Jacke

Last week, got back into Shortest Trip to Earth, a rogue-like spaceship adventure game. Bit of a steep learning curve. Had played it before in 2019 and 2021, got as far as the 4th Sector (of 10). Got to the 3rd Sector on my first play-through before my ship got blown up. With improved knowledge, started another play-through and doing better.

Just got today a fun little Roguelike Deckbuilder Spaceship Adventure game CosmoPirates. https://store.steampowered.com/app/2466240/CosmoPirates/ I'd watched this stream this morning and I decided I needed to play it meself. Very fun!

Nothing is forever without the appropriate actions. Things need maintenance and support. If it's on a computer, that computer needs some sort of maintenance and support. If it's a library, same thing. Etc. Or it needs to be passed on, copied, as appropriate, to a replacement. Organizations need leadership and recruits. Without leadership it will drift, eventually go off-course. All organizations loose members, either to other concerns or passing away. Recruits are needed to maintain the community.

This is all much more complex than what I think you realise. Not easy to connect the assumption behind each of those formulae. As well, each symbol needs definition. And even to speak of the number of possible states of the entire Universe is lacking something, especially as.... Well, the Universe is now on a large scale flat. Which leads to complexities like given a particular spot, there are places that will never be observable because Expansion means they're beyond the Light Speed Horizon, AKA the Cosmological Horizon. They are parts of the same Universe but no information can ever be received from or sent to them. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmological_horizon This is a System that even Classically is well outside of anything considered when Thermodynamics was formulated in the 19th Century. I have no idea how to adjust Thermodynamics to the current Structure of the Universe. Or even if that gives anything useful.

These are complex concepts. It's best to start with the background and definitions, where Wikipedia is good. Chaos is usually used to refer to systems who's development is strongly affected by even small changes in the initial state. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaos Entropy is a thermodynamic property that is difficult to understand and isn't directly observable, but usually only measurable in its changes. It measures disorder of a system and limits how much energy can be put to useful work. It's also a classical concept and like temperature, it isn't quite there when at the level of subatomic particles who's behaviour is bound by Quantum Theory (which isn't even in a complete version, only incorporates Special Relativity and also Background Dependent). Entropy is very much a product of observing classical systems at scales about the same size as ourselves. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entropy The expansion of the Universe is directly observed, it has happened and is happening. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expansion_of_the_universe What happens in detail to the Universe in the past and up to now can be observed to a degree. How to understand it is rather more complex. Whether it is determinate--I assume you mean predictable--is something that can only be observed over a lot of time, a lot longer than any of our lifetimes.

My background is Canadian Forces Army, not Navy. But the shear craze of needing multiple adaptors for at-sea replenishment of liquids (I remember an old video looking at several then in use) had another NATO standard set up and the ships adapted to it so the need for adaptors is now minimal. I suspect other non-NATO navies may hold to it. Such should be done with at least spacesuits at this time.

A long time ago, I was at a Gun Camp in the Suffield Training Area in a very cold November. No one could leave the main camp or field bivouac without their sleeping bag as if the weather turned and their vehicle broke down, you could die even during the day without it. As for Starliner, well, this better be the Boeing Nadir because to go lower will likely involve more loss of life. That means despite all the testing done on-orbit and on the ground, NASA is not sufficiently confident of Starliner just for the few maneuvers to return and re-enter and land. This means it likely exceeds the previous experiences of similar problems on Dragon. What this has also revealed is the shear stupidity of no interoperability of spacesuits between craft. This needs to be fixed pronto. It should also include the Russians and the Chinese as better to plan for it and not need it than to need it and not plan for it. For the Starliner crew, hopefully they were fitted for SpaceX suits. Or such suits that will fit them for re-entry are sent up. I still remember Soyuz 11 and it would be madness to risk that again. (While thinking of worse case scenarios, I thought of an evil one: Starliner returns okay, but Dragon 9 doesn't. Damn unlikely, but damn....)

I can't quite follow the argument going on between @darthgently and @Exoscientist. Kind of tired now. But certain points.... Don't know its effects with respect to heart disease, but don't knock lemon juice. Getting about 3 US fluid ounces a day of lemon juice is the second thing to do (after drinking enough water to produce 2L of urine a day) to stave off and reverse the development of kidney stones (to get and pass enough Citrate anion in the urine). I avoided needing surgery to take out a large stone by slowly breaking it down with daily consumption of lemon juice. I think Musk had proposals for putting 100 people on Starship, but I don't know if that was one-way or round trip. Doesn't matter, because better evaluations of the craft determined 100 was a crazy crew count and more like 12 was likely. Whether that would work, don't know.

Mercury is a deadly element, sometime affecting slowly or more quickly. Poisoning of the environment from Mercury in volcanic eruptions is a major factor in their impact, especially in the larger forms like Flood Basalts. (At least Flood Basalts are all in the Geologic Past and have a lot of warning signs.) One thing any lab that deals in Metallic Mercury always has is Flowers of Sulphur, ie. powdered Sulphur. After cleaning up a Mercury spill, Sulphur is liberally spread around where the Mercury was. Any Mercury that's in cracks and crevices will react with the Suphur to form a compound. Else the Mercury will vapourize and be breathed in. Deadliness of Mercury increasing I think goes roughly Metallic Mercury (but forms vapour) -> Inorganic Mercury Compounds -> Organic Mercury Compounds. Absorption into the body is needed, but with enough of them around will happen. There are other dangerous materials, but Mercury is a common one that isn't given enough attention by a lot of people.

Most electronic components tend to be more tolerant of radiation than people. Though the people have some biological processes to deal with some of the damage, so there's likely some low radiation environments that would be worse for some electronics than the crew. As for keeping spares in a lead-lined box, it needs to be a complex protection (same for any "storm cellar" for the crew) due to some shielding causing secondary radiation that has a worse absorption than the original primary radiation. There are also low-level electronics designs that stand radiation better than others. So I'd say use more radiation robust electronics rather going cheap off-the-shelf (which is a good principle overall for space components). Also make these components easy to replace and set up a standard replacement schedule.

Considering KSP 2 was created under Take Two Interactive, it was almost certain it was going to end in disaster.

The Tweet and Ars Technica article are both from Eric Berger, widely known as hating everything but SpaceX. I considering anything from him to be at best misinformation and at worse disinformation. I'd suggest going to direct quotes from NASA.

Oh, I know about that in for a penny, in for a pound about bad films. Doesn't make sense. But sometimes, you just have to finish something off. It was 1998. I was an on-call field tech with no calls, so I decided to see a film. That film was Lost in Space (1998). After seeing it, I can say it makes both the 1960's and the recent telly series look art-house masterpieces in comparison. But I was a bit late for it, missing about 20 minutes. Then I got called out before the end. Damnation. A few years later and it was on Pay Television. It was a crap film, but I had to watch that missed beginning and ending.

I think the crap screenplay and execution hypothesis explains it all much better with a more common cause.

I hated Interstellar too. It was in many ways a crap film. Trying to rehabilitate a bad film by imagining a framing device that wasn't put in the film in the first place (spent more time on Okra and Tom) is not going to change that the film is crap. There's more honesty about Interstellar in these 2 videos.