I hate all of this sales pressure BS - that the instant anyone hears your name you have to try to "convert" them to sales - and I literally run a webstore.

It's all so deeply anti-consumer, and I want no part in it.

But the positive things I or others do, shouldn't be a requirement to criticize an decrees in public funding for those things, or the lack of personal charity. Say what you want about Gates, he does appear to be incredibly creepy, however at least he has given huge chunks of money away and I hope he continues to do that.

Personally, More than any financial adviser says is prudent, given my income level. I used to be hands on in the trenches, but funding was bad, so I figured the better way was to work for much more money and donate to the hands on charities doing the work.

Firstly, I see you have this notion that martian rocks must all be igneous.

You're not talking about rock, you're talking about regolith.

Depending on where the regolith is sourced

Regolith is not "sourced", it's blown across the whole planet. It's not simply "whatever the underlying strata is made out of".

But, since we are playing 'name the ignorance' in this exchange, your attestation stat perchlorate is 0.5% liberatable oxygen says 'Say i'm ignorant of basic chemistry without saying i'm ignorant of basic chemistry, and am bad at reading too.' The 0.5% statistic comes from the publication at bottom, and is the proportion of the regolith that is perchlorates.

I am the one who mentioned that regolith is 0.5% perchlorates, not that "perchlorates are 0.5% oxygen". *facepalm*

"Saying we'll get oxygen from the 0,5-1% of a poison in martian regolith, rather than bulk ice or CO2, is..."

For God's sake, learn to fucking read.

Washing the regolith to remove the perchlorate is a requirement for *any* other use of that regolith

Which is why you shouldn't be celebrating its existence. It is a problematic contaminant, not a resource.

As you have rightly pointed out, the water ice on mars is more 'frozen mud'. Cleaning the melt is going to be a necessary first step to using it *regardless*. That means either vacuum distillation, thermal distillation, or reverse osmosis filtration. Again, NOT OPTIONAL. This is necessary equipment that you need to bring, regardless.

And this just to get water, the most basic of offworld resources. And all of that equipment (especially the mining hardware itself) requires maintenance and spare parts, which impose more dependencies. And the TRL for use on Mars is low regardless.

You've gone from talking up the ease of operating on Mars to talking it down, yet your self-righteousness hasn't shifted at all in the process.

RO filtration is the least energy intensive of these.

Except, it isn't. 0,5-1% perchlorates. RO typically removes 90-95% of perchlorates. So you're down to ~500ppm. Human safety levels** are in the low parts per billion. You're five orders of magnitude off. Yes, you can purify water that far - and the more perchlorates, the easier - but you're talking an over millionfold reduction. It is not at all trivial. You're talking first RO to get it down to levels where it won't hinder bacterial growth, then bioreactor bacterial remediation, then filtration, then RO, then ion exchange. This is not some little, simple system.

** Plants can tolerate much more perchlorates than humans, but they also bioaccumulate perchlorates of exposed to them, so you have to reduce the water to low ppb levels.

The end products are clean water and perchlorate contaminated mud, and clean mud, with contaminated water.

Viola! *eyeroll*

And your "plan" for dealing with waste perchlorate doesn't just magically produce pure O2 and NaCl in the real world. First off, molten sodium perchlorate, which is what it becomes before it decomposes, is an extremely corrosive oxidizer. Exactly what are you planning to make the furnace out of, platinum? Secondly, you never get perfect decomposition. Apart from residual perchlorates, you have residual sodium chlorate, which is also corrosive, and is a literal herbicide. And your gas stream will contain contaminant chloride and chlorine dioxide, which, news flash, you don't want to breathe.

There is no way on Earth anyone would ever prefer this to just conducting electrolysis on the water that you've already purified.

What were the "Horrifying ways" exactly? Getting a judge to issue a warrant? Thats obviously a precedent that the government has turned away from using.

Ok Snowden referenced, can we clear the air with him finally? He stole some information and had the guts to divulge it at high personal cost to himself. Great Good and Great. But don't fucking listen to any thing he has to say outside of it. He fled to Russia, which, if it is better at personal liberties than the United states, its only because it doesn't have more money to institute more surveillance. He has no great insight. He did a good thing, that doesn't make him president of doing good things, and certainly not a God like figure others hold him up to be.

Here here, agreed. Good thing all the libertarians who really valued personal freedom guaranteed in the constitution backed the one person who absolutely did not value any of the constitution at all. Good job principled conservatives You see when you say you believe something, you have to actually act on those beliefs and not just use them as a shield for your rampant xenophobic, misogynic, racist beliefs.

What!!! Sam Altman not following through with a promise!?! A legal one at that ?!?! Just screwing people over when ever it suits him?!? Crazy times when you can't trust the guy no one trusts at all and was fired over his blatant lies.

No man, you just aren't on enough LSD to understand. AI on planes, like Autopilot on cars but for planes! They can be like self flying, except for the take off and landing. Those will be real coming soon, probably in two months in Full Self Flying Beta, but will require a pilot to have his hands on the controls at all times and cost $200,000 a month per plane pilot combination. Now Full Self Flying un assisted can will be by the end of the year, pending regulatory approval which we've been told will absolutely happen. Then Full Self Flying, look ma no hands edition will be early next year. Then Full self flying, no pilot in seat q2 next year. Then Full self flying no pilot in cockpit in q3. Then full self flying no pilot secretly flying from the back of plan in q4. Before the final full self flying no "pilot" on same plane, but qualified flight director disguised as mid flight entertainment clown and "playing the part of some one flying the plane". the following year.

It's worth noting that Nikola wasn't his first scam, either.

YOO-HOO

He's also a sleasebag who has been credibly accused of sexual assault by three women (and in general being a sex pest to many more). When a former friend (Jonny Robb) threatened to out him over it (it had been gnawing at him for a long time, and he was friends with some of the girls), Milton entrapped him (deliberately switching the topic to money, baiting him into asking for money to stay quiet, knowing that he was poor), then when he got Robb to ask for money, reported him into the police for extortion. Robb - his old friend - committed suicide after being released on bail. Milton rained largesse on local politicians, including the Attorney General's campaign. Milton was never investigated by the AG's office for sexual assault, while they arrested Robb immediately just on Milton's word.

I've talked with people online who knew Jonny Robb, and the universal answer was that he was the kindest person you'd ever meet. He had a hard life, struggled through overcoming depression and addiction, and had a lot of sympathy for others who were struggling as a result. I saw a podcast once where he was a guest, and I remember one of the topics was about a recent event where he was at a fast food restaurant, and there was a homeless lady, clearly mentally ill / schizophrenic, who was in general freaking out the guests and the staff, who didn't know what to do with her, and were probably minutes from calling the police. Robb orders for both himself and for her and sits down and eats with her, chats with her. She's having a great time, having not gotten attention like this in ages, starts joking that he's her boyfriend, etc. After they eat, he walks her out, much to the relief of the guests and staff, heads to a store and buys her a new sleeping bag and stuff. And she looks both simultaneously happy with her nice new stuff, but also terrified, and he suddenly realizes, oh shit, other homeless people are just going to steal this off her. And during the interview, he looked almost like he was going to cry when he said that.

Anyway, he's dead now.

I literally have a BA in horticulture. Regolith is NOT a good choice for hydroponics. Period. Stop trying to pretend it is one. Also, regolith has nothing to do with "shales", and it's not clay minerals either.

The closest thing to industrial hydroponics with it is using it to make rock wool (if the elemental composition is correct) - but you can also use, you know, rocks for that. Rock wool (basalt fibre) is basically air blown / centrifugally-flung lava (artificial Pele's hair) that has been spun. Rock wool actually *is* a common and effective cultivation medium for hydroponic (with the caveat that its reusability is limited, and on Earth we usually don't bother). The problem is that rock wool isn't just basalt. It's basalt + limestone/slag + binders (sprayed into the air to collect and bind the fibres) + other chemical treatments. You may be able to substitute anorthosite or similar for the limestone, but the binders aren't available, so you'd have to come up with new techniques to collect the fibres and make a "knitted" or "sintered" rock wool. As for other chemicals, the full composition of horticultural rock wool usually isn't disclosed (each manufacturer has their own optimal formula to be an ideal substrate), but you generally have to treat the fibres in various ways (as an example, for insulation, which has very different demands, they treat the rock wool with mineral oil)

The statement about bassalt fiber is not meant to be taken in a horticultural context.

"Tell me you've never been in a commercial-scale greenhouse without telling me you've never been in a commercial-scale greenhouse"

Those greenhouse tomatoes that you buy at a store out of season? They're probably grown like this. A TL/DR for you: you start out with rock wool (basalt fibre) plug trays to start your seedlings. You then put one seedling plug each into larger rectangular blocks of rock wool that have holes in the centre for them. When they're ready, you put them into a bagged slab of rock wool (usually a couple per bag), and that's what you produce from. You only maintain a small number of vines from each, regularly pruning off all internode suckers, as you have a fixed space between plants and a fixed amount of root volume so can't have them be expanding outwards (the fixed amount of root volume also means that you have to prune lower leaves to maintain balance). Your vines keep getting longer (and need to to produce more flower/fruit clusters), so when they get to the top of your wire, you incrementally slide them over until they're growing more and more horizontally. When you can no longer slide them over any more or they simply get too long, you remove the plants, toss the rock wool slabs, and start over.

And lastly, if your plan to deal with perchlorates from water is *literally splitting the water with electrolysis*, then you better stop celebrating the existence of this poison on Mars (one poison among many, it should be added - arsenic is higher than on Earth, chromium is commonly hexavalent, etc).

Yeah, I have some minor complaints. But overall it seems like a huge improvement in many cases. I think its best summed up in the summary

New Blood Interactive founder and CEO Dave Oshry, adding that future generations "won't even know this looks 'bad' or 'wrong' because to them it'll be normal."

Oh Noes! future generations will like different things than Me. NOOOOOOOOOOO!!!! The kids must like what I want them to like!

I've never read it. Does he have three robot daughters?