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Given the selection pool for astronauts, I'd say they'd all be able to do all of the math related to their jobs long hand, with minimal reference material. Some obviously more capably than others, but there would not be any astronauts that couldn't do/understand it at all.
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Jun 4, 2019 13:06
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I wouldn't say fully irrelevant in the sense that if we can assume that even at our relative primitive level, everyone invovled in actually being in space will carry that level of mathematical understanding. It is then likely that the member of an alien species that we contact if they come to us would more likely than not have a similar understanding of maths. Now there are tons of equally legitimate things that could prevent us from communicating, but you got to start somewhere.
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Jun 4, 2019 13:30
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There are also scenarios, like in Hyperion by Dan Simmons where civilization is basically run and managed by benevolent AI that controls technological progress and understanding. Individuals in society have no clue, nor capacity to understand the tech. Presumably though, if we were to run into someone from that kind of civilization, they'd just put the AI in view of us even though the member of the species knew fuckall nothing.
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Jun 4, 2019 14:25
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Flowers For Algeria posted:Man you gotta reread Hyperion a bit more thoroughly if what you remember of it is that the AIs in it were benevolent I'll admit, it was years and years since I read it, and I was focused on how it was letting people use the gates and internet and poo poo that it developed and nothing else about the plot.
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Jun 4, 2019 21:29
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Lightning Knight posted:If life was readily capable of evolving in subjectively "harsh" environments relative to Earth, wouldn't we have found some by now, even just in the solar system itself? It can not be stressed just how little we've managed ti check so far when it comes to intra-system biology. There are some missions planned in the near future that will be our biggest strides forward yet in this category, but we basically are working in an information black hole making educated guesses on where it would be best to look.
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Jun 7, 2019 15:46
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Killer-of-Lawyers posted:It's really a shame there's not a bunch of readily available rocks in space that are pretty much pure metal and require a minimal amount of delta V to push into a lagrange point. Yeah, one of the big selling points of space colonies is avoiding gravity wells for things. Who cares about lifting things into orbit when you can just grab rare earth minerals that are far from rate out of asteroids.
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Jul 19, 2019 18:22
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Raenir Salazar posted:Yes but, this isn't actually easier then going to Mars though. It would be a cool thing to also be doing at the same time for a lot of reasons, but I don't think "We should make space colonies instead of a Mars colony" is based on anything concrete. Sure, I don't disagree with that in premise. Just responding to the idea on the logistics of how you'd get your space stations and stuff built. Infinite Karma posted:This idea is pretty much the entire reason for asteroid capture and mining, right? Sending up thousands or millions of tons of metal to build ships out of is such is really expensive and time-consuming. If we just had to send up stuff like electronics and air/food/water, and the structure of spacecraft was already in orbit waiting to be sliced off an asteroid, it'd be a sea change in what we could build in space. Capture a comet and you got your water. Just need to send up manpower and some starter food/seeds, depending on design and size of destination.
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Jul 19, 2019 18:34
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Better not live in cylinders that have Earth equivalent gravity if Mars doesn't pan out. Nope. Doomed to live on one planet forever.
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Jul 30, 2019 18:25
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Kerning Chameleon posted:You can't innovate away the fundamental laws of physics, I don't care what Star Trek told you. Are you naturally this bad at reading comprehension, or do you have to practice at it?
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Jul 30, 2019 19:44
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Kerning Chameleon posted:I just get real annoyed at naive idealists who keep insisting any physical problem can be solved with sufficient application of "the human element." So you are saying that you read something that you don't understand the context of, and then fly off the handle to rush in a poo poo post? Got it.
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Jul 30, 2019 19:57
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I know you're not supposed to feed the animals, this time he was just so dumb that it got me. Sorry for the derail guys.
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Jul 30, 2019 20:08
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Conflict at this stage would more likely come from sabotaging the competition. Either in preventing them from getting to tue resource in the first place, or disrupting their extraction once there. Speaking for spaces, not terrestrial resources.
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Jul 31, 2019 14:55
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:That sounds awful unlikely for an awful long time. I can imagine like terrestrial platinum miners funding onerous legislation to try to slow stuff down or spreading fearful propaganda about made up risks intentionally but I can't imagine any sort of actual space war even at the level of industrial sabotage at any point in any near future. I am not talking some cyberpunk Call of Duty in space stuff. We delayed the Iranian nuclear program with a computer virus inserted into a centrifuge, not Seal Team 6. However it plays out, it'll be both banal and mundane in its execution.
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Jul 31, 2019 17:01
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You keep going on about war. I never said war, or that the action would be in space. You don't even have to do poo poo in space to achieve strategic goals of interrupting another company or country in their own missions. If you had bothered to focus on the part of my post you specifically cut out to reply to me, you might have keyed on to this. So I'll repeat, whatever action ends up happening will be both mundane and banal. Space war is neither of those things so stop thinking that is what I am saying. Also who cares if India went to the moon, we already put our dick on it. This is specifically in the context of a resource gold rush to the asteroids.
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Jul 31, 2019 17:34
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:I just do not understand why you think this is a near term concern. Like I get that in the year 3050 there is definitely going to be cases where mars colony 6 is going to have claims on the same comet as lunar orbiter helios or something and they are going to be all industrial sabotage on eachother, but literally nothing in the modern day is anything like that. bezo isn't hacking space X as far as we know, the whole apollo program went off during the absolute height of the cold war and russia wasn't knocking satellites out of the air with guns or sabotage. There is nothing indicating any sort of hyper agro relationship exists between any space programs or that such a thing will exist in any sort of near term future. Humans being humans I'm sure it will happen eventually but I have absolutely no reason to think that is something that is gonna open up day one of space mining after decades of not being a pressing concern at any other step of space exploration. Both Bezos and Space X are private corporations who would be doing asteroid mining to make themselves big rear end profit. While governments have got along in LEO stuff and not interfered in non-LEO stuff, that we know of (I'm leaving this open in case there has been some spy satellite fuckery that is classified, but I don't really think it is a big thing if at all), where was their motivation for harm? Pretty much every gold rush that I'm aware of has had a history of companies loving with each other in some fashion. All I'm doing now is extrapolating that forward to the first space gold rush. My op was saying that it wouldn't be something like open warfare, but more likely something boring that fucks with the competing company in some process of the chain. That is why I said conflict and not war. And like now, where everything is cloaked in about a hundred layers of plausible deniability, that'll probably be the case then too. Honestly, I don't see how the assertion that companies would behave in an unethical fashion against their competition to secure a new market when massive profit is on the line would somehow become a controversial statement. But here we are. I can say that my op was pretty short so its easy to extrapolate out plenty of strawmen from it, but I feel like it should be clear that I am not talking force escalation, space soldiers, or any of that poo poo.
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Jul 31, 2019 18:34
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Alright man, you've made it clear that you are going to continue to strawman me no matter what I say, so have fun projecting your spy thriller bullshit on to me as you keep describing stuff I never said. We can drop this tangent though.
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Jul 31, 2019 18:50
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Raenir Salazar posted:I mean what you say makes a degree of sense, especially if its private companies competing for contracts for asteroid mines; but the sabotage would likely stay along the lines of corporate espionage for a very long time. Damaging leased government property, or fiddling with peoples rockets is a good way to result in a big disaster and I think governments would step in to keep rivalries from spiraling out too far. To go back to my original post: Dameius posted:Conflict at this stage would more likely come from sabotaging the competition. Either in preventing them from getting to tue resource in the first place, or disrupting their extraction once there. I can see that sabotage can be read in a loaded way to make people think physical hardware compromise, but hopefully I've clarified enough that we can all agree that there is more than one way to skin that cat. And just again to clarify, I was responding to the notion that there'd be space war about this and my response was basically that no there wouldn't. There'd be some kind of corporate (or maybe state, who knows on that front) fuckery amongst competition as more likely. OOCC just probably read some Tom Clancy in space novel and constasntly projected his fanfic on me.
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Jul 31, 2019 19:17
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Raenir Salazar posted:Like it makes sense to me that the moment governments start trying to outsource costs to private companies those companies will knife fight to get those contracts as soon as additional private sector competitors to SpaceX appear. Yeah I didn't think any of this would be in say, next 20-50 years, unless Bezos or Elon make some significant breakthroughs in their capacity to capture/mine an asteroid. But I also don't see these companies trying to rely on government leases on things to accomplish their goals. I'll admit that I don't keep current with Space X stuff, but they seem to be wanting to be as self contained as possible.
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Jul 31, 2019 19:46
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That isn't what people are saying. Asteroid mining is a subject because Space X said that is what they want to do. Getting into space has historically been very gate checked by governments, but the whole point of NASA trying to leave LEO to private corporations is that the means for access is to shift industry and as that opens up, it also opens up the door for more fuckery.
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Jul 31, 2019 20:02
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:Like I get "capitalism bad, lol" hyperbole or whatever, but I absolutely do not believe that there is going to be more sabotage between rival companies than there was between the US and the literal soviet union during the period of times space travel was a literal weapons system test for nuclear weapons. If there has ever been any space sabotage it has all been so low key and ineffective it hasn't even been able to prevent iran or north korea from having space programs. Everyone else has moved on from sabotage being tied to literal breaking of hardware but you. I don't know why you can't get it, nor do I care. Please have caught up with the rest of the thread befofe wasting another post. Also please finally understand this point, my original position, which I've not deviated from, is that if we see something happen, it won't be a hot war, but instead some kind of corporate fuckery. I never said it was a guarantee, I just said that this area was where something was more likely to occur.
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Jul 31, 2019 21:57
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:Like can you just say what you are trying to say and stop using weird hand waves like "fuckery". What specifically are you suggesting will happen and why are you suggesting it will happen only at the dawn of space mining while never having happened in all the last 58 years of private companies operating in space or all of the various government space programs, even the ones involving weapons testing and rival superpowers or even with weapon tests by countries other countries have absolutely zero issues openly shooting at or bombing. I literally don't know how else to explain to you that my position is that we are not likely to see govenrments interfere with each other, and if something were to happen it would happen from companies trying to interfere with each other. So I'll just have to take my own advice which I didn't follow the first time and say let's drop this tangent. The whole point was such a minor comment and not some grand conspiracy that you seem to think I am proposing.
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Aug 1, 2019 00:15
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Captain Monkey posted:Sure, I'm not arguing with that. I just enjoyed the thread a bit more when it was smart people like Libluini, Raenir Salazar, and others talking about cool space stuff and less cheap kerning chernobyl knockoffs pitching nihilism as enlightened reason. Space is awesome and we should be doing more stuff there on all fronts for reasons both profit driven and just for the sake of the science or even just the novelty of it.
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Aug 1, 2019 16:04
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On that line of reasoning, it will be interesting to see how it goes when the first entity gets access to one of these effectively infinite taps and how it restructures the market and what kind off incentive/viability it creates for competition. Like, if you go to Ceres and mine there your bottle neck is going to be at Ceres, but if you lasso an asteroid and bring it to NEO or even a Lunar orbit, your bottleneck will be much closer to Earth and you could strategically saturate the market before a Ceres supply makes it back, cratering their potential profit as your supply can be much more responsive to market demands.
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Aug 1, 2019 20:44
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Moridin920 posted:Waste heat would be a bitch if you did smelting in space. Yeah I've been wondering how they could be able to manage waste heat in something that doesn't have atmosphere.
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Aug 1, 2019 21:42
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Bring it into the atmosphere just wrong and it'll smelt itself. 
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Aug 1, 2019 21:58
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Moridin920 posted:It makes me mad sometimes to think about what we could accomplish collectively as a species but instead we dedicate ourselves to making number go up. The only number we should be focused on making going up quarter over quarter is the "Height of Space Elevator".
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Aug 2, 2019 23:59
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BardoTheConsumer posted:Screw a Mars colony. Let's just throw kuipers belt objects at that lifeless desert till it grows lakes and an atmosphere. Universe Sandbox 2 tells me itll work and who am I to argue? Problem with this approach is waiting for the sumbitch to cool off after you bombard it.
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Aug 13, 2019 21:44
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If we are going sci-fi propulsion, might as well use the NASA warp drive. It works like the engine on the Planet Express Delivery Ship.
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Sep 20, 2019 00:40
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My understanding is that we have a decent conception of abiogenisis to self replicating RNA to DNA, so long as you don't look to closesly at the details. As in, we know it can happen because it did, and we think we can give a pretty good rundown of how it happened, but there is still a poo poo ton of original research to do to prove all the steps. Also, given the nature of what we are talking about here and the distance between then and mow, we'll never likely know for sure, just have ever more increasingly educated guesses. Dameius fucked around with this message at 05:06 on Oct 17, 2019 |
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Oct 17, 2019 05:04
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We recently gene spliced photo synthesis to be more efficient because the way plants evolved to do it was extra energy intensive. Have chemsists deconstructing the reactions down at the level you are working with come across anything else like that? Or just any other cool poo poo you've seen/done/learned in field?
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Oct 17, 2019 06:59
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This isn't my field so I could be wildly off and would welcone clarification or correction, but I thought it was the case that RNA like self replicating things, for lack of a more precise term, are not uniquely novel in the realm of ochem, even if the things are not efficient in terms of copy integrity or energy use in relation to RNA/DNA/Cells. So long as that is true, you would expect that where you can have conditions for Earth like "primordial soup" for the ochem to play out it just becomes a question of time and iterations both on planet and across planets for something resembling very basic Earh-like primitive biology to exist. How that then evolves and adapts and yadda yadda yadda is a whole other can of worms in a separate conversation. But just strictly life down at the monocellular level is well within our current scope of provable knowledge to bolt into known probabilities of galaxies/stars/planets that would allow it to exist. And again, of course, that says nothing about our ability to prove it exists or even meaningfully test for its existence and so on.
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Oct 17, 2019 17:24
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WAR CRIME GIGOLO posted:Seeing as our material r&d is going to drastically change with the advent of nfusuon id say its very likely to be econimical. We will be able to create materials we never dreamed of. Why would we care about solid metaic hydrogen in particular and what other novel exotics would we want to chase?
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Nov 28, 2019 16:18
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Future civilizations could plunder our city garbage dumps for all sorts of rare earth waste to resmelt.
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Jan 4, 2020 01:36
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Martian underground hydroponics seems to be the least handwavy thing imaginable in all of things that would be needed for any of this. We already have a really good grasp on the hydroponic side of things at 1g. We seem to have a decent enough understanding of what we could expect at anywhere from 0-1g through LEO to experiments and now China's Lunar expirement. At this point, its pretty much all an (on the scale of all the other problems involved in colonizing) average to simple engineering problem with the only real theoretical component left being which crops will react best to growth at Martian gravity and what we could do to those plants to further facilitate. We already know how to bore a hole. We know how to create air locks. We know how to create closed loop systems for nutrients and water, et al. So really its just a question of applying that in 0<x<1 where x is either Mars or whatever asteroid we want to settle on. I really don't understand where the consternation is coming from on doing this.
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Feb 7, 2020 20:38
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Infinite Karma posted:Boring a hole requires some pretty heavy duty equipment, which is a combination of large, heavy, requiring frequent replacement of materials (like the abrasive digging heads), energy hungry (even if you built one that used electricity instead of diesel engines), and labor intensive. It would take dozens of rockets worth of launches just to get the stuff to Mars to try and dig a single hole. Just aligning launch windows makes getting all of this there at the same time is incredibly challenging unless you can launch 10 rockets simultaneously. And that's before you talk about launches of people to operate the equipment, and the stuff to keep them alive for months or years before the permanent habitat is ready, and the stuff to house them while they dig the better habitat, and the stuff to stick in the hole you're building to finish it off. Let alone actually designing and engineering the equipment to do this kind of work on another planet, and the nuclear or solar power plants (and massive batteries) to power the whole operation. Also, you need massive redundancy because it's got to work right the first time. Digging out a cave as big as my house and filling it with beds and hydroponics would probably be a trillion dollars. And that still has little to no ability to bootstrap anything more that would reduce the cost of a future mission. If we'd ever attempted even a single bit of off-world engineering, let alone succeeded at it, I'd have a lot more faith in the assumption that these are simple engineering problems and not incredibly risky and difficult ones. I don't know why bad faith you seem to think the only way to bore a hole in Mars is to take the largest industrial equipment we have on Earth and use it there. Hell, we already have rovers boring holes in Mars right now. Granted, those holes are not conducive to making a home sized hole, but the proof of concept exists. The goal post you've established of a home sized hole can be done a lot more easily than you seem to think, especially if we take advantage of existing topography. Again, of all the challenges that exist for semi to permanent habitation of Mars (or an asteroid), this is among the simplest and among the ones with the most already existing and off the shelf knowledge that we have.
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Feb 7, 2020 21:49
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Raenir Salazar posted:One way would be that if 1,000 LY away you detected with accuracy up to 0.000000001% that a star had its gravity being distorted by "something" with sufficient mass, and then traveled to there and found, wtf there's nothing actually there, then that could suggest it, we sort of have a window to how things looked X many years in the past. So if we had the data storage and harvesting abilities to take perfect snapshots of the observable galaxy every year and crossed references the images to what we actually see up close that could give way to some information. If they found Voyager and correlated that the system depicted on the gold disc was the system they were looking at when they came here and decoded everything properly they'd come up one planet short.
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Apr 16, 2020 00:56
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WOWEE ZOWEE posted:One of the weirder solutions I've heard for the Fermi paradox is that the solar system could be enclosed within an enormous Dyson sphere, showing us a simulation of the outer universe where everything is seemingly dead. Runs into the same problem as the universe is really a sub-atomic perfect simulation of a universe. Were this to be the case such that we couldn't tell the difference, then there is no falsification possible. The twist on that is presumably the Voyagers will donk off the inner shell of the Dyson sphere at some point depending on the arbitrary size of it in this scenario. So nothing to do but wait and see. And we'd probably have to send a few more probes to test the donks before we even begin to consider that is what happened instead of some other reason for the probe going dark.
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Apr 24, 2020 19:35
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We could liquidate Mercury and make a Dyson swarm from it easily.
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Apr 25, 2020 00:33
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Easily as in with the available materials such an act would provide. Not easily as in we could do it tomorrow.
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Apr 25, 2020 02:07
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Heck Yes! Loam! posted:Do you know how much Delta-V it takes to get to Mercury? It makes no sense to send payload to / from the inner solar system when we could use almost any moon with much less energy. My point was to illustrate how much raw material could produce a Dyson swarm, not actually suggesting that if we were to make one we should liquidate Mercury. Sorry for not making myself more clear.
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Apr 26, 2020 02:29
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