Comment Re:All You Zombies... (Score 4, Interesting) 254
Ever read "The House in November", by Keith Laumer? Kind of the same thing, but more story to it. "All You Zombies" was short, sweet, and to the point.
Ever read "The House in November", by Keith Laumer? Kind of the same thing, but more story to it. "All You Zombies" was short, sweet, and to the point.
I thought I read that they tested it against cultured human cells in a petri dish, without bad side-effects. That's not whole-animal testing, but it's better than no human testing at all.
First question... Is such a dust cloud inconsistent with a sun-like star somewhere inside the boundaries?
Second question... If a sun-like star can exist there, is such a dust cloud inconsistent with that star having a planetary system like ours?
Third question... Assuming the first two questions pass, and that there could be an Earth-like planet there with life that could look up into the sky and wonder, what would they see?
In other words, is that dust really still a hard vacuum, just seen from a different perspective, or is it really something denser that would alter the view from within?
But the Earth had an oxygen (potentially biosculpted) atmosphere some 500 million years ago. So if someone there has been able to observe Earth and know something about its atmosphere, they'd know that there might be life here. We would count as "interesting".
I've read more recently that there may be other ways to have significant amounts of free oxygen in a planetary atmosphere besides biological processes. I have no idea how probable those ways are compared to life, how stable they are, how "interesting" they are compared to life, etc.
But for the remote sensing schemes we've used on exoplanets, as well as foreseeable improvements to those schemes, Earth would definitely count as "interesting".
Not irrelevant. The parent poster was concerned about protecting his system, then proceeded to discuss protecting from the US without considering other threats.
Plus don't forget, the NSA simply must be the only agency in the world trying to do this sort of thing. I'm sure that no other nation has any interest whatsoever in gathering this type or depth of information, for any reason at all.
Maxwell and Newton were one-in-a-million. (if not more) Do we really want to only harness that small a portion of the human race's mind-power? Yes there will always be some who will have found their motivation in the natural world, and don't need any artifice. But is there really a problem with providing inspiring artifice? Does that make contributions those people make worthless? They may well be second-rate compared to Maxwell or Newton, but that also takes in the vast majority of mankind. To do better seems good.
Which highlights what I'd really like to see added to the ISS - a farm module. Test a farm module on the ISS, getting the concept ready for a Mars mission. Do we really plan to send something on the order of 2 years of consumables on a Mars mission, recycling only the water? We need much more complete recycling, and we'll need it for any permanent presence anywhere beyond Earth. For that matter the only reason we don't need it on Earth is because we've got this giant biosphere that has handled the details pretty well for us, up until the past several decades.
I rather like the idea of such a farm module even on Earth. No doubt it would be designed for compactness, efficiency, and minimal hand-holding. Sounds good to me - put one of those in the back yard and cut the grocery bills. (I realize that the initial outlay is likely prohibitive, but the idea is neat.) There are also likely places on Earth where such a thing would be worthwhile, say Antarctica or other inhospitable locations.
(Note that I didn't say that a farm module would use sunlight - that might not work for Mars, and probably not beyond.)
The International Space Station is a vast outpost, its scale inspiring awe even in the astronauts who have constructed it. From the edge of one solar panel to the edge of the opposite one, the station stretches the length of a football field, including the end zones. The station weighs nearly 1 million pounds, and its solar arrays cover more than an acre. It’s as big inside as a six-bedroom house, more than 10 times the size of a space shuttle’s interior. Astronauts regularly volunteer how spacious it feels. It’s so big that during the early years of three-person crews, the astronauts would often go whole workdays without bumping into one another, except at mealtimes.
On the station, the ordinary becomes peculiar. The exercise bike for the American astronauts has no handlebars. It also has no seat. With no gravity, it’s just as easy to pedal furiously, feet strapped in, without either. You can watch a movie while you pedal by floating a laptop anywhere you want. But station residents have to be careful about staying in one place too long. Without gravity to help circulate air, the carbon dioxide you exhale has a tendency to form an invisible cloud around your head. You can end up with what astronauts call a carbon-dioxide headache.
Even by the low estimates, it costs $350,000 an hour to keep the station flying, which makes astronauts’ time an exceptionally expensive resource—and explains their relentless scheduling: Today’s astronauts typically start work by 7:30 in the morning, Greenwich Mean Time, and stop at 7 o’clock in the evening. They are supposed to have the weekends off, but Saturday is devoted to cleaning the station—vital, but no more fun in orbit than housecleaning down here—and some work inevitably sneaks into Sunday.
Life in space is so complicated that a lot of logistics have to be off-loaded to the ground if astronauts are to actually do anything substantive. Just building the schedule for the astronauts in orbit on the U.S. side of the station requires a full-time team of 50 staffers.
Almost anyone you talk with about the value of the Space Station eventually starts talking about Mars. When they do, it’s clear that we don’t yet have a very grown-up space program. The folks we send to space still don’t have any real autonomy, because no one was imagining having to “practice” autonomy when the station was designed and built. On a trip to Mars, the distances are so great that a single voice or email exchange would involve a 30-minute round-trip. That one change, among the thousand others that going to Mars would require, would alter the whole dynamic of life in space. The astronauts would have to handle things themselves.
That could be the real value of the Space Station—to shift NASA’s human exploration program from entirely Earth-controlled to more astronaut-directed, more autonomous. This is not a high priority now; it would be inconvenient, inefficient. But the station’s value could be magnified greatly were NASA to develop a real ethic, and a real plan, for letting the people on the mission assume more responsibility for shaping and controlling it. If we have any greater ambitions for human exploration in space, that’s as important as the technical challenges. Problems of fitness and food supply are solvable. The real question is what autonomy for space travelers would look like—and how Houston can best support it. Autonomy will not only shape the psychology and planning of the mission; it will shape the design of the spacecraft itself.
Bear spray is quite nasty stuff. It's meant to stop something big and mean, or at least pursuade it to look toward less-equipped hikers.
Would you have had the "is
The last hike of the vacation was the Grinnel Glacier Trail, and at the end I gave my can to someone headed up that didn't have one. Wasn't going to do me any good, didn't need it at home even if I could get it on the plane, and they weren't properly equipped to hike in Glacier N.P. without it.
"The medium is the massage." -- Crazy Nigel
