Recent comments in /f/space

Underhill42 t1_j5vs4at wrote

I think a big issue was simply that using an NTP on Earth is a really, really bad idea - I seem to recall hearing of an idea from that era of flying one over the USSR to essentially carpet-dirty-bomb them into submission.

And off Earth... we haven't had any national interest in doing that. The moon race was good cold-war propaganda and ritualized combat... bringing nukes into it was exactly what we were trying to avoid. Going to other planet's though? Where's the profit, power, or security in that? Especially after determining that the moon was just a big dead rock we were nowhere close to being ready to usefully colonize, and photos from the 1965 Mariner mission established that Mars was probably the same.

Yeah, the long-term dreams are inspirational - but it's likely to be generations before anything except mostly-automated asteroid mining (which was completely out of reach at the time) will be able to turn a profit, and colonialism is all about getting rich. Not having your great-grandkids get rich, assuming they can even maintain a position to cash out on your investment rather than someone else's grandkids being the ones to do so.

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Omnitographer t1_j5vr8sp wrote

I could see growing mushrooms for primary food source like The Expanse's "kibble", but having us live like some kind of Seleno Kabouter Plop village seems a bit far fetched.

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Captain_Quidnunc t1_j5vqu26 wrote

I know exactly what I mean.

Do you?

First off, mass has nothing to do with volume.

Nobody is quite sure what causes mass. But it absolutely is not volume. The two are not connected in any way other than taking shortcuts to estimate the mass of 3+ dimensional objects by assuming a fixed volume of a given substance has a fixed mass.

You are trying to apply the rules of baking a cake to physics at the cosmological scale. It just doesn't work that way.

And yes. Two dimensional objects don't have what we consider thickness. That's what makes them 2 dimensional.

Neither do black holes. Feel free to try to calculate the thickness of a black hole. Or the thickness of anything in it.

Go for it. Try to calculate the 3+ dimensional "space" between any two known or proposed particles in the presence of the gravitational forces observed in black holes.

Please show where all the Z vectors and time dependent values end up.

By the way...what force are you proposing that can maintain a Z distance between these particles?

In opposition to the known gravitational forces present in black holes?

The electromagnetic repulsion from electrons that normally maintains Z?

Past the event horizon?

Electrons?

Repelling with sufficient force to overcome the gravitational forces present?

And this is exactly what the latest information from gravitational wave study and hawking radiation says as well. That a black hole is what it means to observe and attempt to measure an infinitely (or near infinitely) massive 2 dimensional object from 4+ dimensional space.

It also probably means that everything "in" a black hole is pure data that somehow maintains mass or mass like gravitational effects on 4+ dimensional space. But again, we don't know what causes mass. Or gravity for that matter.

It's really weird compared to average observations of reality at human scale. But so is the fact that all protein expression is completely dependent on shape.

And who knows, maybe 50 years from now we will have a completely different and clearer understanding of black holes. But the current, best, approximation of reality is this. However weird it is.

Hell, when I was a kid the best Nobel laureates in physics and cosmology said black holes were fairy tales.

So nothing much would surprise me.

But this "finding" seems more like an exploration of what is mathematically possible, than an attempt to observe and describe reality in a better way.

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Underhill42 t1_j5vq0w5 wrote

No reason to launch anything significantly radioactive. It's the waste you have to worry about, the fission fuel itself is (comparatively) safe. It has to be, if it were seriously radioactive it wouldn't still exist after almost 5 billion years in the ground.

Still not exactly *safe*, but so long as you stay well away from critical mass the heavy metal poisoning will probably do more damage than the radiation.

And I think I recall hearing that NASA is moving strongly away from using legacy pre-physics units for anything, in large part because it opens the door to stupid conversion errors like that, and someone inevitably walks through.

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SFDinKC t1_j5vnr4y wrote

I was working at Morton Thiokol as a preliminary design engineer when the Challenger accident happened. I had only been there 3 months and it was my first job out of college. I remember a lot more talk on that morning being about how Al McDonald was going to get fired as soon as the shuttle made orbit for not signing off on the flight readiness statement the night before. In the few weeks after the disaster I heard more about Boisjoly. Mostly how people thought he was starting to have a nervous breakdown because he felt so bad that he was unable to get NASA to take the o-ring cold issue seriously enough in the months leading up to the launch.

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SpectralMagic t1_j5vlnsc wrote

I can just imagine some space base with mycelium sprouting out from between the modular wall panels. I think this is a bit unrealistic since mycelium is pretty much always alive, like the whole thing is a seed. So unless you kill it and make it leave behind a husk it's just going to cause trouble.

I'm actually just making a biased opinion/guess here, so I'm certain I'm only half correct, but yea I don't see this being a true solution when other expanding/growing insulation also works

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dromni t1_j5vi3dt wrote

Bad idea. The Last of Us told me that eventually the shroom buildings will mutate and assimilate the human dwellers, converting them into monstrosities connected by a hive mind.

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