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Listening to the live stream yesterday evening - they performed a significant amount of troubleshooting for the toilet. This required consulting with a full tea

by Alupis 6mo ago

Listening to the live stream yesterday evening - they performed a significant amount of troubleshooting for the toilet. This required consulting with a full team of experts, including a "Toilet Lead". It seems it wasn't "flushing" waste into the collection bag or something similar - but they were eventually able to get it working. I found the language NASA and the astronauts used to communicate absolutely hilarious - "Yes, we're excited and eager to begin immediate fluid disposal!" Glad they got it working - best of luck to Atemis II mission!

RataNova 6mo ago
Nothing says "this is real engineering" like discovering that even the bathroom has a dedicated expert and a troubleshooting playbook
whackernews 6mo ago
I love this. No matter what we do and how far we push the limits of humanity, we still have to shit.
- api 6mo ago
  The second law of thermodynamics dictates that everything poops. Anything alive that is using energy and doing work and transforming matter must poop in some form or another. We don’t know what form life out there might take, but we know it poops. Even post biological machine life would poop in the form of industrial waste, waste heat, etc. Even near perfect recycling can only be near perfect, not perfect, due to the second law, which means a super efficient organism or closed cycle ecosystem or industry will still poop. Just not much. It will also emit a ton of waste heat, which I guess is kind of poop since mass and energy are ultimately equivalent. If there’s weird life out there made of plasma or something, it poops. Probably charged particles or something. The monolith in 2001? It poops. Somehow.
  - NooneAtAll3 6mo ago
    can't you have life that dies before it poops? "death before dishonor" xD
    - dotancohen 6mo ago
      Whatever eats that thing has to deal with the waste that it stores. Wonderful defense mechanism.
    - api 6mo ago
      In that case the corpse is the poop. There are insects whose adult stages do this.
  - rossant 6mo ago
    I had the same realization lately. Shouldn't it be said more specifically that anything that consumes matter to turn it into energy (as all living things on Earth) must poop? If we make the distinction between mass and energy of course.
    - beAbU 6mo ago
      No I think that "everything poops" is absolutely perfect. Poop is entropy, and everything turns into entropy eventually. It might not be traditional poop as we know it, but the point is, no matter how far we go one day, no matter what/who we meet out there, no matter how much we advance, there will always be waste to manage. Waste might be literal poop, waste heat, spent uranium, used oil, slag from a smelter or whatever. We might be perfect recyclers one day, and we might repurpose almost everything, but there will always be a little bit of "poop" left over to manage.
      - api 6mo ago
        Years ago I read about an actual scientific proposal to look for UFOs. A few people in the UFO scene with scientific backgrounds were trying to crowdfund it. The idea was to place very sensitive wide angle infrared telescopes at remote locations that are UFO sighting hot spots. Because as long as physics is universal anything flying around, especially like supposed alien craft, must be using a lot of power and rejecting tons of waste heat. They’d have to light up very bright in IR and physics says there’s nothing you can do about it (unless you imagine wild ideas like dumping it into another multiverse slice). You’d get lots of planes but you could cross reference against public data to remove most of those. And obviously something doing maneuvers that are aerodynamically impossible or would turn a human into strawberry jam is not a plane. I thought it was a good idea but I don’t think it got funded. It was years ago so the tech might have been very expensive. I bet it would be cheaper now. IMO it would be a good low cost but high payoff experiment.
- lebuffon 6mo ago
  ... and we seem to be unable to make something that works without "turning it off and turning it on again" :-)
sillysaurusx 6mo ago
Apparently the way they got it working was to power cycle the toilet.
- kube-system 6mo ago
  [dead]
- throwaway5465 6mo ago
  It needed more than a flush. /ducks
- AlexDragusin 6mo ago
  Maybe it was doing updates... /s
NooneAtAll3 6mo ago
> "Yes, we're excited and eager to begin immediate fluid disposal!" corporate talk on a public science mission :/
- khazhoux 6mo ago
  I hope they remember to cut the mics during the fluid disposal event https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ruCsYGL3QlY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ruCsYGL3QlY
- muvlon 6mo ago
  This doesn't register as corpo talk to me, more tongue-in-cheek nerdy mission control talk. See also "rapid unscheduled disassembly".
etskinner 6mo ago
I especially liked the part where mission control referred to using the toilet as "donation"

by Alupis 6mo ago

RataNova 6mo ago

Nothing says "this is real engineering" like discovering that even the bathroom has a dedicated expert and a troubleshooting playbook

whackernews 6mo ago

I love this. No matter what we do and how far we push the limits of humanity, we still have to shit.

api 6mo ago
The second law of thermodynamics dictates that everything poops. Anything alive that is using energy and doing work and transforming matter must poop in some form or another. We don’t know what form life out there might take, but we know it poops. Even post biological machine life would poop in the form of industrial waste, waste heat, etc. Even near perfect recycling can only be near perfect, not perfect, due to the second law, which means a super efficient organism or closed cycle ecosystem or industry will still poop. Just not much. It will also emit a ton of waste heat, which I guess is kind of poop since mass and energy are ultimately equivalent. If there’s weird life out there made of plasma or something, it poops. Probably charged particles or something. The monolith in 2001? It poops. Somehow.
- NooneAtAll3 6mo ago
  can't you have life that dies before it poops? "death before dishonor" xD
  - dotancohen 6mo ago
    Whatever eats that thing has to deal with the waste that it stores. Wonderful defense mechanism.
  - api 6mo ago
    In that case the corpse is the poop. There are insects whose adult stages do this.
- rossant 6mo ago
  I had the same realization lately. Shouldn't it be said more specifically that anything that consumes matter to turn it into energy (as all living things on Earth) must poop? If we make the distinction between mass and energy of course.
  - beAbU 6mo ago
    No I think that "everything poops" is absolutely perfect. Poop is entropy, and everything turns into entropy eventually. It might not be traditional poop as we know it, but the point is, no matter how far we go one day, no matter what/who we meet out there, no matter how much we advance, there will always be waste to manage. Waste might be literal poop, waste heat, spent uranium, used oil, slag from a smelter or whatever. We might be perfect recyclers one day, and we might repurpose almost everything, but there will always be a little bit of "poop" left over to manage.
    - api 6mo ago
      Years ago I read about an actual scientific proposal to look for UFOs. A few people in the UFO scene with scientific backgrounds were trying to crowdfund it. The idea was to place very sensitive wide angle infrared telescopes at remote locations that are UFO sighting hot spots. Because as long as physics is universal anything flying around, especially like supposed alien craft, must be using a lot of power and rejecting tons of waste heat. They’d have to light up very bright in IR and physics says there’s nothing you can do about it (unless you imagine wild ideas like dumping it into another multiverse slice). You’d get lots of planes but you could cross reference against public data to remove most of those. And obviously something doing maneuvers that are aerodynamically impossible or would turn a human into strawberry jam is not a plane. I thought it was a good idea but I don’t think it got funded. It was years ago so the tech might have been very expensive. I bet it would be cheaper now. IMO it would be a good low cost but high payoff experiment.
lebuffon 6mo ago
... and we seem to be unable to make something that works without "turning it off and turning it on again" :-)

sillysaurusx 6mo ago

Apparently the way they got it working was to power cycle the toilet.

kube-system 6mo ago
[dead]
throwaway5465 6mo ago
It needed more than a flush. /ducks
AlexDragusin 6mo ago
Maybe it was doing updates... /s

NooneAtAll3 6mo ago

> "Yes, we're excited and eager to begin immediate fluid disposal!" corporate talk on a public science mission :/

khazhoux 6mo ago
I hope they remember to cut the mics during the fluid disposal event https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ruCsYGL3QlY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ruCsYGL3QlY
muvlon 6mo ago
This doesn't register as corpo talk to me, more tongue-in-cheek nerdy mission control talk. See also "rapid unscheduled disassembly".

etskinner 6mo ago

I especially liked the part where mission control referred to using the toilet as "donation"