
|
|
|
a pwn cocktail posted:They seem to clearly be aircraft piloted by some form of intelligence. For the reasons I gave above I don't find a black budget program plausible (mass sightings by pilots as early as WW2 doesn't help the black budget case either), so "aliens" seems like the most plausible conclusion until something better comes along. Out of interest what do you suspect it to be? I don't know. If we're making baseless assumptions it could be time travellers, interdimensional beings, advanced North Korean spycraft, quantum fluctuations in swamp gas, manifestations of dark matter as it interacts with atmospheric phenomena or Thor riding his chariot. The more reasonable position is that we don't know until we do. You know it's similar logic people use with religious miracles. We can't explain so it must be specifically my God that did it! Why not aliens or a different God or an elaborate government conspiracy to fool you? Subjectively preferring one baseless theory over others is not reasonable.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 29, 2020 09:41
|
|
|
Slugworth posted:Look, it's just a film where they other-ize the enemy to show how fun being in the military is, and how much of a sense of family and belonging it can bring to a young disillusioned man. How is that propaganda? The profound sense of belonging to a group as you watch its members die variously and gruesomely. When your officers die horribly you'll get to take their places and reprise their roles in the recruitment ads you once watched thus perpetuating another cycle of pointless death. If you die you'll be a number on a board and if you live you'll probably be horribly disfigured. If anyone watched that movie and thought the military or war looked great they are broken.
|
|
#
¿
May 23, 2020 14:02
|
|
|
Heck Yes! Loam! posted:I have really bad news for you . I know broken people exist but it's not the fault of the movie. Lots of people identified with Walter White and think he's awesome but that's not the fault of the show either.
|
|
#
¿
May 23, 2020 16:38
|
|
|
WAR CRIME GIGOLO posted:Well we see the structure is more advanced on too and less advanced on bottom. However in this circumstance that is reversed. Which is significant in itself isn't it? A ballpoint pen made in 1950 is more advanced than a pencil made in 2020 yet one may prefer one over the other for varying reasons.
|
|
#
¿
Jun 7, 2020 19:53
|
|
|
WAR CRIME GIGOLO posted:Also I wanted to point out something wild that i recently discovered, that being 1500 century Incan craftsmanship seems to rival English and Spanish if not supresede them in terms of indiviual item. What do you base this claim on? If missionaries and a contingent of soldiers build a church in the jungle far from supply lines using slave labor would one say it represents English or Spanish architectural accomplishment? Is it comparable to the finest craftsmen of a nation working and planning for years with ample resources? There can be economic reasons, time constraints and lack of local expertise, tools and materials. Corruption and graft can put second raters in charge with limited budgets. The ultimate goal and purpose may be purely functional and short term. All affect how and why a thing is made. You're not always trying to make the best possible thing with the best people and some times you don't care if it lasts.
|
|
#
¿
Jun 8, 2020 10:56
|
|
|
D-Pad posted:Sure, put words in my mouth. And as I noted in the earlier post about the book at no point does she claim it is aliens, or anything else. It's just eyewitness accounts and supporting documents. Yes, NDE poo poo is quack, that doesn't invalidate her book or the fact she is reporting for the New York Times who tends to vet their reporters at least somewhat. If she was making claims about what it all was then yes, you should take her quack book into account. She isn't. It's just reports and interviews. Eye witness accounts are poo poo evidence. We tend to recall the last time we told the story, not the actual event, and our perceptions are influenced by state of mind and subjective interpretation. No doubt there's thousands of big foot sightings too. What are the supporting documents?
|
|
#
¿
Jul 31, 2020 06:36
|
|
|
What if you're a brain in a vat in a simulation created by a boltzman brain and also pantheism? Let's discuss.
|
|
#
¿
Aug 9, 2020 12:31
|
|
|
Captain Monkey posted:Nobody's ever gone to great lengths to secure their childrens' future either! You really have a deep and thorough understanding of mankind. Saying we won't live in underwater cities is not the same as saying no one wants to live in underwater cities. If you build an underwater city I guarentee you some people will go live there but that doesn't mean they are likely to be built. It's not about individuals. Of course people would go. The question is if or when or if it's likely they'll be enabled. Lots of people want to go right now but currently there's no government or supra-national organization seriously working on it. Is this likely to change? Who knows but I'd guess it would have to get a lot easier and cheaper to do it before anyone will really consider it and it's possible that will be never.
|
|
#
¿
Aug 13, 2020 03:16
|
|
|
GhostofJohnMuir posted:yeah, the ubi seemed to be meeting people's most basic subsistence needs, but it was pretty clear things like basic medicine was very hard to come by Amusingly that's only a thing in the show. In the books Earthers are seen as lazy and coddled by the spartan, dedicated Martians and the impoverished, oppressed Belters. There's no mention of particular hardship or poverty on Earth - lots of ecological destruction though.
|
|
#
¿
Aug 15, 2020 00:57
|
|
|
Bug Squash posted:I listened to an interview with one of the leading superintelligence researchers, or whatever they're called, once on Skeptics Guide to the Universe. My take home was that the guy seemed to be pathologically unable to explain his ideas outside of whatever weird cant his community had developed. Biological intelligence decision making affects us negatively and I doubt studying it will change it. We understand cognitive biases, logical fallacies, emotional manipulation and so on but it's not stopping us from making lovely decisions.
|
|
#
¿
Aug 21, 2020 11:04
|
|
|
Nitrousoxide posted:Mars has an extremely thin atmosphere. It doesn't add too much to the Delta v for getting off of the planet. The moon is much closer so you need smaller and simpler craft to go there and doing telerobotics from earth is a lot easier. Fuel expenditure is irrelevant when we are mning any appreciable amount of water on the Moon.
|
|
#
¿
Sep 12, 2020 04:47
|
|
|
Raenir Salazar posted:I'm not sure what resources are on the moon, but I believe the goal would be the mass mined on the moon is for fabricating structures on the moon with the only mass being retrieved would be Helium(Hydrogen?)-3 which presumably doesn't make up anything beyond a trivial amount of the total moons mass. Lunar regolith is like 40% oxygen, 10% iron, 6% magnesium and 5% aluminum. The rest is silicon, calcium and other stuff. NASA is currently funding projects to extract water from lunar ice and iron from regolith so the path is pretty clear: propellant depots and fabrication of tools, habitats and potentially parts of spacecraft. Iron and aluminum + 3D printer can get you a lot of useful stuff. Even if you still have to import the whole electronics package, wiring, plastics and whatnot from Earth the ability to build engines, pressure vessels and structural parts on the Moon changes the equation because your spacecraft is no longer restricted by the mass and volume you can launch from Earth.
|
|
#
¿
Sep 12, 2020 19:32
|
|
|
No one is rushing to dump a billion dollars into a space probe just to study this. It would be funded through the regular NASA, ESA, etc budgets just like all the other probes and spacecraft in the pipeline. The paper just makes Venus a little more interesting and increases the chance that one of the next projects getting funding will be to Venus instead of some other place. Assuming it won't be debunked in the time it takes to agree to fund, plan, design, build and launch it.
|
|
#
¿
Sep 21, 2020 08:56
|
|
|
Cheesus posted:I think part of the problem is defining what that "civilization" would look like. Most proponents seem to expect one to look exactly like ours at any point in the past 7000 years, but why would it? We have plenty of evidence of 100k year old cultures that chipped rocks, burnt wood and pooped in holes. Archaeologists would pick up on a forgotten Roman Empire just fine.
|
|
#
¿
Sep 24, 2020 15:25
|
|
|
DrSunshine posted:It's gonna be robots, you guys. AI and robotics tech is being worked on and improved at the same time as nascent space industry, so I wouldn't be too surprised if the majority -- possibly even the entirety -- of space industry out in the asteroid belt and on the Moon is automated. Perhaps there'd be some early human work on site, with expert technicians and engineers supervising the robots, but in space it just makes so much more sense to have as many robots doing work as possible. It'd even be possible to have some machine learning-driven controllers with the technicians on site, learning from their actions until it's good enough to do the work by itself. I just don't see the need to recreate some kind of space proletariat when humans are by far the most expensive thing you could possibly send to work in space. Yeah pretty much. Mining is already being heavily automated and it's really not that labor intensive anymore. Australian mines were some of the first to use automated trucks because conditions and distances in the interior made labor more expensive. In space that effect will just be exacerbated 1000x. We haven't colonized anything yet and we've already automated away space truckers 
|
|
#
¿
Dec 20, 2020 02:06
|
|
|
Heck Yes! Loam! posted:Not with that attitude The Dems taking a strong position on NASA right now would be tone deaf and a good way to politisize and get pushback on funding. Millions out of jobs and getting evicted, hospitals overflowing, 350k dead and counting, riots in the streets, climate exploding.... "today I want to talk about NASA which is now high-priority...".
|
|
#
¿
Jan 6, 2021 17:19
|
|
|
Trainee PornStar posted:I get where your coming from but surely even if it takes centuries, it'll be a result to get evidence of aliens . Aliens with severe OCD or fanatical adherents to a finicky religion based on celestial mechanics.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 8, 2021 22:54
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 9, 2024 22:52 |
|
|
Bug Squash posted:I remember reading that in "The Science of Discworld", something about speculation that it could cause an N2 O2 chain reaction, and I thought it seemed pretty dubious even with that pedigree. I don't think there was a citation in the book for where they got the idea from, but I'm will to believe there were a few fruitcakes at the Manhattan Project that brain farted outloud. Random science guy idly speculates,, some pop sci mag sensationalizes it, random lunatics run with it and 50 years later people are like "see everybody used to believe in global cooling". Did you know that in 2010 people thought the LHC would create a black hole that would destroy Earth?
|
|
#
¿
Jan 30, 2021 19:23
|
|