I wish "Science Journalist" was a thing

It is a thing. There are ... about 4 or 5 on each of "Nature" and Science ; maybe 10 times that many in the rest of the science press (American Scientist, Scientific American, New Scientist, Sky and Telescope. Geoscientist's journalist (and editor retired about 5 years ago and wasn't replaced. Guess the global population is a few dozen. Median age probably in their 50s or 60s. Recruitment - close to nil. Profitability, nil.

Ah - there's the problem. Profitability. If "profit" is the driving force in your publication model, yes journalism is extinct.

Phil Plait - yeah, him and Ethan Segal (used to post here as "StartswithABang") are the "recruits" in the astronomy field ; a couple of other contenders trying to mix it with being actual research scientists (one just dropped off the scene - cancer).

The patient isn't dead, but the prognosis is not optimistic.

See my comment a little up-thread. Keyword : "petrological" - I doubt that has appeared in any other posts in this thread.

Annealing itself is pretty well understood. It's effect on radiation damage in electronics, less so. They'll also be working at the "low-T, long-t" end of materials science, whereas metalworkers (and metamorphic petrologists) tend to work more at the higher-T end of the range. Though we geologists tend to go to "long-t" too - million year exsolution of iron phases in a cooling asteroid core? I'll just get a sample. So, yeah, it's a less-explored space. But obviously useful. It'll be an experimental hole that gets sketched in pretty damned quick.

Of course, it's not without risk. The process works by moving atoms around to allow defects - both radiation damage and atoms that don't quite fit the crystalline structure. But that precise patterning of, particularly "atomic defects (a.k.a. dopants) are exactly what turns semiconductor crystals into electronic components. It literally was a "this will cure it or destroy it" effort. As you could tell by them working the system close to unusability before trying to fix it.

[Trump-cultist voice] Serves them pinko-commie-subresives right for scaring Amerikuh with warnings about climate change from space-based globally uniform data sets. Every MAGA know that if you don't measure it, it doesn't exist.

I'm slightly surprised he didn't shut down the whole agency. That's probably next year's plan.

Nope. Annealing a material has been a way of getting defects to realign and "relax" since ... probably about 4000 BP. Even before the bronze age combined arsenic ores and copper ores (later replacing arsenic with tin smelted off-site) to make bronze, copper was being used as a structural metal and the Egyptians learned there was a sweet spot between being "fresh from the forge" (relatively soft), through lightly "work hardened" before it became excessively work hardened, and fractured. When it would need re-melting and re-casting. If you got it in the sweet spot, you'd get optimal hardness, most usage, and putting it at the edge of the forge to a barely-red heat would restore it to "fresh from the forge". But if you took it too far and fractured the entire tool, you'd have to heat it to an orange-yellow heat and re-cast the whole tool.

Annealing is a subtle materials science trick which people have been working on for over 4000 years. Just under 200 years ago the metallurgical microscope (which is a mode my petrological microscope can operate in. Because, ore minerals.) allowed us to understand what was actually happening at the literally microscopic level.

Annealing's 150 K hotter brother process "zone refining" is how all these "semiconductor chip" things actually get prepared for printing the "integrated circuits" onto.

The polar-ish orbit isn't wholly responsible for the radiation problems. Jupiter's radiation environment is brutal at all (magnetic) latitudes. It's worse over the poles, but it fries electronics (and would fry people, absent a *lot* of heavy shielding).

Humans will probably walk on Titan before the walk on Ganymede. And Io-walking, being so deep into the radiation belts, is never going to compete with thermonuclear tiddlywinks as a popular pastime.

Hmmm. Which satellite is likely to give the highest yield of helium? Something with a sub-surface ocean, but which has never been hot enough to melt all the way to surface (generally).

Again, without my notebook (on the wrong logical computer) I'm back-of-the-thumbnailing, but Europa, Callisto and Ganymede all have SSOs, and Europa is the smallest, so easiest to launch from. But ... it matters if it's ice crust is thicker or thinner than Callisto's. It matters a lot.

Not just the soft goods. Almost everything that doesn't have to be metal will be plastics, because the energy costs of smelting ores to metals, then processing and forging/ casting them, are so much higher than for doing organic chemistry at non-glowing temperatures.

Outside launch from a planet or large satellite, you don't need high power or high acceleration in space. Star Wars Trek notwithstanding.

I tried but yo momma wasn't hot enough.

Unfortunately, it's at the bottom of a gravity well some (I don't have my notes to hand, thumbnailing it) 4 times deeper than Earths, which is energy you have to expend to get it "up" to interplanetary potentials. Plus the technical challenges of "scooping" the planet's atmosphere.

It'll have to compete with terrestrial sources (I see HeliumONE had a PR announcement about their Tanzania drilling programme a few days ago), as well as the byproduct stream form processing comets and "volatiles" from comets and gassier asteroids into building materials and radiation shielding. It might work, but it'll be a close-run thing.

so the only supplies are mined

Well, drilled for. Which is, yes, mining. But not in the "open cast" or deep "stopes and levels" sense. See "HeliumOne" above.

Every oil well I've done PVT, MDT or RCI testing on (damn - what did Reeves call their system?), the analyses performed once the samples got back to "town" included testing for helium content, because it has the potential to be a viable cash stream if captured at the wellhead. Separator tank, actually, but ...

Since we won't stop drilling for oil (it's too useful a chemistry feedstock) until it is literally gone, we'll always have that source too. That probably won't supply the birthday balloon market, let alone deep diving or aerospace, but it might manage to cover the medical device market, if recycled carefully.

We won't do that. It'll be the balloons.

10% is mass/mass ; for atom/ molecule count it's more like 24% He - the more commonly cited figure.

Why am I saying "we". You. And any descendants you choose to have.

What TFS (though its likely in TFP) doesn't really cover is, we don't know what the background rate of lung cancer is. That is, the rate of cancer you'd get (cases per 100,000 lifetimes, in common units) in a population not exposed to smoking or other potential causes.

I say "potential other sources" not to exonerate smoking (that argument was over before my statistics professor was a student himself) but because today, almost nobody today (in the west/ "first world") spends their lives cooking over open fires, or living with open fires for heating and cooking. While before the introduction of tobacco smoking (there were other plants used pre-Columbus, but not many, and predominantly in a "medical" context) essentially everyone lived with cooking or heating fires indoors all the time and only got "a breath of fresh air" when they went outside to hunt/ gather/ farm/.

Which would you prefer as a litelong lifestyle

• - smoking and living with gas/ electric heating and electrical lighting,
• or not smoking and living with wood- or coal-fired heating, cooking, and lighting?

Which do you think would give you a higher likelihood of contracting (not necessarily dieing-of) lung cancer?

On the upside, as a species we've probably been living with fire as a household companion for that long - upwards of a million years, 30,000+ generations - that our genomes have adapted to it's presence with enough immunological response to cancers induced by fire smoke that it didn't have a big effect on population levels. Otherwise, the populations without anti-(lung)cancer immune genes would have been out-bred by populations with better cancer-control immune genes. That's evolution for you : Simple. Brutal. Simply brutal.

The future holds the prospect that a population will develop exposed to neither tobacco smoke nor wood/ coal smoke (and we can largely discount natural gas fumes - modern burner design pushes that to either effective ventilation or lethal-overnight), which would mean humans adapting to a new, significantly different, environment.

Who knows, maybe we'll get our sense of smell back up to canine levels. Or just feline levels?

i'll see you on the other side

No you won't.

"VOCs" are "Volatile Organic Compounds" - which in many respects can be rephrased as "solvents" without much confusion. Some are natural, some are artificial.

NO2 (and it's dimer N2O4, and NO, and N2O, collectively "NOx ; they interconvert at environmentally relevant conditions and meaningful rates) is a family of moderately dangerous, sometimes natural, compounds, none of which are VOCs.

That they're both unhealthy families of materials doesn't make them members of the same class.

Question : which would you prefer as a litetime lifestyle - smoking and living with gas/ electric heating and electrical lighting, or not smoking and living with wood- or coal-fired heating, cooking, and lighting? Which do you think would give you a higher likelihood of contracting (not necessarily dieing-of) lung cancer?

Which is the difficult problem this report doesn't really address (at least, TFS doesn't ;TFP probably does, but I'm not interested enough to read the T&F link someone posted up-thread) : what was the background rate of lung cancer, before smoking became common? In (say) 1491 CE (just before Columbus) with indoor cooking on wood fires, and in 14910 BCE (pre-agriculture) with indoor or outdoor cooking on wood fires.
Actually, I'm not that sure the date matters much. By "1491 CE" much cooking took place indoors, and chimneys were probably reaching about 50% coverage. But in "14910" BCE most cooking was still "indoors" to some extent, though the walls may have been stone caves, or more often hide and/ or thatch roofs ; but you'd still have had the smoke recirculating, stinging your eyes, all day, every day.

So, before I stomp on my phone, I should find a stalk of fennel?

It was a safety feature in the wilderness. You could always start a fire

For values of "wilderness" which include "vegetation". Which even in the contiguous US is not all wilderness - there are non-trivial sandy and rocky deserts in the SW.

It's not even that reliable here in Scotland - which has abundant vegetation and even more abundant rainfall.