Great News for a Mars Colony!

eastisbest said:
then we have a right to litter it with small pox laden peace blankets.

The idea here is to avoid territorial wars.
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Why would there be territorial wars if Musk's early setters declared themselves an independent polity? Without any oceans there's a lot of room on Mars.

The reality is that almost every colony established off earth will eventually want it's independence. In fact I suspect that once space colonies become practical a lot of groups will emigrate off earth to create the unique societies that they want to live in. The tyranny of not enough room and limited resources may melt away as we expand through the Solar System.

Spouting legal gobbledygook like this author does strikes me as deeply unimaginative and overly legalistic.
 
A potentially huge issue in going to and living on Mars may have been overcome:

www.cnn.com

Scientists say they have come up with a potential way to make oxygen on Mars | CNN

While NASA wants to land astronauts on Mars at some point in the 2030s, the high-stakes mission would take years to complete and require more oxygen than a spacecraft could carry. Scientists say they might have found a solution.
www.cnn.com www.cnn.com

Transporting enough oxygen and fuel on a spacecraft to sustain the mission for anywhere near that length of time, however, isn't currently viable.

The way NASA plans to address this problem is by deploying MOXIE, or the Mars Oxygen in Situ Resource Utilization Experiment. This system is in the testing phase on the Mars Perseverance rover, which launched in July. The apparatus will convert the carbon dioxide that makes up 96% of the gas in the red planet's' atmosphere into oxygen.
 
lotr10 said:
A potentially huge issue in going to and living on Mars may have been overcome:

www.cnn.com

Scientists say they have come up with a potential way to make oxygen on Mars | CNN

While NASA wants to land astronauts on Mars at some point in the 2030s, the high-stakes mission would take years to complete and require more oxygen than a spacecraft could carry. Scientists say they might have found a solution.
www.cnn.com www.cnn.com

Transporting enough oxygen and fuel on a spacecraft to sustain the mission for anywhere near that length of time, however, isn't currently viable.

The way NASA plans to address this problem is by deploying MOXIE, or the Mars Oxygen in Situ Resource Utilization Experiment. This system is in the testing phase on the Mars Perseverance rover, which launched in July. The apparatus will convert the carbon dioxide that makes up 96% of the gas in the red planet's' atmosphere into oxygen.
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I actually watched a TV program this week that talked about MOXIE and its potential. It's definitely a start in solving the oxygen problem on Mars...or rather lack-of-oxygen.
 
lotr10 said:
Well this sucks but then again no one said it would be easy:

americanmilitarynews.com

Video: SpaceX rocket prototype explodes on landing

SpaceX’s rocket prototype Starship SN8 exploded on its first attempt landing from a highly anticipated “hop” on Wednesday afternoon. The rocket launched
americanmilitarynews.com americanmilitarynews.com
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President Reagan, after the Challenger disaster, "The future doesn’t belong to the fainthearted; it belongs to the brave."

Two things for sure: 1.) There will be more setbacks on our drive to put humans on Mars, and
2.) Like him or not, Elon Musk has giant balls. Kudos.
 
They certainly seemed happy about it all. Maybe they had an insurance write off, lol.
When the first shuttle went up, a few of us were huddled in a lab around a small tv. It started to roll, hearts went into sleeves. We didn't know it was supposed to do that. Same when SpaceX went vertical. Didn't mess either. Boom right to it. Just like in the 50s movies.
 
I think they're happy because it almost worked which at this stage of the R&D is amazing. Musk & SpaceX have never been afraid of learning from failure. In fact it's in their DNA. Here's an explanation of why this was a big win for SpaceX with some great pictures to boot:


The flight left several impressions. First, this design is viable. Though we are still looking at a prototype, it is one that works.

Second, the ship appeared to lumber into space, almost slowly. This was partly an illusion because of its size. Nonetheless, it reminded me of the 747, which always flew magnificently but with what seemed like a measured attitude. Starship appeared similar.

Third, the systems for controlling the ship on its return through the atmosphere appeared to work as intended. Though SpaceX obviously has a lot more work to do to achieve an orbital return, they have made a magnificent start.

And they have gotten this far in only two years, for less than $2 billion. Compare that to NASA and Boeing and their SLS, which is half a decade behind schedule and will likely cost $30 billion once launched.
 
Do you know how I know this guy is a crackpot? Because he claims that the government is hiding alien contact from us because we couldn't handle it. I suspect that we would handle alien contact better then we handled covid. We have been prepared through the pop culture to expect aliens to land any day now. Books, movies, TV shows and every meme imaginable tell us they're either here or coming soon.

https://www..com/omg/former-israeli-space-security-chief-says-aliens-exist-humanity-not-ready-651405
 
lotr10 said:
Do you know how I know this guy is a crackpot? Because he claims that the government is hiding alien contact from us because we couldn't handle it. I suspect that we would handle alien contact better then we handled covid. We have been prepared through the pop culture to expect aliens to land any day now. Books, movies, TV shows and every meme imaginable tell us they're either here or coming soon.

https://www..com/omg/former-israeli-space-security-chief-says-aliens-exist-humanity-not-ready-651405
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Definitely BS. No one should take this crackpot's claims seriously.

We all know the secret underground base is on Venus, not Mars. ;)
 
The story out of Israel has to be BS because there's no way anyone or any E.T. being would have been able to stop Trump from running his mouth about the existence of E.T.s and our supposed contact and relations with them.

if this were true though, we would have gotten perhaps the most entertaining press conference of all-time from Trump with his way of describing things, and every mainstream media outlet would have gone absolutely bonkers over Trump of all people breaking such news to the world.
 
lotr10 said:
Either life could never have developed on our nearest stellar neighbor given it's rather rough "weather" or it developed and is tough as nails.

www.sciencealert.com

The First Weather Report From Our Closest Star Is in, And It's Bad News For Life

We already had a bit of an inkling that our nearest stellar neighbour might be an inhospitable place.
www.sciencealert.com www.sciencealert.com
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Most the stars in our galaxy are red dwarfs. Red dwarf star systems are not the most likely candidate for life, although not theoretically impossible. They are small, cool, temperamental, violent stars with likely tidally locked planets in the habitable zone. Even the light's color would be different....some experts think if life evolved in a red dwarf system, the "plants" would be almost black, not green, due to the reddish light. A truly strange world.

The next two closest stars, the binary Alpha Centauri star system, seem more likely. Both stars are main sequence, yellow stars and similar size to our Sun. How easy is it for life on planets of a binary star system to develop and evolve? Or does it even matter that it's a binary star system? IDK.
 
lotr10 said:
Do you know how I know this guy is a crackpot? Because he claims that the government is hiding alien contact from us because we couldn't handle it. I suspect that we would handle alien contact better then we handled covid. We have been prepared through the pop culture to expect aliens to land any day now. Books, movies, TV shows and every meme imaginable tell us they're either here or coming soon.

https://www..com/omg/former-israeli-space-security-chief-says-aliens-exist-humanity-not-ready-651405
Click to expand...
Yeah, definitely BS, but a part of me really wants this to be true lol
 
First, I have a hard time believing aliens visited Earth without us having more more obvious and conspicuous evidence. "Look everybody, a strange light in the sky!" or "I swear aliens abducted me and then probed me!" or "I have a blurry photo that looks like a disc!" does not count as evidence.

Second, I have a hard time believing that aliens could visit Earth without having totally devastating or extremely damaging consequences to our species. They could be an alpha predator or they could be so far advanced they wouldn't care about us at all or they could bring deadly pathogens or they could just want to experiment on us and so on.

But, on the other hand, who knows? All we know is how life on Earth behaves. Maybe aliens would be different. Your guess is as good as mine.
 
Tonight season 5 of the fantastic science fiction series The Expanse premiers on Amazon.

I've read all the books and watched all the episodes to date and I think that this series does a great job of conveying what a possible future solar system civilization would look like. And it's entertaining as hell.



This season is based on one of the best books in the series.

The Expanse Started out on the SciFi channel and after 3 years was cancelled only to be picked up Bezos and Amazon. It was one of Bezos favorite shows so he kept it alive.

One word of warning to those that decide to start at the beginning and watch The Expanse. The first 3 episodes are slow and a bit confusing as they introduce you to all the characters and plot lines. However from episode 4 on you will be increasingly captivated by the story and presentation. My guess is that most people who visit this thread will like this series.
 
Mind blowingly far away:

phys.org

The farthest galaxy in the universe

A team of astronomers used the Keck I telescope to measure the distance to an ancient galaxy. They deduced the target galaxy GN-z11 is not only the oldest galaxy but also the most distant. It's so distant it defines the very boundary of the observable universe itself. The team hopes this study...
phys.org phys.org

"From previous studies, the galaxy GN-z11 seems to be the farthest detectable galaxy from us, at 13.4 billion light years, or 134 nonillion kilometers (that's 134 followed by 30 zeros)," said Kashikawa. "But measuring and verifying such a distance is not an easy task."

"Nonillion" - It's fun to learn a new word
 
After further analysis, scientists have discovered the radio emission was just an garbled reflection of the WKRP Turkey episode. They still have not been able to rule out alien involvement in the broadcast
 
Damn, the jokes write themselves!

www.popsci.com

Uranus blasted a gas bubble 22,000 times bigger than Earth

Last year, while combing through NASA’s archives, two planetary scientists noticed something earlier analyses had overlooked—a blip in Uranus’s magnetic field as the spacecraft cruised through a magnetic bubble of sorts. The new result, which appeared last summer in Geophysical Research Letters...
www.popsci.com www.popsci.com

Researchers have spotted them pinching off from various planets, but the magnetic belch Voyager 2 sailed through was a first for Uranus. “We expected that Uranus would likely have plasmoids; however, we didn't know exactly what they would look like,” DiBraccio says.
Now that they’ve caught one red handed, she says it looks quite similar to those seen leaking from Saturn or Jupiter but stealing away relatively more mass. (This plasmoid formed a cylinder roughly 22,000 times larger than Earth).
 
File this under things that make your head explode:

phys.org

Ripples in space-time could provide clues to missing components of the universe

There's something a little off about our theory of the universe. Almost everything fits, but there's a fly in the cosmic ointment, a particle of sand in the infinite sandwich. Some scientists think the culprit might be gravity—and that subtle ripples in the fabric of space-time could help us...
phys.org phys.org

A new paper co-authored by a University of Chicago scientist lays out how this might work. Published Dec. 21 in Physical Review D, the method depends on finding such ripples that have been bent by traveling through supermassive black holes or large galaxies on their way to Earth.

The trouble is that something is making the universe not only expand, but expand faster and faster over time—and no one knows what it is. (The search for the exact rate is an ongoing debate in cosmology).
 
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