Yeah, I predict that in the future, you can’t expect that content on the internet is written by humans. If you go to the internet, then it will probably not be to connect to other humans. Maybe you want to know something that a bot can tell you or you have some administrative task to fulfill, like filing a form.

thanks, the link is interesting.

The value proposition would be that it is important to understand the exact radiation pattern/schemes if we ever want to routinize spaceflight. In other words: effective solutions (to the problem of radiation) requires detailed knowledge of what the problem actually is, in other words, what kind of radiation are we talking about.

I was more talking about the quantitative split in Particle Radiation/Electromagnetic Radiation.

unfortunately, the preview of the book doesn’t show for me

Depression has many causes:

• For once, people work too much. It exhausts the body and we feel tired.
• For two, there’s the meaninglessness of life. It’s difficult to stay motivated when nothing makes sense/there is no future.
• Thirdly, positive sexual experiences strongly cure depression. Since the dating market is largely fucked (no pun intended), well that option doesn’t exist to large parts of the population.
• Fourtly we’re socialized to hide depression. As everybody knows, the first step to solve a problem is to recognize it exists. Stigmatization of depression has held back effective treatment for way too long.

isn’t that why the hippie movement ended?

… and I came to believe that our current cosmology is incomplete or wrong.

Well, yes, I agree with you.

Ok maybe my numbers were a little bit off but the point is: if the universe were created slowly, we’d see clear traces of that. but the evidence points into the opposite direction, that the universe, at some point, was very hot and dense, before stars started forming. So the question is, where would all that matter come from? I deem it’s unlikely to all just be “one huge quantum fluctuation”, but i’m not sure about that; cosmology is exotic sometimes.

Our theoretical framework, allowing matter creation (*) provides a possible origin for the universe (without the need of a Big Bang).

If you look at the typical composition of a star today, you will find that it is mostly (99%) hydrogen.

We know that a star burns hydrogen into helium, and therefore the relative fraction of hydrogen in the star’s composition decreases annually by a specific rate (let’s say 0.0000001%). That means that a star might have an average lifetime of 1 billion years, before its composition changes and it has only small fraction of hydrogen left.

If the universe were created slowly (by a slow process, such as spontaneous particle creation would be), then stars would burn out while they are being created; In other words, we wouldn’t see stars that are mostly unconsumed hydrogen, but instead, stars that are mostly already consumed helium, with slow rates of hydrogen being created continuously.

But that would lead to stars having a drastically different composition: instead of 99% hydrogen and 1% helium, we might see 1% hydrogen and 99% helium. That is why I believe a “slow creation” of the universe to be unlikely.

I was thinking three options:

• mining from underground (hoping that there’s enough ice underground/water in the mineralic crystals that can be thermically released)
• water from the atmosphere (believe it or not but the atmosphere in the early morning is actually saturated with moisture - about 0.25 mbar iirc) so it could be extracted through something similar to a room de-moisturizer
• polar caps (unrealistic in the early game)

Hmm yeah, airtight buildings are a challenge to construct.

That’s why I’ve favored the people on Mars living in the spaceships. The building already exists, and is naturally air-tight (after all, it has been airtight for 6 months in outer space). But that has its downsides: less protection against radiation, mostly. (due to only having 5mm of steel and 200 kg/m² CO2 above your head instead of meters full of dirt and rock.)

I don’t see perchlorates as a big problem.

After all, plants grow quite well without soil, like hydroponics, I guess.

I think that water is an important resource. Once that you have water and electricity, you can produce oxygen easily. And you need large quantities of water anyways.

Yeah, I guess. I’ve read on Wikipedia that a year on Mars gives a human 200 mSv of radiation. While the limit for US radiation workers is 50 mSv a year. So that’s 4x the allowed dosis.

Still, I wonder how much that can be alleviated by metal shielding. A spaceship’s outer walls are 5mm solid steel, and I’ve read somewhere that most of the radiation is particle radiation (not electromagnetic radiation), so that can be stopped with solid steel quite well. Unfortunately, I don’t have any actual numbers, though.

Edit: Source

Edit:

250 mSv: 6-month trip to Mars—radiation due to cosmic rays, which are very difficult to shield against

Apparently I was wrong. It’s not just particle radiation, it’s actual electromagnetic radiation. Which is much more difficult to deal with.

What I’m worried about is that all of these reports kinda seem so “untrustworthy”, it seems to me.

Like, would you trust it with your life that whatever was found in these mars quakes was actually water? Maybe some scientist made some mistake in their evaluation, after all these questions are complicated.

If we settle mars, we need a much more reliable source of water; one that there is no doubt about; and one that we can easily trust with our lives, our very survival.

Very interesting read.

I also like how, at the end, it changed perspective to say “actually, our problem is not software, but politics”.

We must be aware of what agents we encourage and discourage through our actions.

Short question: how would they enforce that? What if I use some obscure messenger that nobody has ever heard of? What if I simply use telnet or netcat to send messages to other people?

It would technically work, yes.

But also, you’re wasting a lot of storage space that way, especially if you do it often. You really only should backup your home directory, it contains all your data. You can simply re-install the rest from the internet.

Crazy. I’ve been a long-term Musk supporter (because of meaningful business targets: EVs and Mars colonization), but these recent events I cannot support. Laying off employees while not at the same time demanding Universal Basic Income on a state level (so that no single corporation is disadvantaged) is a death sentence to the worker population, and that, I cannot support. I’m out.

I’m worried that Maps will be hit by the enshittification next. We need a good quality maps alternative. OpenStreetMap seems ok, but it lacks a few features, including trip planning.