5 ms·
Not being able to go to your favorite cafe / restaurant as frequently != being confined in a windowless structure
by hereforphone 5y ago
Not being able to go to your favorite cafe / restaurant as frequently != being confined in a windowless structure
- dylan604 5y agoWhy does it need to be windowless? You could have windows looking out at arid landscapes of Mars. You'd see sunsets, sunrises, highnoon, etc. You could even see the local "weather".
- hereforphone 5y agoThis is what was described about this simulation
- dylan604 5y agoI get that, I'm just saying why does it need to not have windows?
- hereforphone 5y agoI can only guess because I haven't read much into it. I think that they're trying to simulate the feeling of isolation one might experience on Mars. From an article it also seems like they will severely limit your contact with friends / family as well, presumably for the same purpose.
- Valgrim 5y agoI could see them simulate a severely constrained internet access, with limited bandwidth and minutes-long ping.
- dylan604 5y agoYeah, I think total cut off is weird. Maybe allow for it most of the time, but do "tests" where the signal is lost due to high winds damaging an antenna. Then the people have to don space suits to put it back together, etc. Otherwise, a compress collection of text only messages wouldn't be that big of a deal to send back and forth would it? Maybe a couple of images each day? Hell, we receive images from Mars daily now. Sometimes, these "tests" are unnecessarily obtuse. I understand, test the most extreme, but sometimes that unlikely extreme is enough to cause people to not care.
- gruez 5y agoso... perfect for HN? sign me up!
- X6S1x6Okd1st 5y agoMars doesn't have an ionosphere. Windows run in direct opposition to radiation shielding.
- dylan604 5y agoThat's why we're going to need to build a portable mini magnetic shield. It might not be planet sized, but imagine having the auroras just out of reach. Plus, being able to say "Raise the shields" and it not be just a line in a movie would be cool on its own accord.
- platz 5y agowindows are weak points.
- X6S1x6Okd1st 5y agoIt's possible, but that's also something that needs constant power and effort. Living in a cave or piling up rocks might be much more resilient
- dylan604 5y agoIt would also be useful on the ride to the new planet while in the metal tube for months on end.
- yarky 5y agoI don't know, but this reminds me of a saying they had in the army, something along the lines of "training must be so hard as to make the real thing feel like a break". Not having windows seems harder than the real thing. If you can go through that, you'll likely be ok during the real thing. If the real thing goes wrong, it better not be worst than what you trained for.
- wongarsu 5y agoOn Mars you have to deal with radiation because there is no magnetic field. The most realistic way to do that in early missions is by putting rock between the habitation module and the sky, either by burying it in regolith or by putting it in natural lava tubes. Either option makes windows difficult. If this experiment shows that windows are vital, I'm sure there are ways to make it work. But otherwise windows are an unnecessary complication that we can figure out once we have experience with the more essential problems of living on Mars.
- WalterBright 5y agoI've often thought that wall-sized retina monitors would be wonderful. People can travel the world this way without ever leaving the room. But it might work even with the large TV monitors today. Just put a camera where the nice view is, and pipe it in to the screen.
- mhh__ 5y agoVR has probably killed that market. Walter you might be interested to know that London City airport's Air traffic controllers do actually use this technology. There isn't enough space for a full tower so they have a redundant camera system on site and the controllers are nearby elsewhere - this allows them to use tricks like overlaying data about aircraft onto their view, and they actually compress the whole viewing area directly onto their panels. https://youtu.be/MsoxL6tMG_I https://youtu.be/MsoxL6tMG_I
- dylan604 5y agoInteresting link. One issue I have with this is the binocular replacement system of PTZ camera system can only look in one direction at a time vs multiple people scanning in multiple places at once. Otherwise, I like the idea. Hopefully, nobody with a backhoe starts digging into their dedicated fiber lines.
- LargoLasskhyfv 5y agoBut not smell it. Neither feel it. For instance the moments where temperature, moisture, dew point make it 'just right/silken air'.
- comrh 5y agoIn Kim Stanley Robinson's Red Mars the first settlements on Mars are underground and windowless to protect from radiation iirc.
- simion314 5y ago>Why does it need to be windowless? Radiation? or to train for space travel where you have no landscape or sunrises
- LargoLasskhyfv 5y agoBut no atmosphere either, thus galaxies and nebula visible to the bare eye, apart from countless stars.
- dylan604 5y agoThat's not exactly how that works. The light from galaxies and other Deep Sky Objects (DSOs) are too faint for the human eye. Only with much more sensitive electronic chips or the longer accumulation of photons from long exposures do we get to see these DSOs. Also, a lot of these DSOs are hidden out of the visible light spectrum. So if the earth was to suddenly lose its atmosphere today, we wouldn't be seeing DSOs tonight. However, the stars and stuff we can see would suddenly stop twinkling.
- LargoLasskhyfv 5y agoOn a night with good conditions I can recognize for instance Andromeda Galaxy, Orion Nebula, and the hazy stuff around the Plejades with my bare eyes, though faint, and not colored like with astrophotography. Are you telling me I couldn't see them better without atmosphere? Do I have owl eyes, or what?
- dylan604 5y agoOkay, now you're going to make me qualify it based on the object's magnitude. Let's try this. If the earth lost its atmosphere today, you would not suddenly see things tonight that you wouldn't normally have seen before.* *If you live some place with so much humidity/heat that the air was always working against to you seeing things clearly that now are suddenly clear, maybe you'll see more. However, other places on the planet still saw them. Kind of like living in a large city with horrible light pollution. Just because you can't see them doesn't mean they're not visible elsewhere.
- quakeguy 5y agoThere is even radiaton hardened glas, i just looked it up. https://www.schott.com/advanced_optics/english/products/optical-materials/optical-glass/radiation-resistant-glasses/index.html https://www.schott.com/advanced_optics/english/products/opti... Would have a tint though.
- tsimionescu 5y agoBecause there is no possibility of sending windows to Mars for a hypothetical first base there. It would be far too expensive, and given the already extreme difficulty of such a mission, it would be a huge luxury.