Green Baron

Converting myself into yet another jokester ... :-) There has been a thick cloud cover and it was comparably fresh for days now (unusual here). Must shift the hot shower to the evening as i only have a solar heater ...

[snip] For that, my drive to ask an alien, if i recognize him (her/it/undefined) a question, is pretty limited. "Hi, welcome. I'll have a coffee with milk, what's your favourite poison ?"

The data (position vertices describing the corners of the beam) doesn't even change. Scaling is just a matrix multiplication :-)

Ha ! Now i know what to reply when next time i am commanded to clean up ...

I assume you refer to an experiment in which tardigrades were exposed to conditions in LEO (hours/days, on the ISS) and partly survived ? These are, afaik the only multicellular organisms so far. Apart from that, several microorganisms (bacteria) have been exposed directly or to simulated LEO conditions and some have been reported to survive.

Yep, an absolute vacuum does not exist afaik. The particle density in space is very low, compared to our environment. Though it varies greatly between the inner solar system, the space between stars and between galaxies and so on.

We surely came after the Arthur Philip Deodat ... if their alphabet makes at least a little sense :-)

Ok.

This project was paused for a while but has been resurrected. My naive terrain renderer can now build a quad tree of terrain tiles from an arbitrary heightmap and select levels of detail while moving the camera around. Each detail level is represented by a size half that of the next level, the highest level being closest to the camera, the distances between levels calculated as the camera moves. Number of levels and resolution of depth can be changed on the fly. This image shows the bounding boxes of each level, a box for each tile that is constructed from the lowest and highest height value as well the minimum and maximum world position. The small boxes in the foreground will have the highest resolution, the large ones in the background the lowest, though overall the number of triangles / screen area stays roughly the same. This has not grown on my dung ! I am only doing the realization and learning a lot on the way. It is based on the excellent work of this guy: https://github.com/fstrugar/CDLOD Next: sampling the height map and actually draw the terrain, nice shading and overall code cleaning and a little docu (for myself, i am starting to forget things i did in the beginning). There will (hopefully) be no popping or seams between tiles as the levels are gradually morphed from higher to lower in the vertex shader. Then projection on ellipsoid (aka solar system bodies) and heightmap generation, and data streaming. Oh, and frame rate so far is >10,000/sec., GTX 970 and i7 single threaded. I expect this to go down quite a bit when sampling the map and shading things, but there will still be a lot of leeway for physics etc. !

Buen dia :-) We should really switch back to the disk design ...

Sure, a whole lot of questions about the moon's geology are open, but quite a lot is known as well. I was just defending the documented knowledge about the moon and the hypotheses derived from the evidence at hand against the "1 sample" claim. Without strolling too far for it costs time, please believe me that a geologist does not need samples for comparison of everything. A basalt, the most common "stuff" on Moon and Mars, is physically and chemically a pretty simple rock. Sediments are complicated ! :-)

And every time it becomes a little shorter ...

"Der Freigeist" (The Free Thinker), by Gottfried Helnwein, Austrian artist

Hi, am missing the "Primes" and "Google Picture War" thread in the lounge. Have i Edit: oh forget it. God, am i stupid. Shame on me. With ketchup.

Canapé ?

*lol* i must admit, i didn't know that song :-) Some good rock music will bring back my faith in music: Jethro Tull - Heavy Horses (I am having problems linking to the right song on youtube. *shrug* Anyway, one can't miss it.)

That "only 1 sample" thing is a little inaccurate. We have much more than 1 sample. There is: - all in all ~400kg of samples from the six Apollo landing sites - a few samples from Soviet landers - some meteorites from the moon, others from around the solar system - telescopes - measurements from orbiting spacecrafts - a good grasp of the history of the solar- and the earth moon system - a bulk of geo-* data from earth All in all enough to build a rough geological timescale of the moon as a whole, which is much simpler than the earth's also because the moon does not have many of the processes that form and change earth, like mantle convection, tectonics, an atmopshere, biosphere, hydrosphere, ...

Moar of that old stuff: No matter how good the pc loudspeakers, this kind of music really should be heard over a real hifi rack, best vinyl or cd. To feel it in the stomach :-)

Hmmm, they are not ? In my eyes they are, even if they are built by individuals that have a dozen eyes and 8 limbs, or just sit around like orange trees. Sorry, but what's a glock ? If/when i die i die, the species will be fine with that, it is several times a second. I will not kill others. And i frequently was together in a room with people with spears, bows, bolas, atlatls and all kind of pelaeolithic weaponry and we had a huge fun. The headache the next morning was not the result of intraspecies violence :-) Well, not to me :-). And i daresay that, despite of Hollywood or whatever cultural background comes to mind, most people and probably most aliens are pretty peaceful, because that's a model for long term evolutionary success and that is how civilizations are built in the first place. Violence destroys them ... Edit: but my posts above where not about violence, just about the "observer effects" that may damage or change what we want to investigate, self replicating chemistry, microbes, lifeforms, etc .... Other civs are, well, far away :-)

I hope so too, of course. We can't be careful enough not to introduce our own stuff, as bacteria on the hull of the ISS and possibly on the Curiosity rover have already shown. That'll mess up most the high resolution analyses and methods we have, leaving us with guessing again. And that may be just because of carelessness. https://www.nature.com/news/microbial-stowaways-to-mars-identified-1.15249

Example: Prehistoric caves in southern France had to be closed to the public, and some even for the scientists now. Important parts have been 3D reconstructed instead. The caves were locked away from the open for 10,000-40,000 years. When people entered, immediately fungi and bacteria started to grow and destroy the surfaces so that the extremely sensitive methods for analyses, especially dating and isotopic composition, partly do not work any more. Also the until then preserved colour pigments that lasted ten thousands of years where partly destroyed in just a few decades. So, that is what an intrusion does and no filter can prevent this. I don't want to say that will inevitably happen to emerging life elsewhere (anyway i only expect, of at all, microbes), but this is what we must be prepared for on contact. The leading space agencies are perfectly aware of that, yet they can't fully exclude to introduce microbes on their machines.

What should aliens do if they discover us ? The only thing that would not bear the risk of contamination, destruction, immune reaction, whatever is: leave it in peace. I know that will not happen.