Found it via the 3rd name.

https://royalsociety.org/scien...

15 - 16 April 2024 09:00 - 17:00 The Royal Society ... ah, the GRauniad article is from the 14th!

Scientific discussion meeting organised by [names]

Is the universe simple enough to be adequately described by the standard [lambda]CDM cosmological model which assumes the isotropic and homogeneous Friedmann-LemaiÌtre-Robertson-Walker metric? Tensions have emerged between the values of cosmological parameters estimated in different ways. Do these tensions signal that our model is too simple? Could a more sophisticated model account for the data without invoking a Cosmological Constant?

Speaker abstracts will be available closer to the meeting date. Meeting papers will be published in a future issue of Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A.

There are abstracts of the presentations, but no details.

I guess, if I were really interested, I'd search Ariv for papers by the relevant names, but I'm not that enthused. I've got better things to do this evening.

Yeah, I'm hunting around the RS's website looking for some information about this meeting ... to find it has gone down the cracks. Their programme of meetings covers 25th Apr onwards, while the Grauniad item talks about "this week's meeting" ... and if it's going at the moment, then the videos won't be on YT, yet. (The most recent RS video is "Dr Anthony Fauci on the lessons from AIDS and COVID-19 , 1.6K views, 4 days ago"). (Not a particularly engaging set of lectures. The RI is better.)

The named organiser (https://www.physics.ox.ac.uk/our-people/sarkar) ... doesn't have anything on his website.

He's trying to play some "Say you don't have an argument without saying 'I don't have an argument' " game?

The Triassic wasn't particularly "lush". With Pangaea barely getting started on it's pre-breakup LIP and rifting, most of the Earth's continents were far form any oceans to produce moist air and rainfall, making it, on average, a fairly arid period.

Also, most oil deposits are considerably younger than the Triassic.

Oh look, it's the "it's to hard qq" crew. Go back home nobody needs your doomer shit

That's for the entire bay, though? San Francisco the city only needs about 14 miles of seawall. Then it's another 50+ miles to San Jose, and 65+ miles up to Richmond point. I would imagine each city will tackle the problem different as they're in different counties, different soil types and most importantly different elevations

Yeah I've played that game. It breaks every week or two, when Autodesk releases a new update, and then you're stuck without a solution while you wait for an unpaid developer to fix it sometime in the next month

And remember right now is the LEAST capable this technology will ever be

People arguing about grades of steel on "one weird trick to make the PERFECT knife out of a cast iron skilet, EDC" video 7,363,983

The Netherlands have proven without question that you can build and maintain sea walls for centuries at marginal cost to the economy. Building a seawall is very straightforward and a seawall of any length can be built in under a decade.

The only reason I still have a windows machine is for the exceedingly rare game that doesn't work on proton/steam, and more importantly, Fusion 360, although browser-based OnShape apparently is pretty good if you have a computer/GPU that can make it run smoothly (they both use the same licensed "kernel" that almost all CAD software uses)

But a bigger problem is risk of a "Mars pandemic". There could be microbes on Mars that Earth life has no immunity to.

Meh.

If there is life on Mars, and if it can survive a few centuries/ million years in vacuum below the surface of a lump of rock, then samples have been raining down on Earth since the Hadean. Despite Fred Hoyle and Chandra Wickramasinghe's best efforts, nobody has yet been convinced of any cases of "Mars Flu", despite the constant (if thin) rain of such projectiles. We have found and identified hundreds, possibly thousands (I can't be bothered keeping count), of Martian meteorites, which means there are millions or billions out there on Earth's surface which haven't been identified. Yet.

If Mars had infective biota, and that can be naturally transferred between the planets, then it has already arrived here. Repeatedly.

Now, personally, I don't think it is very likely that such a transfer (of organisms)could happen, in the Solar system. And it's even less likely to happen between stellar systems. But the possibility is just possible enough that people don't get laughed at (much, in public) for suggesting that Earth life originated on Mars. It's about 99 times as likely as all Mars life having originated on Earth. But it's not quite an insane speculation - the mechanisms exist, even if the stack of probabilities against is pretty daunting.

But if you grant that possibility, then there is no way you can have that without Earth having been repeatedly inoculated with Martian organisms. Therefore, the surviving life on Earth today are descendents of survivors of, say, the last time that 96% of genera of life on Earth were wiped out. (Permo-Trias "Great Dying" Mass Extinction, I'm looking at you!) And since that "Great Dying" didn't get us (our ancestors), the next delivery of "Death from Martian Skies" is pretty unlikely to either.

(There are very good terrestrial-only explanations for the "Great Dying" - but not for all the major extinctions in the Phanerozoic Era ("Era of Evident Life"), and I'm not claiming that was the cause of that mass extinction - I'm just arguing that IF Mars had Earth-infective biota, then our ancestors have already have survived an encounter.)

I've also got a philosophical contempt for the concept of "panspermia" - but I grant that it's physical mechanisms aren't impossible, just bloody unlikely.

If you're doing sensitive, accurate measurements - such as isotope measurements to see if you've got biological processes going on - you need equipment that doesn't vibrate much, and whose parts don't move relative to each other.

That is not a recipe for launch from Earth, or the "Entry, Descent, Landing" phase of a mission, invariably described for Mars as "seven minutes of terror" (for the flight engineers).

JWST was on the drawing board for the thick end of a quarter century, and it only contains one class of instruments (optical). Now add isotope measurements (for dating), equipment for grinding and preparing thin-, thick- and polished sections of rocks. An XRF lab for heavy element analyses. An IR lab for your organic analyses (because light elements are pretty indistinct on XRF ; not enough nuclear electric field to give narrow fluorescence signals). An XRD lab for potential bio-materials, and for understanding the clay minerals.

Then freeze the instrument designs in (say) 2025 for a 2038 launch (2040 EDL). And lose access to whatever advances in analytical techniques happen between 2025 and 2040. And the option of re-analysing the samples with the incredible new techniques that will be discovered in 2050.

Since Lowell's self-delusion of being able to see an "annual wave of greening" on Mars, from Earth, we have known that any life on Mars is not as blindingly obvious as that. You don't hear much about it, but every single rock examined by a Mars rover in the last 19 years has been pored-over by a considerable number of experienced geologists (and innumerable internet wingnuts) and the total number of fossils discovered remains at a big fat zero. And that is on missions aimed and, and steered onto, interesting areas with a relatively good chance of hosting fossils.

Do you really think a "basic" analysis is going to actually answer the question? We already know that nearly 20 years of efforts have not detected any clear signs of life, and that's with some quite sophisticated tools being flown (I'd love to have a hand-lens with built-in XRF, even if it's only good to concentrations of a few hundreds of ppm.)

Try it, if it fails, send another one in 90 days with the problems fixed.

The cadence of orbital alignments between Earth and Mars is 2 years (actually, slightly over, IIRC), not 90 days. If you want to operate on a different cycle, you hugely increase your propellant costs, hence launch weights, hence overall costs.

You can fudge it to be a 21-, 22-, [...], 26- 27- month cycle at acceptable costs, but outside that, the planets, in a very literal sense, do not align for you.

Then somebody in either Engineering or Guidance really fucked-up badly.