While it is an enormous problem, possibly the most significant, we know how to shield against radiation, but it's going to take mass in the form of hydrogen-rich molecules like water or polyethylene (as examples). To solve that problem we are either going to have to make launches a lot cheaper, or figure out how to do it all in orbit.

It's at the edge of our technological capacity to produce such a spacecraft now, so the barrier is economic. That's a massive barrier, but in theory we definitely could, if we put a significant percentage of GDP of the wealthiest nations towards the project, produce a spacecraft that keep astronauts alive and relatively protected from ionizing radiation both on the journey and while on Mars.

As to your general assholery, I guess everyone has to have an outlet, though why Slashdot is a bit mysterious.

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.

This debate has been going on for at least a couple of decades. I remember back in the Usenet days, when AOL and other early ISP users first started showing up in droves with whacked out untraceable bang paths that people were trying to sort out technical solutions, usually involving some servers tarpitting some domains, with the inevitable consequence that valid users (by whatever definition any given Usenet group had) were blocked.

In a way, AI bots aren't any different than the spam problem on fax machines and email; universal low-barrier delivery meets large scale programmatic swill. AI allows complexity that earlier spambots couldn't dream of, when the most sophisticated way of defeating filters was spelling "porn" as "pr0n" and a bit of header fuckery. In the end there is only two ways to go; either do what filtering you can and accept some degree of false positives, or go to identification systems that will, one way or the other, compromise anonymity, because make no mistake, once you start storing any kind of data linking an account to an actual human being; biometric, picture ID, phone number, mailing address or whatever, it won't take long for the court order to show up demanding you hand over all the de-anonymized account data to find the person distributing child porn, drugs, or calling their local political representative dirty names.

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.

Neo and Android-based Chromebooks, and "good-enough" Office alternatives like Google Docs and I would argue even LibreOffice (I use it almost exclusively these days), mean Microsoft is suffering a differentiation crisis. They'll likely have the corporate lock for some time to come, though they've managed to fuck up Outlook so badly that I have to be wondering if the only thing really keeping the big guys locked in as Teams at this point.

MS's ability to leverage Windows as the platform is decaying, and the "bells and whistles" approach has managed to alienate a lot of users. People are at the point where they use Windows because they have to, but there's enough platform-agnostic functionality out there that the old lock-ins they relied on to keep Windows dominant are becoming more like prisons for their own development teams.

I know MacOS has its critics, and in its own way it has its UI lock in, but after using it now for four years, and my use of Windows now being reduced to an RDP session at work, I have to say the experience overall has been pretty pleasant and productive. The lack of update nagging, the sheer horsepower of Apple Silicon, an actual *nix prompt instead of WSL, printing that isn't an absolute shitshow (and this is saying something because Windows used to be the reigning heavyweight champion of plug and play printer handling).

Windows 11 is its own type of hell, and every time I'm forced to use it I find it a slow, bloated, unintuitive mess. It feels like Windows 7 if you had let your 12 year old kid download a whole bunch of dubious software and now the desktop and taskbar do strange things while spam spontaneously appears. If someone had shown me Windows 11 fifteen years ago I would have gone "Holy shit man, your Windows 7 machine has been rootkitted!"

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).

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

100%!

With the caveat that I'd not say lunar regolith is"like asbestos". Asbestos is unusually hazardous because it splits mainly along its long axis, so its fibres tend to get thinner and thinner over time (unlike, say, glass or carbon fibre, which tend to split transverse across the fibre). This turns asbestos into tiny needles that make it deep into the lungs, immune cells try to engulf them, fail and die, and then trigger an immune cascade in response. It's also not really the same as classic silicosis, either - on Earth we deal mainly with crystalline silica, but lunar regolith is mainly amorphous, which is less fibrogenic. It's less likely to cause long-term health issues and is less long-term stable (good), but the flip side to that is it's highly short-term irritating - not just from being fine and jagged, but also because (having not been exposed to moisture or the atmosphere) it's highly reactive.

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

Well, it's take ;)

There is no reason to celebrate the existence of perchlorates on Mars. Also, I have no idea where you got the idea that perchlorates break down in water. Perchlorates are highly stable in water. Unusually stable relative to their high oxidation potential. It takes a lot of activation energy to break the chlorine-oxygen bonds. Which is how perchlorates long-term contaminate aquifers (even on Earth where microbes could potentially help decontaminate them - indeed, in the human body, the vast majority of the perchlorate that you consume leaves the body unchanged). Mars ice should be expected to be utterly loaded with perchlorates.

(Also, for the record, what we've found at least thusfar is not really "ice" as one may commonly think about it, it's probably better to refer to it as "permafrost" - lots of mineral grains in it)

potentially useful mineral dust to use hydroponically,

Mineral "dust" is very much what you don't want with hydroponics. With hydroponics you want a balance between aeration and water. Fine dusts offer basically no aeration. That would be a pot of rot (beyond being a health hazard to workers and consumers). Most hydroponics on Earth is done with things like rock wool, pumice, sand, that sort of stuff. So long as what you're using isn't toxic, you can use pretty much anything in hydroponics, so long as the particle size is reasonable (with a lot of flexibility, up to and including aeroponics - aka no growth medium at all - but never so dense / fine particles that the roots can't breathe).

(Different media offer different properties - coarser = better aeration but need to water more often & more vulnerable to temporary watering outages, for example. Some, like pumice and sand, are mostly reusable with cleaning / sterilization, whereas you usually don't reuse rock wool as its degradation is usually more than growers want to deal with)

That was a choice

Oh come on. What percentage of modern game sales are of games where the authors deliberately attempted to make it look bad? The overwhelming majority push for realism. And even for those that don't push for realism, almost none of those deliberately push for "looking like subpar or outdated CG".

If you want to jump back 5-10 years in gaming technology, you're free to, but the market does not agree.

. The problem here is that offloading design to AI like this makes everything look the same.

Unlike unnaturally smooth shading, poor lighting models, and limited texture resolution?

There is nothing fundamental about what AI can or can't make things look like. Anyone who has spent time with a modern image generation model (say, Nano Banana 2) knows that the only meaningful limit to what it can create is the limits of what you can imagine. To the degree that DLSS 5 might be too limited**, it's something that would be tuned out of future models, in cooperation with game devs (large game dev firms maintain good communication with hardware manufacturers like NVidia). Beyond model changes, it would be easy enough, for example, to let game devs add textual guidance for DLSS.

** I don't think your diagnosis of the problem is likely to be correct. I have zero doubt DLSS 5 can produce uneasy, disgust-inducing brown-foggy scenes - rather, it looks to me like it failed to detect that that was the goal here. Which again, is something that can be fixed in two ways: better models, and textual guidance.