Recent comments in /f/space

jetstobrazil t1_j2ehi5x wrote

Lol I don’t have a want for anything to be true, only to know what is.

My comment was based on scale. To say the Milky Way is the only galaxy known to contain life is true. But only to us, who have done very little in the way of exploring, know very little about what could possibly be out there, have an extremely limited number of resources to use to even begin to search for life, and have only barely begun to use them to do so.

Out of the millions of galaxies, the billions of stars and planets, which could potentially contain life, we have barely searched 2 planets with rovers, and have only searched for alien life through radio waves otherwise.

What I’m saying is we are trying to find a needle in a haystack, have done a once over of a single straw of hay next to us, and declared there are no needles in this haystack.

1

ninehundreddolarydos t1_j2eh8ec wrote

The article says they propose building a large ring of solar panels above the 88th parallel, so enough solar panels to always have half in sunlight and half in darkness.

I think fission is much more sensible.

114

athomasflynn t1_j2egtpu wrote

I completely agree. I thought about it for the first time 5 or 6 years ago when they were talking about 3D printing habs. I had a giant 3D printer (100x100x150cm) that I would run nylon through and it used more power than the rest of the building it was in. I couldn't see the practicality of 3D printing with local materials in an environment where energy efficiency was key. It didn't make sense. But if the energy was essentially free, instead of 3D printing they could essentially build a solar powered CNC machine.

Living underground makes more sense anyway. They need all the radiation shielding that they can get. Put the water supply on the roof above the living spaces and they'd be even safer.

There's a reason Musk started his boring company.

11

SenateLaunchScrubbed t1_j2egaps wrote

>That's why I said it's uncertain at best, at which point you replied that you're certain. Obviously we can't look into alternate realities so I don't know why you'd reply that you'd be certain.

Because we have history. We've seen what happened previously to other developments the government didn't mess with, and the private market doesn't drop things like the government does. It doesn't find something new and then puts it on the backburner for years. The government does. All the WWII up to Apollo progress was then made up by decades of stagnation.

>I gave specific examples, fusion power

That has gone nowhere and will most likely never go anywhere.

>and space travel

Which was in the hands of private individuals before, until the government took over, and then they took care that nothing happened in it for decades, and only now we're rescuing it from the government's incompetent hands.

>"Governments destroyed the world"? It really feels like I'm getting into a political argument here with no clue what your politics are. Government and private industry aren't blood enemies in some epic battle of good vs evil, most of the time they work hand-in-hand to build a functioning society with pros and cons of each. The pros of government funding is that they'll fund advanced technology long before any private investor would.

The government is everyone's enemy. There are no pros to government funding other than cronyism and corruption.

1

cartoonist498 t1_j2efp6z wrote

That's why I said it's uncertain at best, at which point you replied that you're certain. Obviously we can't look into alternate realities so I don't know why you'd reply that you'd be certain.

I gave specific examples, fusion power and space travel, where government bootstrapped the research and development 50 years before any private investor would touch it. At any point during the last half century a private investor could have taken the reigns but that never happened.

"Governments destroyed the world"? It really feels like I'm getting into a political argument here with no clue what your politics are. Government and private industry aren't blood enemies in some epic battle of good vs evil, most of the time they work hand-in-hand to build a functioning society with pros and cons of each. The pros of government funding is that they'll fund advanced technology long before any private investor would.

2

mrod9191 t1_j2eeprp wrote

How are the solar panels producing more power if the lunar night is 14 days long? Does that mean during the lunar day the solar panels are producing more than double the power than the nuclear reactor?

105

SenateLaunchScrubbed t1_j2eeji9 wrote

But that isn't a fair assessment. The world was in chaos during the entirety of WWI, and then afterwards with the great depression, and afterwards because of WWII. So it was a messy time, bad for business. Governments destroyed the world, and your argument is "but private industry wasn't doing so well back then".

0

Apokolypze t1_j2ee7mg wrote

No shit, I was merely saying it probably gave off some microwave energy. Blasting the surface with microwaves to scienmagically make a landing pad is hypothetical.

3

SenateLaunchScrubbed t1_j2ee4fq wrote

And that proves what? That's how the free market works. Some succeed, some don't. The Wright brothers made many mistakes when it came to business. The thing is, their failure wasn't the failure of the industry. Plenty of other manufacturers quickly showed up, and started selling planes like crazy. The wright brothers models where more expensive, and less well marketed.

0

cartoonist498 t1_j2ee0uf wrote

> stalled progress for decades.

You're just making this up. It's pretty much the consensus that World War 2 advanced human technology by leaps and bounds in a way that wouldn't have happened without it.

Unless you're arguing that the private sector would have increased advancement by the same amount, or even anywhere close to the same amount, the rest of what you're saying is built on a house of cards and what seems like a hatred of government funding that's unfair to bring up because it's not based on logic.

Space travel being difficult is the reason it took so long, not government bureaucracy. I'm not seeing your POV which is basically saying humans would already be on Mars if it wasn't for the government. In no reality would that have happened.

The same example you provided, SpaceX, disproves your point that an impenetrable oligopoly is always the end result because a brand new company has entered to challenge the big players in the space launch industry and successfully disrupted the market, and probably will become a leader in the industry by later this decade.

And all this progress built on the back of 70 years of government funding long before any private investor would touch it.

4

Zee2A OP t1_j2edbys wrote

Solar power can offer a superior alternative to nuclear fission for generating oxygen on the moon .This would require "six times less mass to produce the same amount of energy" as the best nuclear option, says the professor: https://interestingengineering.com/science/solar-power-generating-oxygen-moon

Study Published in March 2022: 'Uninterrupted photovoltaic power for lunar colonization without the need for storage' : https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0960148122001550

0

khanzarate t1_j2ecyao wrote

Well if you’re gonna be that bitter about it maybe you better just not, and jerk yourself off on how much of a waste of time it would’ve been, instead of actually trying.

Literally the only result of commenting how you wouldn’t waste your time here.

14