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Mars Now
- Tepix 4y agoI hope we get that greenhouse on Mars sooner rather than later. Seems more important than Twitter.
- TEP_Kim_Il_Sung 4y agoFreeze peach always seems unimportant until you lose it. Good thing that goes hand in hand with economic improvement, based on historical evidence, and make greenhouses on Mars more likely.
- AlexandrB 4y agoIf our free speech rights depend on the whims of billionaire media owners we don't have those rights in any meaningful sense. I don't think that Twitter changing hands moved the needle one way or the other.
- TEP_Kim_Il_Sung 4y agoTwitter is just one, now fully exposed, symptom of a larger problem, which will be easier to deal with now that more people are watching.
- throwawaylinux 4y agoIt definitely moved the needle as you can see from the wailing and gnashing of teeth by a lot of the billionaire owned politicians, bureaucrats, institutions, and legacy media corporate "journalists". It's funny how angrily and desperately they insist that nothing really changed and everything is a "nothing-burger", but they're gaslighting you as usual. Speech and public opinion is still under the control of billionaires, and Musk is not likely to be particularly less greedy, self-serving, or egomaniacal as Murdoch or Soros or Bezos, but he is not in lock step with them. The enemy of my enemy is... quite possibly still my enemy, but it's beautiful to watch them fight one another. And if it can distract them from starting new wars or stealing more money and rights from people for just one minute, that's a wonderful bonus.
- TEP_Kim_Il_Sung 4y ago"Once social change begins, it cannot be reversed. You cannot un-educate the person who has learned to read. You cannoy humiliate the person who feels pride. You cannot oppress the person who is not afraid anymore." —Cesar Chavez
- c54 4y agoPeople have high hopes that Musk is some kind of principled arbiter but it's wishful thinking. https://www.cnn.com/2022/12/14/tech/elonjet-twitter-suspended/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2022/12/14/tech/elonjet-twitter-suspende...
- ericbarrett 4y agoGonna have to figure out how to deal with relativistic iron nuclei: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/11540033/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/11540033/
- JumpCrisscross 4y ago> relativistic iron nuclei The Martian atmosphere is 1/166th the density of Earth's [1]. At the ISS's altitude, it's something like a trillionth. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmosphere_of_Mars https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmosphere_of_Mars
- idlewords 4y agoThe Martian atmosphere does not provide meaningful shielding against heavy ion radiation unless you're way down in the Hellas basin (where no one particularly wants to land). You reduce the flux by half compared to deep space just by having a big rock blocking half of the sky, but you'll still get all the cancer sooner than later.
- ericbarrett 4y agoA little napkin math says the columnar mass of the Martian atmosphere is 18 g/cm^2, versus 10g / cm^2 of aluminum shielding discussed in the paper. So being on the Martian surface would probably give you something like 1/10 (atmosphere + planetary mass + environment suit) the heavy ion radiation exposure of deep space. You'd need to be pretty deep underground most of the time (no windows, at least) to be safe for the duration of a reasonable visit. I'll pass!
- idlewords 4y agoThe napkin math falls short a bit because the heavy ions that absorb in the atmosphere will create a shower of secondary radiation that reaches the surface. Similarly, heavy ions that hit the surface will create secondary radiation from rock. This factor is why partial shielding in a spacecraft can give the crew a bigger absorbed dose than having no shielding at all.
- stronglikedan 4y agoThe Twitter takeover solved a real, current problem. Those are always more important than future problems.
- tasty_freeze 4y ago> a real, current problem. Those are always more important than future problems. You mean like addressing climate change, vs spending trillions trying to terraform a planet to make it barely habitable.
- rglover 4y agoMaintaining free speech will allow people to discuss and shed light on actual—not heavily manufactured—issues like the climate change movement being used as a distraction while banks and corporations implement natural asset corporations. [1] [1] https://unlimitedhangout.com/2021/11/investigative-reports/un-backed-banker-alliance-announces-green-plan-to-transform-the-global-financial-system/ https://unlimitedhangout.com/2021/11/investigative-reports/u...
- kmonsen 4y agoThere is no evidence there is more free speech on Twitter after the Elon takeover. It's just different people being banned and for more arbitrary reasons.
- tagami 4y agoOff-world crop production can benefit life here on the Homeworld. We are working on that with our ExoLab missions. Our 10th mission is currently on the ISS looking at legumes for protein and vitamins like thiamine. https://magnitude.io/exolab-10 https://magnitude.io/exolab-10
- enkid 4y agoNo offense, but how? It just seems way more economical to grow plants in the environment they were evolved for.
- genocidicbunny 4y agoSeems it would be useful to quantify what that environment specifically is, maybe find some ways to improve it such that the plants are hardier or have better yields.
- nashashmi 4y agoWhy do people think this is even possible? CO2 is heavy stuff. All it will do is just fall back to the surface. Maybe methane will be better or even better will be O3 ozone. But methane does not last. And I’m not sure how to get ozone in the planet. Also, we hardly understand life on earth. Do we really think we can get life on mars for long periods of time?
- foobarbecue 4y agoMaybe they meant an actual greenhouse, not a greenhouse effect.
- Tepix 4y agoI was referring to the greenhouse that Elon Musk planned to launch to Mars that led him to found SpaceX.
- nashashmi 4y agoyeah. I realized that after someone else posted the same. I was referring to another crazy idea: Nuke the CO2 ice caps for a greenhouse effect on the entire planet. [1] [1] https://www.sciencealert.com/elon-musk-still-wants-to-drop-nuclear-bombs-on-mars-so-he-s-making-t-shirts https://www.sciencealert.com/elon-musk-still-wants-to-drop-n...
- Tepix 4y agoYes. Most people think it wouldn't work.
- Taek 4y agoWhat Elon does with his time and money is his own business. What are you doing to help humanity get to Mars beyond scolding the person who is arguably the greatest single contributer to humans in space of the past 20 years?
- Teever 4y agoyou may want to consider why you're taking OPs comment about Elon Musk personally.
- moloch-hai 4y agoI don't want humanity on Mars. On Earth is bad enough. But we won't be going to Mars, help or no. Starship and Superheavy (Can and Kicker, by my lights) are woefully inadequate to the task.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- reset2023 4y agoCan't get the fascination with this desert? It's like post apocalyptic Earth.
- z3phyr 4y agoShort answer: It is in space and relatively easier to get to than other planets in the system. It is a gateway to becoming space-faring civilization.
- idlewords 4y agoThe second part of this answer is a non-sequitur. Why Mars in particular? The technology needed to get there doesn't carry over to any other destinations except the Moon and Venus, and it's much easier to build next-generation rockets on Earth. Why not just skip Mars and go straight to step 2?
- xboxnolifes 4y agoIt's not just the technology to get there we need. We need the technology to live there.
- idlewords 4y agoAbsolutely true, but my point is that there's no destination beyond Mars reachable with the spaceships we build to get there. So I don't get how it's some sort of gateway rather than a detour / dead end.
- moloch-hai 4y agoThe good news is we don't have anything to get to Mars with, either. SpaceX cans are comically inadequate.
- mlindner 4y agoYou need resources to build with. Venus isn't an option because you can't get resources from it. (If there's two things you need, it's energy, and physical materials.) The Moon is certainly an option, but while Mars is a desert, the moon is volcanic rock and never had active geology that concentrates metals. Additionally while Mars has an atmosphere of sorts, the Moon has none which means anything mounted on the surface of the moon is in an equivalent environment to being in deep space. This means there's zero protection (besides the planetary body itself) from radiation and micrometeorites (and bigger meteorites). They rain down constantly on the moon slowly carving divots into whatever you build things out of or punching holes in them. Also I disagree that the technology to get to Mars or the Moon is inapplicable to elsewhere in the solar system. And most of the other options are generally worse than Mars for one reason or another. I'd like to hear what you think "Step 2" actually is.
- kuprel 4y agoWonder if the stars are accurate. The Sun is missing
- moffkalast 4y agoThat's not the only thing that's missing. Where's the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter?
- ledauphin 4y agoThis is neat but the mouse controls are maybe 5x too twitchy on my fairly standard Mac in Chrome. Google Earth's tuning is very usable in a way that this is not.
- naruhodo 4y agoSame. Firefox on Linux.
- ehsankia 4y ago+1 Chrome on Windows. I wonder if it's just designed for touch controls?
- sen 4y agoProbably, it works great on my iPhone.
- soco 4y agoSo the "mobile first" paradigm still refuses to die?
- dzikimarian 4y agoFirefox on Android - same issue.
- foobarbecue 4y agoSeems to me like the problem is the pan rate doesn't decrease as you zoom in as you would expect. Panning is fine for me zoomed out, but way too fast zoomed in.
- tppiotrowski 4y agoWay back in 2006, as a CS major with networking emphasis, I did a summer internship at NASA APL (Applied Physics Laboratory) My task was to modify Linux networking stack to simulate deep space communication packet loss and throttling. Then to implement something called Bundle protocol over UDP and run a lot of throughput simulations. The idea was to maximize data throughput between Mars and Earth by routing data packets from the rovers to the orbiters because the orbiters circled every 90 minutes and the rovers had to wait hours for Mars to rotate to get line of sight with Earth. Also, some orbiters can send at higher throughput than others. It was a fun project but way over my head at the time. I do remember walking into mission control a few times and ESPN was playing on the big screen. World cup was going on that summer.
- Zigurd 4y agoHumans living for more than months at a time in space or on another planet is a fantasy. The attempts will kill the participants. That is for machines or post-human life, designed for the purpose, to do, if it is even possible. The answer to "Where is everybody?" is likely to be "They're home" having learned that trying to leave is deadly.
- coolspot 4y agoUmm… https://www.nasa.gov/feature/jeff-williams-racks-up-new-time-in-space-record/ https://www.nasa.gov/feature/jeff-williams-racks-up-new-time...
- nvahalik 4y agoThose days are spread out over the course of over a few trips over nearly a decade. Nowhere near to the amount of time you'd log on a trip to Mars and back.
- AnimalMuppet 4y agoYou don't think you could get to Mars and back in 520 days? Why not?
- Zigurd 4y agoYou could, at some cost to the health of astronauts. They won't die, right away, anyway. They will lose a lot of bone density, at a minimum. The other effects, like pooling of various bodily fluids, etc. will become both tiresome and more dangerous the longer they go on. They will get a lot of radiation. On ISS astronauts work out 2.5 hours per Earth day to control health problems. Training enough astronauts for frequent missions will be extremely difficult, maybe infeasible. Colonizing Mars is a fantasy.
- idlewords 4y agoThe radiation flux in low earth orbit is also much milder, about 1/4 what you would be exposed to en route to Mars.
- tpmx 4y agoAt least kind of related: I'm worried that NASA will mess up their livestream of the Artemis 3 mission to the moon, just like they did with the Artemis 1. Compared to what we've been getting used to with SpaceX, it just wasn't that great.
- edgyquant 4y agoDid SpaceX livestream the entire trip around the moon in real time?
- tpmx 4y ago(Well, NASA didn't do that. Most of the time it was an animation. When they did have a camera feed the production quality was very uneven.) Have SpaceX livestreams set high expectations? Look, I want NASA to look good, but I'm worried that they are treating the streaming as an afterthought.
- OmarShehata 4y agoIf anyone's wondering, looks like it's running ThreeJS! (you can tell by typing `THREE` in the console)
- bagels 4y agoI love three.js, it's great for making high performance webgl that even run well on mobile.
- idontwantthis 4y agoI'm seeing outdated Perseverance data as if it hasn't landed yet, and no data on orbiters.
- dekhn 4y agoI've long been curious: it looks like we haven't dropped any landers directly on the icy poles. Those seem like they would be a treasure trove of data- scoop up and melt ice, then filtersample the liquid.