Mazon Del

I know. T-T

I'm sure they do have a checklist of things to secure, but it's probably quite minimal, especially considering that the astronauts do not keep as clean a house as you'd think. NASA and everyone on the ground would love it if every panel was closed up, all the wiring nicely stowed away and everything all secured. In reality though, they are aware that there is only so much BS they can insist the crew devote time to before they sort of have a "I need fun" mutiny. So while they do schedule an hour or so for it now and then, generally speaking it's the first thing to go from the schedule if they need a break.

When the ISS was originally budgeted and such, the plan was for the ISS to be two stations right next to each other. The one that we got, plus a giant empty space that was to be a drydock for large craft assembly. It was to be separate from the other one to keep the science-ISS isolated from the vibrations in the other to keep the science data good. Alas, it was pretty much the first thing on the chopping block as time went on. But yes, there has been some discussion on the idea of re-configuring the ISS and slapping an engine on it. If I remember right, the big problem is that the ISS lacks the radiation shielding to adequately protect the crew and electronics through the VA belts and into space beyond. It was designed to get most of that protection from the VA belts, which means staying within them. Correcting that deficiency is one of the harder parts to fix about the plan to snag the US modules and send them into the lagrange point behind the moon to act as an observatory.

Just came across this on Reddit, it is something I've been curious about for some time, here you go.

Really an AI in its own right is somewhat unnecessary (though a huge boon) to any possible singularity. The point has always been that the tools we build today make tomorrows work easier than yesterdays tools. Note, a tool is not JUST hardware. A CPU just sitting there is not a useful tool. A CPU running a program to solve a problem is a useful tool. A CPU running a better program to solve the same problem is a more useful tool. Further note, the usefulness of a tool is not just directly related to the existence of the tool, but in how many of it are being used. A simple example is a PS4, a powerful computer in its own right, but in the 4,000+ Air Force cluster, a force to be reckoned with indeed. A more pertinent example is how we are in this fascinating state where items like 3D printers and the "Maker/Hacker" ideology is suddenly acting like a force multiplier when it comes to inventiveness. Sort of a mathematical example. You have 1M engineers, of which 10% are interested in inventing things, and of which 2% actually have the resources to actually create the item they have thought up. That is 2,000 active inventors and 98,000 that just shrug and wistfully imagine the glory of their idea without going anywhere. Suddenly, someone invents a 3D printer that those engineers can buy. You get an extra 2% that suddenly have the resources to explore their idea. You are now at 4,000 inventors. But perhaps now also you get an extra 1% from the original 1M that explore this new interesting curiosity. So the new math says 4,400 inventors. Another person invents a new coding system that makes it easier and more intuitive to program robots or other automated systems, apply the 2% and 1% again. You now have 7,200 inventors. Plus, now that you have these people playing around with all of these things helping them improve, and now they are quite cheap to utilize then for a variety of reasons (inspired youth, non-engineers poking their heads into certain aspects of the field, etc) we can suddenly add 1% more to our original million engineers meaning that after these two little steps we now have 7272 inventors. All of these things feed back into themselves, and sure, you DO have an upper boundary limit that is just equal to your population total but even once you reach the saturation point there is a LOT of inventing going on. Invention isn't even just making the tech in columns A or B better, it is also creating column C by realizing you can combine A/B. The more people creating new things, the more chances there are to combine things. Imagine in a way that inventing humans are neurons and the tools that they create/use are the connections. The more of both we have the more "intelligent" we are. And the greatest thing about easier and more intuitive, yet powerful, tools is that they drop the bar of entry to their use drastically. Perhaps an example. Let's say you have a teenage girl, (apologies about this specific example women of KSP) and she is that stereotypical doesn't care about school, just wants to have fun, type teen. Very into the makeup and such. Well, as a gift her father buys her a device (that is getting a bunch of VC money incidentally, it's a real thing) where she can select any colored pixel on her computer screen and print of any makeup type (lipstick, blush, etc) in that color. Let's even say it has the option to let the user play with the ingredient mixtures so they can make a given item more smooth, textured, etc. This girl that has no interest in engineering suddenly has this simple to use tool that lets her craft colors of makeup that were never able to be bought previously, and perhaps after hearing from one of her friends that adjusting the balance of chemicals gave them a desired look, this teen starts adjusting the balances on hers and spreads that info around. You now have a non-engineer engaging in invention without even properly realizing that she is adding to the cumulative knowledge of humanity. THIS is the power and driving force of the singularity, when humanities ability to actually use our capabilities becomes so trivial and widespread that simply the act of going about your day ends up furthering us all even in some small part. And we are at the point where we are finally starting to ramp up that tool curve for the last part.

Oh but that is a rather different situation altogether, those situations are not providing me with something I so desperately desire and believe I cannot obtain on my own. Sure, they say they'll give me vast wealth, etc. But as an egotistical inventor, I believe that it is simply a matter of time before one of my various projects tips the scales for me. As far as the R&D comment, the point was that the vast quantity of it was already done. Sure, that ISS module would need some minor reworking to add on the solar panels to the outside and such, but generally speaking the work could be done to maximize the carryover of the modules previous "space-worthiness" certification. As far as the "spacecraft are not Legos" comment....they kind of are. A rather substantial portion of missions and satellites done these days are "cobbled together" (of course a lot more effort than that wording implies, but considering what is usually done, still apt) out of parts from craft that never flew. Given a large enough part, all you need to necessarily custom build is a docking collar arrangement to connect them together and depending on what the items in question are, this could simply just be a matter of producing a few more of one of the current flavors that already exist. Now of course if I had been chosen and I was looking at the aforementioned cobbled together craft and receiving training on it, if I felt that their integration of the disparate parts was putting the mission in danger then my willingness to accept such a craft will change. But at the same time, I've been part of enough multi-million dollar projects at work that end up requiring random junk from around the office soldered and hammered into position to make work that I am aware that just because a square peg was literally sledge hammered into a round hole, this doesn't actually mean the object in question is likely to fall apart.

I did. They had a few points in their favor from my perspective. First: They admitted they weren't intending to do the R&D themselves. The rockets would be Falcon Heavy's, the transit module would be a clone of an ISS module (the R&D for those is done, all they have to do is just order them from the companies that built them, this was their point), etc. Most of their "R&D" costs would be in any minor re-purposing adjusting and systems integration. Second: The guy in charge of the whole thing DID have the media connections (he invented the show Big Brother) that he was saying he'd leverage to get a lot of the funding side going. Third: As I've said before, I looked at it from a punnet square perspective. It's a scam, it's not a scam. I pay the $40, I don't. In the first crossing it is a scam and I pay $40, "Oh no! $40. I guess I won't have sushi this week as a punishment to equal out my finances.", regret over. In the second, it is not a scam and I did not pay the money. I will for the rest of my life sadly wonder if I could have been one of the people to have gone to Mars. In the third crossover, I don't pay the money but it was a scam "Hah! I beat the scam!" and my money is no different. And in the final situation where I paid and it wasn't a scam, even if I didn't get chosen (I didn't incidentally) at best I go to Mars, and at worst I know that at least I tried to go and couldn't have done any better (for that attempt). I heavily value not regretting a failure to spend a pittance on the chance for a massively desired life situation over $40. Any regret over that money lasts at most a week. The other regret is forever. Do I think they are going to succeed? Not anymore. Do I regret what I did? Not at all.

I'm only on page 2 of this thread at the time of posting this, just for references sake. I would like to point out that human babies generally speaking do not pass any of our tests for self awareness until somewhere around 2 years of age. An example, they do not understand that their reflection is in fact, them.

Actually, it really ends up depending on how you phrase the hiring question. Would you like a job with a lifetime employment guarantee, theoretically excellent healthcare, room, and board all free of charge. All training provided to you at no cost. A wonderful sense of comradeship due to everyone depending on everyone else. And you are literally building a new world for your children. That sounds like a hell of a good deal to me. Besides, even if I had to pay the 500K to do it. I'd find a way. I get that I don't represent the majority of mankind, but I'd still do it. Plus, you don't actually need to reach 1M settlers from Earth. Just around 5-10K is all you NEED for minimum genetic diversity, to say nothing of people who might donate sperm/eggs to be shipped to Mars to help ensure that should Earth get cut off. The 1M is mostly a hyper padded number that just kind of ensures that you have enough manpower to shove into whatever problems you might run into.

This is actually one of their "worse" selfies in a way. You can see the jagged part of the arm in the upper right part of Curiosity where the mosaic cut if off.

Yes Musk intends to sell the tickets to Mars for half a million as that is the most cost sustaining way of doing things, but again, he cares more about getting the colony than profit. There is likely to be some ratio of volunteers to empty seats vs population on Mars where he just starts paying himself.

Mars One started off decently enough, the first thing in their favor was that they admitted that nobody on the small project just yet had any experience with anything related to rocketry. They had a very low level beginnings of a plan, mostly saying "We'll just re-use what others made. Our habitat modules for the journey will be copies of already R&Ded ISS modules. We'll use the Falcon Heavy. Etc". And the $45 fee (For those in the US) was basically a "Kickstarter". Now, for people as rich as those guys, it was theoretically not hilariously necessary. But, let's not jump on the "Hate Mars One!" bandwagon. There are threads already devoted for that. Musk's situation is a bit different. Chances are pretty good that while he will let some people buy seats on the trip to Mars, he'll have to fill most of the seats himself (remember, the launcher holds 100 people). While I'd intend to try and snag a seat myself, we'll see where things go.

Where are you getting the 7-14 times reuse from?

My personal hatred? Seeing any article on Quantum Teleportation / Entanglement. They ALWAYS make them seem like they figured out FTL comms, when they've done nothing of the sort, or even just further proved you cannot use those things for that purpose. Just sort of that silly instinct within me that wants to believe it is just a matter of time until we figure out how to make it do that anyway. >.<

In a video I once saw concerning the various legalities of space travel (and some problems we currently or will shortly have because of it) they brought up that right now space law basically treats the property of a given government as its sovereign territory, and thus even though the ISS is "international", if a given country owns a particular module, the common law of their nation applies there. In all technicality, the ISS is considered a "border free" zone if only because nobody makes sure that your passport and other papers are good for you to move between modules....and now I just thought up a humorous Papers Please mod....

Human civilization, and thus effectively humanity itself, is quite a fragile beast. The sheer amount of infrastructure it takes to support a single human life is staggering, and it doesn't take that much effort to disrupt the infrastructure enough to begin having effects on people. The question about cost-effectiveness of one vs the other is in some ways almost a fallacy, if only because the biggest advantage that a Mars colony gets (being on a separate planet and thus completely disconnected from catastrophe's on Earth) is kind of an incalculable advantage. It has exactly as much worth as you personally choose to assign to it. But let me put it this way. With the redundancy of having a colony on Mars vs vaults on Earth is this. If an incident happens that destroys the Earth based ability to live, Mars is fine. If an incident happens that destroys the Mars based ability to live, Earth is fine. If an incident happens that destroys the vault based ability to live...everything is dead. And no, just "burying the vaults so deep it would....." is not really a valid response, once you get below a certain rather shallow depth, building anything on the scale you'd need to ensure humanities survival quickly becomes as expensive if not more so than setting things up on Mars. Yes, let me agree with your statement through a tiny device made of precious metals from all over the world, machined at the nano-meter scale to provide me with more than enough processing power to run a space program, that connects me instantly to the infinite repository of human knowledge we are now conversing on, without using any wires, as I lean against my electric car charging in mere minutes with more electricity than many humans have used in their entire lives, on my way to the airport to fly through the air at 500 miles per hour in a 110,000 lbs metal machine whose engines have pieces moving around faster than the speed of sound, that will more likely than not be flown primarily by an artificial intelligence that could probably replace the crew if we really wanted to do so, so I can travel a distance in mere hours that 99% of humanity historically has never traveled, just so I can spend some time with family and do hikes in the mountains before heading back to work where I build sensor systems capable of detecting thousands of craft of all sizes from absurdly ridiculous ranges to feed this information through a satellite communications network so that some fancy suited guy I've never met can decide if it's worth detonating the planet or not while shouting "MURICA!" to make a point, while leaving 6 people flying around in a 990,000 lbs tin can the size of a football field at a speed of 17,000 mph and an altitude of 256 miles to wonder what those bright lights were and why nobody is talking to them anymore. Thank god science fiction never comes true, or we'd really be in for it.

Some of the points you bring up are likely not as...efficiently costly as you might think them to be. Yes SpaceX is devoting a crapton of money and effort into their R&D on the rockets and that cost will end up eating into their profits. But remember, every rocket has gone through that to some extent or another, it's largely just a question of accounting to find out how it got balanced. ULA sort of cheats and tries to get the government to pay the R&D costs of everything it does, and then once the rocket is done they base their prices as though assuming they need to recoup the R&D costs. *eye rolls* One test that could likely give a good idea about how well a refurbishment program would work, that I am not certain if SpaceX has done or not (I assume they've done things that are "close enough" for now) is basically rig up one of their rockets for the static fire tests and let it go through the motions of rocket use, fuel burnout, stage separation (which incidentally does not include explosive bolts, SpaceX uses some form of piston, hydraulic I believe), etc. Then try to refurbish it. It won't be as good of a test as having a real rocket, but it would give them a good idea of the costs involved. I "think" I read somewhere that SpaceX is hoping for something like being able to reuse a given rocket up to 10 times before retiring it, but that could just be a misremembered misquote. And finally again, it should be brought up that at the end of the day, SpaceX making money is mostly just a consequence/side benefit of why Musk created the company in the first place, which is to build rockets to colonize Mars. He's said time and time again that if he has to, he'll fund it with the billions he has in pocket, and later once they get the Mars Colonization System (I forget it's actual acronym up, but the rocket that can lob 100 people to Mars). Tesla was constructed in a similar vein, though with more of a hope of profitability. He thought electric vehicles were needed, we just needed to stop having terrible ones. So he made a company to make awesome ones. Turns out, he says that if they could pack the things as filled with batteries as he'd like, they could easily have a 500 mile range. Problem is that with the cost of lithium batteries, that would make it WAY too expensive. Luckily, the gigafactory alone will more than double the world production of lithium batteries, so he estimates the price should drop by about 30%.

Actually the rules of war DO have an affect. It isn't just a "oh no! He used gas! Sanction him!" situation. Effectively the way that the rules of war work in this day and age runs through the UN. If someone fights another outside a certain set of unacceptable reasons, then the fight pretty much gets to happen barring bigger countries interfering anyway. But if one country attacks another and starts to break the rules of war, then you start getting into some low level punishments as a warning, but if within a couple months you see they have not backed off, then you have reached the point where countries are allowed to utilize this breach of the RoW to attack THAT country without starting themselves off on the punishment track. In the olden days (WW2 and before), the problem with this setup was that the people "making" the RoW had no real authority to do so. The British, as a famous example, stipulated that the only legal and fair way to utilize submarines was a set of instructions that guaranteed the attacking submarine would be sunk, likely without having committed any damage. The Germans of course just ignored this entirely to no real consequence. The whole League of Nations thing is widely recognized to have the critical flaw of being intended to stop war from happening under any circumstance. We understand now these days that this is not particularly manageable. So the point of the UN is to try to keep things in a somewhat orderly fashion to prevent massively escalating engagements between nations. The RoW also have a secondary method of trying to keep things "civil". Generally speaking the internationally accepted rules of war are defined based off of what we tend to loosely agree are a bunch of human rights. So it is not too out of line to state that by breaking the RoW, you are committing human rights violations. Meaning that as the person in charge of causing the RoW breakage, you are now able to be grabbed post-war and imprisoned or executed. Remember, in a "normal" war while the losing government might be thrown out of power, generally speaking that is where it is supposed to stop. The trick being that these days most of the wars getting fought end up happening because, in addition to whatever might be the real hidden reason (*cough* oil *cough*), we already know the ruler in question has broken human rights.

The real problem with vaults is that actually expanding a civilization underground is quite difficult, for a lot of reasons. While yes, on Mars you have other difficulties you do get the advantage that above-ground construction and expansion is easier than below-ground. Besides, who knows how long you could be trapped underground from whatever calamity forced you there in the first place. On Mars, nothing short of the Earth exploding into fragments that reached Mars and force them underground could keep them from being able to continue to expand into space if they wanted. (Assuming of course the main disaster we are discussing happens to Earth). But what is probably the biggest reason you'd want to have a Mars colony instead of vaults is that vaults are only as good as your ability to put people inside of them before it is too late. There are a wide variety of known extinction level events that could happen too quickly for a majority of the vaults to be useful. Gamma Ray Burst being one, and currently an extinction level asteroid strike. We still quite suck at detecting asteroids these days, particularly if they are approaching from the southern hemisphere in any appreciable way. In the last 15 years there have been something like 20 asteroid strikes in the kiloton+ range on Earth that the only reason we know they happened is because of the system in place for detecting nuclear tests. There was no warning for those, one moment a nice day, another moment the people in NORAD are concerned that someone's breaking the test ban treaty until they figure out it was non-nuclear. With Mars...it's constantly staffed 24.66/7/687. (which admittedly does not roll off the tongue as nicely)

An additional concern! After all, this system also doesn't replace the real armies if your countries VR army is based off of their current capabilities. I cast magic missile on the darkness! GM: US, please stop referring to the North Korean player as "the darkness", his characters name is The Grand High Emperor of Earth, His Holiness, Slayer of the American Demon, Ruin-er of the fake South Korea, Enslaver of....ok, fine, The Darkness it is. *grumbles behind his GM wall*

It's possible that it could have somehow aided early navigation techniques in some way, but ultimately would probably not have changed too much. If it was a mostly water ice asteroid (uncertain about Minmus' stated composition) it is possible that it would have been a fairly strong candidate for a colony, but budgets would likely have still worked out the way they did.

We pretty much cannot do the Phobos thing at this time, part of that is that we have yet to construct a single cubesat at all, and additionally we have no engine that could get us to where we'd need to go even assuming the best case aided ascent from our parent rocket. And unfortunately no, we cannot get one of the NASA cubesat slots for the next Mars mission, they are pretty much already snagged.

Really the big problem that you'd have in such a system is that if it was a "perfectly modeled" copy of the real world, then countries with nukes have no reason to ever NOT use them in the virtual fight. After all, there is no consequences for doing so. The game would have to have a stale-mate option because it is certainly possible to stalemate in a war where both sides can nuke each other out of existence. Really the only way this would help anything (but still fail to do so) is if you as some unbiased 3rd party created as good of a simulation as possible for all participants and then let them use the simulation to try and guess how good they'd do against their opponent. If they see there is no possible way they can win, then they might not fight. Chances are though, all you have done is made it so they are better at anticipating their opponents moves and for the sides that are pretty much guaranteed to win, you are further confirming to them that they will win, which allows them to just throw their weight around more in the political arena.

I wouldn't say "an average" building could withstand those forces. That said, it is mostly a matter of ensuring a good foundation (big and certain vibration resistant cement mixes) and thick enough struts (heh). Some effort sure, but not exactly anything too special.

Actually, most proposed programs to send signals out to contact aliens tend to have the idea of a signal that repeats every so often at a given area to both increase the probability of being seen and also to help them ensure that it is not a random/natural event. One such proposal was to basically have the signal fire off in Fibonacci separated time patterns. 1 hour for like 5-10 minutes, 1 hour, 2, 3, 5, etc. For a full day perhaps. Wait some time (a week, month, etc) and then do it again. Repeat as long as the budget holds out. It's pretty likely that if we spot an Earth grade planet and it has signs of a biosphere, some rich person would likely fund a SETI-telescope of sorts to just full time be sending them messages.