Though sending PROMISE to the moon would leave Perseverance and Curiosity -- both of which remain active on Mars -- without an Earth-based testbed, Isaacman thinks it would be worth it. "We've had years now of experience operating the two rovers on the surface of Mars,...

But the older that Perseverance and Curiosity get the more engineering baby-sitting they will need. Repurposing the test rover risks shortening their life. Judging the need based on the first half of Mars missions is insufficient. Past 50 people need a doctor much more often. Rovers are similar.

Francis Crick calculated how long it would take for life to evolve from scratch, and concluded it would take longer than the earth has existed. In response, he developed the hypothesis of panspermia

Any such calculation is likely to be off either direction by a factor of about 10 such that the age of the Earth and age of the universe is not different enough to distinguish. And we don't know all the pathways to biogenesis such that estimating the early stages is a fuzzy art.

Panspermia is certainly a realistic possibility, as some microbes have incredible survival abilities.

Note that my early description didn't mention that the chemicals the intermediate-step proto-cells would consume and produce may be partial or full fuel for the subsequent stage(s), perhaps after being altered by the environment a bit. Having to rely on the environment to "adjust" the food supply may be why separate sub-microbes are necessary.

More evidence we need to tax the rich, they have way too much money and are chasing really stupid shit. After you have 20 yachts then #21 doesn't have the same ego kick, so you look for pie-in-sky investments.

Rumor is there's also a bubble in bubble insurance*. Does that mean it will double-pop?

* Or at least bubble hedges

It's not the highest scope in the world, but its forte is mass surveys, not resolution, so it doesn't have to try to compete with Hubble. If it finds something interesting, then another resolution-oriented scope can zoom in.

It's great for finding moving and flashing things, as it allows automated comparisons over time of most the sky. This scope might even find Planet X, although let's not call it Planet X because Elon tainted X things. Call it Planet NoElon.

People seem to think that the first living organism to evolve has to be as complex as the simplest cells we know, but more likely it was much simpler. We just don't have any living examples because such protocells probably can't compete with modern ones. The first life-forms can be slow, inefficient, inaccurate at reproducing, etc. because they had zero competition. Somebody joked "union workers evolved first!"

One interesting theory is that the first living thing(s) were actually a set of complimentary proto-cells where reproduction happened in cycled stages say: A to B to C back to A, because self-replicating is hard to get right in a single step. Each stage may have fed off different chemicals. Eventually they evolved into a single unit.

If Musk can be in the space-car-socNet-Borg-terraform-botfarm* biz, then Zuck can be in the socNet-VR-botfarm biz.

* Did I miss any?

That's generally what JavaScript was supposed to be: a glue language that does things like call a GUI engine, it wasn't designed to BE the goddam GUI engine.

sit in the damned dark and accept your punishment for greed and ignorance!

If somebody put the open-source models on an AI server farm(s) and charged only based on what it costs to host and serve them, would the income cover the server farm?

It's nearly impossible to test that right now because it would be competing with subsidized services.

And matrix chips tend to wear out quicker than CPU's, meaning higher replacement costs.

Middle-range strike drones are much cheaper than JDAMs (smaller payload, but you don't care about that against trucks), longer range, and let you operate in fully contested airspace or even when the enemy has air superiority.

Aerial bombs are for entirely different purposes; they're for destroying fortified positions. Whether the aircraft should be manned or not is an entirely separate question, but one thing is unambiguous, it needs to be big enough to carry said bomb (aerial bombs are very heavy).

But again, complete overkill for a transport vehicle.

"the manager" lol you sound like you work at a gas station

Re, the terrain of Donbas: compare, at the same zoom level:

Donbas

To a stereotypically flat place in the US, like, say:

Kansas

Unless you mean the "Smoky Hills" of Kansas:

Smoky Hills

Though their relief is only about 2/3rds that of that in Donbas. Donbas's relief is more like that of the Piedmont Province (the area west of the Appalachians), the dissected till-plains of southern Iowa / northern Missouri, the Tennessee / Kentucky western highland rim, or the low glaciated plateaus of the northeastern US (NE. Pennsylvania to southern NY).

It's not as forested as it used to be, but still has sizable patches left, such as along the Siversky Donetsk, mainly pine. Maybe the area east of the Appalachians would be a good reference for the mix of farmland with residual forest patches (well more than midwest states like e.g. Kansas). Defensive lines are commonly built in the forested areas, for greater cover.

Oh, and also (re: NERA) worth noting that there would be a brief boost in energy transfer to the generated gas from cell discharge. You wouldn't come close to fully discharging a cell (that requires lithium diffusion), but it can effectively instantaneously discharge the double-layer capacitance at the electrode-electrolyte interfaces, and very rapidly oxidize lithium at the anode surface (such as the SEI) / reduce species at the cathode. So in a way, not an entirely non-reactive armour, and somewhat reminiscent of the reactive-but-not-explosive NERA variants where they mix nitrate salts into the elastomer to make the reaction more energetic and gas-generating.

It seems that the most effective "drone defense" thusfar has been "moving in small groups or individually, at night or in bad weather, and then hiding in a basement until there's enough people / supplies to push further".

It's clear that armoured vehicle design needs to change. But hangar/turtle tanks hardly seem a durable approach either (even in Ukraine their use has fallen off). I'm still very much a believer in hybrid armoured vehicles, where you have a battery pack with several dozen km of range, and one or more generators powering it.

From a direct survivability perspective, if you use a non-flammable li-ion chemistry (there are plenty, it just means sacrificing some energy density - still requires managed venting / air control systems, however) and have cells in parallel connected by multiple busses, spread out across the vehicle's footprint, it becomes almost impossible to take out the entire power supply, just individual cells. Likewise, since electric motors are compact, you can have 1-2 motors on each axle, and again it becomes almost impossible for a drone to get a mobility kill that way (reducing approaches only to trying to disable the tracks themselves). If they take out the generator/generators, the vehicle still has its electric power to fall back on, and while it's not going to be making some deep push anymore, it can still keep fighting, and retreat when needed.

From an indirect survivability perspective, you have the ability to advance silently when needed (no engine noise, greatly reduced thermal signature), and since modern batteries have so much power density, you have the ability to have a higher top speed, which has proven critical for safety in drone-dense environments. You also have a lot of electrical power, for drone-detecting radars, drone jammers, anti-drone weaponry (lasers, microwave, etc), and so forth.

The mass and volume of the battery pack (we're talking maybe ~250kWh for a rugged heavy armoured offroad tracked vehicle, ~60kWh that for a lighter-armoured road-optimized vehicle) isn't wasted. Cell cans are steel, and between the inner plate and outer armour you're basically forming a honeycomb structure (good for dissipating shocks and spray) with a lot of thermal capacity (cells are organics, e.g. generally high specific heats). With a proper design, you might even be able to get it to function as non-explosive reactive armour. Specifically, contrary to misconceptions that NERA requires elasticity, NERA works instead by a vapor pressure-bulging effect: the interlayer vaporizes and expands violently outward, causing bending of the metal plates it's sandwiched between, so the incoming metal jet is constantly hitting a different location as the bending progresses. NERA normally uses, but does not in any way require, elastomers for this role, simply because they're easiest to package between metal layers, but a properly engineered battery pack should be able to serve the same role. In NERA, you want as much gas pressure generated as rapidly as possible; the copper plasma jet effectively instantly converts e.g. ethylene carbonate, graphite, etc to gaseous CO2, H2O, etc (plus vaporized metals along with the vaporized steel). The keys that matters are that cells that (A) cells that are in parallel are distributed throughout the footprint of the vehicle (not concentrated in a single location), (B) shared buses create multiple distinct parallel paths between the cells within a given parallel group, and to the next series group; and (C) (required for any NERA) that generated gases are properly vented / handled.

A number of next-generation armoured vehicle designs are pursuing hybrid propulsion.