SunlitZelkova

My thing with evolving into a new species was more akin to how we are not Permian cynodonts anymore: so much time has passed humans* will not be humans anymore naturally. This would take millions of years. It isn’t something done to a species, it just happens. My inbreeding depression scenario assumes that eventually there won’t be enough genetic diversity to sustain a healthy population and that it will wither and die. This would also take millions of years. Disease is a reasonable possibility, more so than destructive war alone I think. Disease did contribute to the collapse of Native American tribes after all. I could see a “superpandemic” killing say, at least 50% of the population, plus another 25% killed in the ensuing chaos and conflict, which in turn paves the way for an inbreeding depression thousands of years later. That’s not an arbitrary number, that’s roughly the degree of population loss experienced by the Coast Tsimshian Native Americans in British Columbia upon European contact and the ensuing epidemic (57%). Germany lost 15% of its population in the rather politically motivated WWI, if a pandemic disrupted food and other material supply chains and triggers wars for survival how many more might die? Meanwhile despite intermarrying with Europeans Native American populations still have lower genetic diversity compared to others. There isn’t any problem at the moment but what about 10,000 years from now? Perhaps there wouldn’t be such issues in real life for Native Americans via further intermarrying, but our scenario has humans/an intelligent species on its own with no outlet for an increase in genetic diversity. As you say, scary stuff. *Just using them as an example but this could apply to any intelligent interstellar species.

Inbreeding depression/genetic bottleneck. Or outbreeding depression. I am skeptical any intelligent species-caused event could bring about true extinction. Just as nuclear war never posed a threat to humanity as a whole ‘cuz South America, Africa, and Australia, the likelihood of an extinction event would be even lower once planetary/stellar dispersal occurs. The inbreeding/outbreeding depression would take a very, very, long time to manifest itself. It’s such a huge timeframe that the other more likely possibility is that the species evolves into a new one. Depends on to what extent these populations were introduced to the new lands. Are they roaming free in their own new ecosystem like Hawaiian hamsters or are they dependent upon care from the intelligent species? Unlikely. Intelligence needs very specific circumstances to occur. Agreed, if an extinction event has to happen I would think it would be the genetic events I mentioned but I think it is unlikely. That said, a species becoming a new one would technically qualify as “extinction” too. Disclaimer: I am by no means a genetics expert, if there are any here please enlighten us further!

I suggest we get back to the spaceplanes. Apologies for taking space history to politics. I think @kerbiloid ‘s claims of what he did are what he did. He merely said that for Starship to work it would need to be redesigned as a spaceplane, not actually advocating Starship itself. Starship is technically envisioned as a Mars spacecraft, so it would be better off as a generic semi-expendable SHLV rather than a spaceplane should the current design fail.

I am a little bit skeptical of such a conclusion. Apollo unfortunately coincided with the greatest level of public protest and anti-government opinion ever (so far) in the US. The Space Shuttle arose in era where *we* (our elected representatives) learned our lessons regarding control of the narrative and the general situation was good enough that no one needed to really question things to the extent they did in the 60s*. IMO, if the Shuttle had been built in the 60s, we would have seen the costs and cancelled it in favor of cheap expendable rockets. If Apollo had occurred in the 80s, we would have seen science opportunities and went on to build a lunar base. That said though, my point was not that the Shuttle was something malicious done to spaceflight, but that ignorance allowed it to happen. You do bring up a good point though. In my Apollo-space station fantasy program, does public support for spaceflight stay high? I would think high enough to get some kind of ISS-like station built, IMO. People take what they can get, and it would be embarrassing for American science to abandon crewed space while the Soviets did Salyut-Mir. *60s protests would have been much smaller without the threat of being sent to die in a war, and 80s protests would have been larger with the threat of being sent to die

Non-combat means non-military… Someone is working on Dream Chaser, and while it is nice, I have to wonder what advantage it has over Dragon.

People keep boats there too. When it is nice, it is probably great fun flying and sailing around the state. When disaster comes, they simply can’t afford to take their boat or plane and flee when they have a house, car, and other terrestrial possessions to take care of. There are pictures out there of recreational docks too, and the boats are completely trashed, either thrown on land or sunk. US Navy P-8s and US Coast Guard SH-60s did relocate as far away as California though. Makes me wonder how good the civilian weather information system is compared to the military one. While I sit thinking it is going to be sunny on Monday, is the local ANGB base battening down the hatches for a storm? It doesn’t look like anyone bothered to tie down the aircraft pictured (even though that may not have made a difference). On the other hand, weather prediction at sea- civilian and military- is so good that ships can often sail around storms. Which leads me to a question of my own- is maritime meteorology more difficult than meteorology focused on land?

I disagree. If anything profit from continually maintaining ICBMs has kept spaceflight going, while it was the development of ballistic missiles in the first place that facilitated space exploration in space. GIRD-09, the first Soviet liquid fuel rocket from 1933, was built with the official goal of mimicking the effects of a 122mm artillery shell. Whoops. I forgot what boon means lol. We might be better off in some ways, worse off in others. Without a spaceplane choking NASA funding, a post-Skylab space station could be built sooner. Perhaps the Apollo CSM/Saturn IB combo could have gone on to be as prolific as Soyuz and Soyuz. On the other hand, a return to the Moon would be more difficult to get going. SEI would probably still die for the reasons it did IRL- no one saw any need for a Moon base. With no Columbia disaster, there would be no need for Constellation. And with no Constellation, there is no need for SLS. So a more efficient ISS would be the only thing in crewed spaceflight until 2026, when China tests its super heavy lift crew rocket for lunar flight, and the US is finally forced to go back to the Moon for hysterical national security reasons. China’s space program is focused on matching the achievements of other countries, so they would likely go there regardless of whether Constellation/SLS exist or not. Assuming an uncrewed Progress-type cargo derivative of the CSM was built by the US, there would be no need for Commercial Payload Services or Commercial Crew. SpaceX might still exist so long as Musk has his Mars dreams, but it would not have NASA funding or support. With no Artemis, I don’t know if Starship would take longer or not.

Why is it on top of a TEL? I spy Hangzhou and Fujian!

Those would be threatened by tsunamis and rising sea levels, respectively.

They are mainly legal and sociological. I myself was interested in this concept when thinking about it in relation to space colonization feasibility. Also, there may be issues in the strength and survivability of such structures against extreme events like storms and earthquakes, but I couldn’t find anything more about it.

@steve9728 Welcome back (to the forum)! Wow. About a year ago or so I said that China might beat the US to the first Mars sample return by a couple months or weeks because both came back in 2031. But the NASA-ESA schedule has slipped to 2033, so as long as no delays occur, China will bring the first ever samples back from Mars in 2031, a full two years ahead of the US. There are caveats of course. A cheaper private mission could be launched on expendable Starship, perhaps in the 2026 window. I say expendable because I don’t expect Starship to land on Mars before 2030, so long as it is taking ~two years or so to get to orbit and there won’t be any lunar flight until 2025 at the earliest. This private spacecraft could be big, and thus a 5M (Soviet MSR proposal with the N1) all-up style lander. A counter to this would be that the Starship community is mainly interested in human spaceflight, and I’m not sure of the willingness of a private organization to “steal the thunder” from NASA and ESA. I am not aware of any eccentric billionaires interested in funding their own MSR mission. China’s mission might slip. After all, Tianwen-1 was supposed to launch in 2018 originally I think. I think this would be a good thing though. The US will try to find scapegoats, and the easiest would be SLS- JPL and the private sector are pretty blameless. Those billions could have gone to MSR in 2031, yet it went into SLS. This would probably kick off a “Mars Race”- not a real Mars race, I wouldn’t expect a Chinese crewed Mars landing until the 2040s at the earliest- but initiated by the US to land the first humans on Mars, perhaps another “before this decade is out” type goal of landing before 2040. Artemis’ government built habs would probably be abandoned, Artemis would become a science program and facilitator of commercial activities on the Moon. NASA would send astronauts there still but primarily focus on Mars. Downside is crushed souls at NASA and ESA come June 2031. Oh, by the way, despite no real race, the initiation of a crewed American Mars program would definitely kick off a Chinese program, just with no necessity of beating the US. China won’t want to be left behind. Exciting! Nothing says “Happy Halloween!” like a core stage slowly decaying towards an unknown crashing point. Spooky! It is not intended for crew launches. That will remain the job of Long March 2F, Long March 7, and the future Long March 5 derived crewed variants. Tengyun might be intended for crewed missions, I don’t remember. It is more akin to the Soviet Spiral spaceplane, lofted by a hypersonic carrier aircraft and then separating and launching into orbit.

Fingers crossed the Artemis donut will return at Krispy Kreme! Oh, and I guess hopefully SLS launches successfully too.

It is not connected to the sample return lander per se, they are just going to drop it.

I decided to put this here instead of the JAXA thread because it involves the US too. Kanai Norishige was part of a NASA-JAXA team that did training with the old SEV prototypes. They drove around during the night to see what rover ops might be like in permanently shadowed craters. With Lunar Starship still in the design phase and SLS ridden with problems, astronaut training for Artemis is the coolest aspect of the program I think. A week ago or so NASA also shared pictures of what looked like surface sample collection training at the NBL.

Two Mandalorians and Hera Syndulla checked out the MMX Phobos rover at the IAC. The rover will be built by CNES and DLR. ESA is not involved.

Thanks for the reply, it was a nice little read! I have thought about my original question though and come to realize that those posts making fun of dinosaurs more or less make sense, so long as they are referring to the mere existence of such technology rather than its effectiveness. Even if an interstellar comet smacks into Europe five months from now, at least we can say we had asteroid redirection technology, right?

Asking here as well as other places to view a wide range of opinions: How does one go about making the Russian “р” sound? My Uhmairickuhn tongue won’t let me, nor has it ever let me do the “r’s” of other languages. Even the Japanese “r” was difficult until recently. I am aware of the thing with the q-tip. I am not necessarily asking for solutions, just general knowledge surrounding this issue. Curious for both replies from native Russian speakers and anyone who has tried to learn it as a ‘nth language. Witty replies are welcome too for morale purposes!

I don’t think it has to do with “society” at all. Effectively everywhere outside of Japan, people just couldn’t, and often still can’t really accept animation as being a medium to tell a story rather than “lowly” children’s entertainment. That’s a problem with the audience, not “society”. Understandably, the raunchiness prevalent throughout Japanese pop culture is a turn off to Japanese animation and that may trickle down to animation as a whole (although IMO I don’t find most of it any worse than the types of things often seen in Western live action works). So that doesn’t help either. There’s not much of a “solution” to this, because it is a valid opinion. I find reality television pretty ridiculous, but that doesn’t mean it is wrong. No one is going to convince me that Keeping Up With the Kardashians is good entertainment and likewise no one is going to convince someone uninterested in animation that animation is good entertainment (for adults). But that’s ok. We can like what we want to and dislike want we want to.

The K-Pg extinction event was celestial giants doing a planetary redirection test by chucking stones at the distant orbs. Hopefully they cancelled their program rather than simply delaying the next test.

First, a message to @intelliCom continued from the DART thread where we were told to stay on topic. You can learn about the presence of alien life on exoplanets on the KSP forum. The entire forum is dedicated to alien spaceflight! https://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/index.php?/forum/3-kerbal-space-program/ Second, a question not really related to DART so I put it here. I have seen a lot of comments in jest making fun of the terrestrial dinosaurs for not having a space program. But how logical are these statements? Based on human technological standards circa the 2020s, would the dinosaurs even have been able to detect the asteroid that hit Earth? Even if they had the means to stop it? Not much* is known about the origin of the asteroid that caused the K-Pg extinction event, for all we know it came from the Kuiper Belt and could not have been stopped. *I feel like I may have seen an article about this a year ago or so but I didn’t see anything in my saved links. I still could be wrong though

To be fair though this isn’t necessarily “NASA” as the group of scientists and engineers we know and love so much as it is concept artists with a huge free hand and their overseer PR officials who don’t care as long as it trends. They regularly get exhaust wrong for launches, also images of exhaust during Mars EDL in graphics is incorrect on their part too. I’m sure others have their own fair share of errors they have seen. But the people who review it are probably PR people, not actual engineers, so it passes. That doesn’t mean that “NASA” (the actual science people) consider a majority of asteroids to look that way in their personal view. I bet that those depictions come from fantastical pre-detailed space exploration (i.e. the age of telescopes and Mars canals, instead of probes and disappointing Venusian and Martian atmospheric pressure readings) that have simply remained in pop culture since then despite new discoveries, just as how films nowadays often depict Mars as having fantastic mesas and valleys despite the majority of it being something of a flat plain. When people eventually visit an asteroid and/or Mars those depictions will become more realistic, just as landing on the Moon in ‘69 made the equally grandiose and absurd lunar mesas and valleys go away (although the actual Moon, and thus Mars and asteroids, is/are spectacular in its/their own right, and those fantastical depictions are still nice as pure art so nothing is/will be lost ).

What is weather usually like in November at KSC? I’m curious about the likelihood of another scrub. Last time they tried to launch an SHLV in November (not counting Shuttle), it got struck by lightning twice. No Alan Bean onboard to save it this time around though.

Johns Hopkins APL released a graphic containing some of the results of the simulations of the impact.

They appear to have fixed the leak, but for all we know the stress from another rollback and rollout will cause another leak.

As of when I made that post, it was December 31st, 1969 for me. EDIT- Nope, still 12-31-69. Guess it is a time zone thing and you are probably correct.