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Even then you need to land somewhere. I just played around and at 80 tons with around 13 m/s vertical speed touchdown and it's kaboom-time. I didn't even have any horizontal velocity, that was just an 80 ton VTOL. Sure it was a tad rough landing but it shouldn't make the pavement explode...

I'm not gonna get into this discussion any more than a surface scratch but just to point out there is no current consensus on either free will or what consciousness is and how it's formed so you can't really just smack around your view of people not having free will like it's a universal fact. Or if you can point this consensus to me, I'll gladly admit I'm wrong about it. Secondly a chaotic system does not necessarily have to rely on any sort of quantum mechanical randomness in order to be chaotic. Even purely deterministic systems can be chaotic and on the other hand a system can also be intederministic without being supernatural. But everything that happens in our brain is governed at least partly by biochemical processes, which are a collection of statistical effects by countless molecules which in turn are governed by individually by quantum mechanics so yes, on the individual cell level there is total randomness involved everywhere. Have you not even once in your life sat down and thought about an opinion you have or why you feel a certain way? And then realized that it's something you've never thought about but now that you actually think it through, you feel different about it? You have literally never ever ever in your life changed how you feel about things? Maybe I'm some sort of superhuman but I do that on a daily basis. I constantly re-evaluate my moral values and every now and then realize I've been stupid and childish about some things and that feeling essentially rewrites a part of my brain. Result is a change in my moral standards.

You know, scientists are like fairies. Every time someone says "I don't believe in science!" somewhere a scientist drops dead.

From strictly utilitaristic point of view, not much really unless you want something like a robot friend or artist in which case those things could matter. But the automaton executes morality as defined by it's creator, the free thinking intelligence executes morality as defined by itself. So from the original point of view in this thread it makes a world of difference. I personally wouldn't allow anyone to pull the plug on a free thinking machine intelligence if it was advanced enough that I would consider it self-aware, morally acting and sentient creature. For the automaton, who cares? It's a program.

Of course, although survival and reproduction aren't moral issues, they're just desires like the craving for sugar and fat. Though they do turn very quickly into moral issues so I'm just poking at the semantics a bit. Then again most of this whole issue is pure semantics. But yeah in a sense we have also hardcoded moral values through emotions and culturally adopted norms, like freedom of speech for example. And I'm on the same boat with 78stonewobble above that I don't think humans really exercise free will in most of their actions, at least excplicitly. But the main difference here is that human moral system isn't predetermined by a set of values and then forced to act based on those values, it's rather re-evaluated on the spot when making moral decisions and often behaves in highly illogical and emotional way. If you program a machine to make decisions based on some quantified set on values, it doesn't get that choise. You can let it modify itself but if you treat morality as quantifiable, you're implicitly denying irrationality from it.

I'd personally advice against using the word soul in this context. It's a word that's pretty heavily loaded with subjectivity and values and in order to use it to convey any meaningful ideas you'd have to construct an exact definition for it first. And by doing that you'd probably contradict almost every other person's view of what soul is. In any case, quantifying morality and ethics has been done in many different ways by a vast number of people. Some of the theories have had limited success in describing how people behave in very spesific settings, such as for example consumer behaviour. But on a more general level the problem with quantifying morality is that it always leads back to the people who are defining the values in the first place. So to some small extent you can quantify your own morality and you can quantify the morality of people in general or any other subgroup. But since morality in itself is a subjective and largely qualitative concept, you can only quantify it subjectively and in retrospect. What I mean by this is that starting from a completely "blank person", you don't first arrive at certain values, then apply them to your own thinking and then reach a moral decision. What happens is that you first develop your own concept of morality, then quantify it and then you can in theory use that quantification to predict your own decision in a given moral problem. If you don't have morality in the first place, you cannot assign values you need to quantify it. So the problem here is that you can program a synthetic mind to behave according to some moral standards. But the values of morality are actually chosen by you and the quantification process is also creator-dependant. So what it ends up representing is your idea of a system which quantifies your idea of moral values. But now the machine is deprived of free will as you're hardcoding it to "like" and "dislike" some actions more than the others. And now we're already pretty deep in the territory where the machine is pretty much just an automaton pretending to me a moral subject. So you can call this morality but I don't see how it even remotely resembles the morality the humans possess.

Or perhaps learn the dark secrets of humour before trying to be clever and sassy on the internet by linking wikipedia articles on argumentation My point was merely that olympic games are not becoming silly, they have always been silly.

Yes they should definitely bring back the good old days of club swinging, live pigeon shooting, obstacle course swimming and I want to experience again the intense moments in tug-of-war finale of 1908!

It's a gel which is somewhat porous so in a sense it's a sort of a mesh by itself but yeah I think there's some misunderstanding because it doesn't exactly allow free passage of air. It does breathe a bit and certainly keeps moisture pretty well. But it's essentially like jello so imagine pouring some on a plate, then shaking, vibrating and blasting it off to space. It's probably gonna be a mess so you need some kind of supporting structure for it. Maybe take some thick nylon wire and build a framework on which you pour the agar and then clamp it tightly to the dish with a net on top. I don't think the moss needs a lot of space on the gel surface per sprout or whatever is the moss equivalent of a sprout? Something I'm thinking is that if you completely seal off the dish with 1 atm inside it and then expose it to vacuum, can it handle the pressure difference?

The difficulty options are fine for balancing the game and a very welcome addition but that's really the only thing they do - balance. The core issue is still that we have an amazingly fun and engaging game with building and flying rockets but there's nothing beyond that. If you think in terms of what you do in game instead of why you do it. What you do is you build a rocket, fly somewhere and then click a button. It's irrelevant in this context whether the reason is that a contract told you to, you get science points from there or just felt like it. The contract and science system simply tells you where you need to go and what parts you need to take with you but those two properties are already included in the game by default. You're going somewhere and taking parts with you no matter what - they give you nothing new to do or think about. To me this feels like playing an RTS where you gather resources and build your base, train and upgrade your force, assemble and move them in good order to the other side of the map and that's it. There's nothing to do there. And this is why I think the contract system especially is making the game a lot less sandbox-like. At least with science your starting condition is that the science just is there, you have ways to get it and it's entirely up to you where, how and when you collect it. That's sandbox gameplay and even if it's not really exiting, it's at least OK. For contracts you can only choose how you're doing what's told to do so they're even more linear by removing the when and where. OK granted you have options to choose from which is very good but I'm talking from the system's point of view - the contract itself is defined as exact, you're just given several options from exactly defined destinations. And it's totally fine if you want KSP to be a hybrid of randomly generated mini-quests and rocket building. But it's very very far from any economy or tycoon games. It's not that there's money for you to grab and it's up to you to decide how you pursue it. It's just handed to you for grinding arbitrary miniquests like in your everyday MMORPG. Though I'm very exited about the new biomes. Coupled with lowered science gains they should make the science lab an essential part for any planetary exploration so maybe research bases, rovers and planes will finally become useful.

What you said is true but I don't think it's intended to work that way. Anyways the consensus probably is that the tech tree could use some tweaking but besides that my original point still is that no matter how you arrange it, having less parts available makes things harder. Despite this it's said (by Harv himself) to be a tutorial for the game and help new players. I don't see how it's helping new players in any way as it only enforces restrictions on them. There are tutorials and there's sandbox where you can play around with designs and see what works and what doesn't if you have trouble in learning the ropes. Once you learn the basic concepts the tech tree is just a small speedbump that neither really serves the new player (at least after one playthrough) nor really challenges the experienced player and it's too easy and fast to serve as a driving gameplay mechanic for the career mode. So effectively it's almost redundant for anyone else but the person who plays for the first time and has enough skill to overcome the challenge, not enough skill to breeze through it and who's not too unskilled to be halted by it. So it's a very small niche who actually experience this as a meaningful mechanic. Luckily the new difficult options are some sort of remedy for this. But not to drift too far off-topic, I reeeeally hope they'd make science somehow more interactive with the biomes. I dream of having meaningful research stations and having to actually design the science payloads and experiments with the intended target in mind. As it is it's just "cram them all in and clickity-click once there."

This gets tossed around a lot but I still have trouble understanding the logic behind it. If you're a new player who is struggling with Mun landing, how on earth is it supposed to help you that you're being denied access to fuel lines, rockets that are big enough to easily lift your lander, landing cans and solar panels in the first place? Honestly there aren't THAT many parts in stock game and they do follow a very intuitive and logical progression as in you have small engines, medium engines, big engines and huge engines for example. Also if science is just a tutorial for new players, funds are just a tutorial for new players and tutorials are also a tutorial for new players then what is there for experienced players? If they are supposed to just zoom past the tech tree in a few missions, do a contract every now and then just to top off the fund reserve and play it as sandbox then why do they even play the career mode in the first place? If they don't enjoy progress, why play the progress game?

Simply amazing video! And excellent choice of music to go with it, too.

There are already some drugs to help alcoholics. An old one is Antabus or disulfiram, which cause extreme nausea from drinking even a small amount of alcohol. It's a pretty harsh way to treat alcoholism, but physiologically effective. It doesn't help with the urge to drink though and obviously the person seeking help must take the treatment. But alcoholism is a mix of physical and psychological symptoms anyway so treatment is always a bit difficult. Another, newer drug is called Selincro, or nalmefene, which aims to reduce the actual urge to drink. It's supposed to help with some other addictions as well as it targets the opioid receptors themselves in the brain. As for metabolising alcohol out of a human body there's already a pretty good system in place. It's called the liver You could try to enhance it of course but a human can drink faster than any enzymes can catalyze alcohol out so what you'd get in the end is just that the alcoholic would simply need to drink more in order to get their addiction "satisfied" and they'd sober up faster so they could drink sooner again. Also a person with a serious alcoholism problem can already be very very drunk constantly and still function, which is also a problem in itself. Even if you could make a drug to sober a person up very fast, wouldn't you think it would actually encourage alcohol abuse as the consequences wouldn't be so severe? Tuesday night, let's get hammered for the evening and sober up during the night with no hangover on wednesday morning's meeting? Repeat on wednesday night because hey, there's a "get to work" -pill.

"Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not to his own facts." If you go around claiming the Earth is flat - people will prove you wrong. If you're about to dunk your head in a barrel of hydrochloric acid based on your firm belief that it's good for your complexion - people will (hopefullly) stop you because you're wrong. You have every right to your own opinions no matter what they're based on. You have every right to express those opinions. You don't have the right to moderate what people say to you if you voice your opinions. They have the freedom of speech just like you do.

I did say in a "very speculative case something like that could at least carry information and be replicated" which I did mean as being extremely unlikely to have been a precursor to anything but there's no hard proof to say they weren't either. So yeah for the purposes of life origins I wouldn't support PNAs unless we find an actual life form that uses them. I was merely pointing out for the sake of argument that in case of alien life emerging there are other possibilities if you wish to speculate every imaginable scenario. I'd imagine many people reading these forums were not aware that changing the way DNA is built is pretty easy to do and every day business in a bio lab. But anyway that's not why PNAs are studied. They have some very useful properties when designing diagnostic assays for example. They have similar~ish binding properties than DNA or RNA aptamers but they're much more thermostable which can be a huge advantage in an actual application. There's also the fact that they're almost impervious the DNAse and RNAse which can be a real pain if you try to use a natural sample matrix and include synthetic DNA oligomers. Plus you can conjugate the peptide backbone easily with other molecules like imaging labels. That's harder to do with natural DNA. As for unnatural bases, I don't really know what they've done with them so far but given how ribozymes seem to have an insane amount of possibilities for different functions, I wouldn't dismiss alternative structures as a waste of funding. I'm just throwing this off the top of my head but if they can make a host carry six bases in a plasmid, then create a system to synthesize a protein based on that system we could in theory make the vector a lot shorter and then possibly generate bigger and more complex proteins in simpler production organisms. And if they can make this system to work and show that an organism can indeed function with six bases just as well, then couldn't it exist in an alien life form? Let's say if we find out that six bases has more redundancy then could it be favoured in a harsher environment as a basis for life? Also I can symphatize for the funding issue, but show me a field of science that doesn't suffer from this and I'll consider changing my major

That phrase is a bit misleading. Life that we have now here on Earth is very tough and capable of adapting to incredibly harsh conditions. I'm pretty sure that places like Europa could probably sustain some of our lifeforms at least after a few modifications. However it says zero about how life can come into existense or how probable or improbable it is. It's like saying you can drive on top any cliff with a Humvee so obviously a Humvee can be built on top of every cliff. I don't know how plausible it is to happen in reality but there's all kinds of fun things we can do with DNA and keep it functional. Like you can use different base pairs other than G-C and T-A or you can use a different backbone structure. For example peptides can be used instead of the sugar-phosphate structure and it's actually more stable but as a consequence also less adaptable and complex but in a very speculative case something like that could at least carry information and be replicated.

That's pretty amazing. An expert with contacts, lab access and a personal research interest plus some groundwork already done. I think you hit the jackpot there.

I'm a gamer. I support realism but only when it bends a knee to the altar of meaningful gameplay decisions. Quite honestly some of the realism advocates do seem to maybe have lost some perspective on where the line is between stupid arcade and going grognard. On flipside many people seem to oppose the changes just for the sake of opposing the changes. But here's my take on things. ISP. When I started playing, I googled it and read about it. I learned something like this (still no idea how far off the mark I am): atmosphere affects thrust if fuel flow is constant, KSP makes thrust constant but alters the fuel flow. In realistic model you'd need to hit the throttle a bit more to get the same thrust and you end up burning more fuel, in KSP mode it just burns more fuel. So in the end the gameplay effect is pretty much the same, either way you need to choose an engine that has enough thrust. This is the gameplay decision here: Which engine do you choose for this rocket. For me it's just comparing peanuts to peanuts. However I'd argue that many people don't even care about the effect of atmosphere on the engine at all. They have enough thrust to lift off, enough dV to do what they want and that's it. Only substantial thing the realistic ISP would do is add a level of complication. I don't mind either way but I can see why they want to simplify it a bit. The educational value is that atmosphere affects engine performance. That's not wrong. The details are, but so is the Bohr model and still they use it to explain the structure of an atom. I honestly do not understand how this has become such a major issue for people. But then again, the arguments against it aren't really all that strong either so might as well change it. Maybe then even I would learn how it really works. Pros: Realism crowd isn't complaining. Cons: The low-complexity crowd isn't complaining. Life support With every life support mod you do pretty much one thing. Estimate how long the mission will last and how many kerbals are going. Add tonnage to compensate. Forget unless you estimated wrong. It's fun for some people and I understand it, but enjoying the mechanic pretty much requires the premise that you want to have a life support system. The mechanic itself is simply a timer that you need to satisfy. Unless there's something substantial gameplay wise added to life support, I'm adamantly against it. If someone implements kerbal comfort and happiness levels, a reason to actually take kerbals somewhere other than the arbitrary science experiments they can do, meaningful decision on how the life support is done, then I'm definitely for it! I'd love to have my miner kerbals produce more funds if they have access to comfy living quarters with huge snack supplies to wolf down, I want my science kerbals to get more lightbulbs over their heads if they have ample supply of extra electricity to play video games and get intellectually stimulated and Jeb to get frustrated if he doesn't get to do a 5 G turn at least once during the mission. Anything meaningful. But not "Add 2 tons of life support to last a year. 4 tons for 2 years. 6 if you think you need 3 years." Also I don't want kerbals to die but that's just personal preference. Pros: Could be interesting. Cons: Could be arbitrary. Aerodynamics This one's s great example. The soup dynamics make any design decision on the shape of the craft irrelevant. Barn doors and pancakes fly just as well as sleek, beautiful planes. With FAR, every choice matters. Pros: Meaningful design. Cons: Can't think of any. Re-entry Along with aerodynamic forces being able to break joints, this one makes you think about the craft design quite a bit. Pros: If you want to bring something back, you need to figure out how to do it properly. Cons: Some wacky space plane designs become harder or impossible. Universe scale With improved aerodynamics, the planets can and need to be bigger. I think the 4,5 km/s to orbit is pretty good, it could go up to 6 but not more than that. After playing with RSS, the launches are quite exciting at first, but soon the scale starts to be a bit tedious. 15 minutes to orbit doesn't sound like much, but after 10 launches it starts to feel a bit long. This however is nothing more than a personal preference. The stock launch is way too quick though. I don't like dropping my first stage 15 seconds after liftoff. Pros: More immersive launches (highly subjective) A huge planet looming over your head is a sight to behold Cons: Longer launches (migh be an issue for some) Planetside travel gets more tedious. Procedural terrain isn't THAT exciting to watch.

Optimal for pretty much any growth is around 30-40 degrees celsius, looks like anything 40 is pretty bad. For spirulina it seems to be around 36 celsius but there are other factors too. Going below 30 isn't an issue, it just hinders growth a lot. I don't know how cyanobacteria can take freezing without prepping them for it but I do know they won't grow like that Soil based plants would be sturdier though, seeing as they don't die during hottest summer I'd guess they can survive and thrive if given water in a bit more robust conditions. But if you want a liquid culture, it needs to stay in the range of 35 +/- 5 degrees if you want it to grow, depending a bit on organism. So the heat regulation is the defining factor here.

Some random thoughts: Using soil based plant doesn't really solve many problems. They need to be watered as well and need to be kept at steady temperature. Plus they grow slowly and we don't know how long the satellite stays in operation. They also probably need more space to grow than water based organisms. One option would be Spirulina algae. I'm not entirely sure what kind of growth conditions it requires, but it's a cyanobacteria so basically it needs water, nutrients and CO2. You can do a microgrowth experiment in a very small container, probably 10 milliliters is more than enough, the experiment is very fast as they grow quickly so the satellite doesn't even need to live for that long, just a few days. I don't know how representative a microgrowth experiment is though but a normal lab microgrowth is done in the milliliter range and sometimes even less than one milliliter. Spirulina is actually soon going to be sent to the ISS to study how it grows in microgravity. It's a possible solution to creating a bioreactor which would scrub CO2 from the air, use it for growth and actually in my university they've studied a way to make food especially for astronauts from spirulina (it's actually used as a supplement already and tastes very bland). There's an ESA project called Melissa (Micro-Ecological Life Support System Alternative) which has been studing different species for this purpose and they've found Spirulina to be a good candidate. A basic bioreactor is just a tube with the nutrient solution with the organism inside. Usually air is pumped through it, probably in this case air spiked with CO2 and there needs to be a way to extract the outflow of gas. With small growth chambers you could use one pump system for all experiments. For the sake of science you'll need replicate experiments, preferably at least 3 to confirm anything. It's much more uesful to get one reliable result from one situation than shakier data from several situations. Of course if space and weight permits, do both gravities but start with getting one good dataset. If there's space it's easy to do for example one set of experiments in lunar gravity, spin up to martian and then do a second set of experiments. If you use for example 3 tubes @ 30 grams each, that's 90 grams for one experiment set and roughly 200 for 2 sets. Only restriction here is how much space and weight there is available. The defining factor here is also the heating mechanism. No matter what you plan to grow, it won't grow in freezing temperatures and will probably burn up in anything above 50 celsius.

I'll have to look if I can find that Churchill's book. It's a bit old but shouldn't be an issue. Thanks for bringing it up I think the study should be tied to the current scientific field in some way and not just throw something random together. There are ways to do even molecular level assays with very light equipment using normal lateral flow strips and microfluidistic valves. It's just a matter if suitable assays for a meaningful target are available (commercially or via university) since we can't develop them on our own. You do need a camera to read the result though but it's required for any growth studies too. There are even quantitative assays that utilize cellphone cameras but I'm not sure if any are commercially available yet.

First point is that whether or not something is fair use is not easily decided and it's done on case-by-case basis. I don't want to go into ogy contests about this but just from wikipedia you can pull examples both ways and study the mess that is copyright laws. Just because you think it's fair use might not be fair use. Asking Squad about it is free and if they say it's not OK you should not do it, it's that simple. If they say it is OK, your bases are covered since you have the IP holder's permission to use it in this way. Second point here is that whether or not this is non-profit can be contested. You're asking people for money that goes directly to a single person to fund their balloon launching hobby. You don't even have an existing work here, you're selling the idea of Jeb on stratosphere to get money of which you're basically not accountable to anyone on how you use it. It's very different if you were to first do the work, then ask for donations to cover the expenses. Now you're just asking for money. Third point is that using this forum to ask for money without permission from the forum's owner is just plain rude. I can think of a few scenarios that might happen if they just let anyone advertise their kickstarters to fund their Jeb-launching projects. Again asking for permission costs nothing, is polite and if they say no, you don't do it. There's literally no reason not to do it. Final point here is that the person setting the kickstarter should realize that if any copyright issues would be to arise, they're personally accountable. If they get ten thousand dollar fine, they themselves will have to pay. Crying to court about someone on the internet saying it's ok will not help. For all the above points that may or may not cause trouble the simple, polite and completely free solution is to ask for permission. Personally I can't understand why this is such an issue and needs to be argumented over? Just ask, if they say yes, great, you have official support. If they say no, you just avoided a lot of headache for someone and unneccessary work for a gaming company. Either way it's a win.

I'm 30 and definitely not yet an adult. I'm fully expecting some sort of exponential curve and one morning I'll wake up and feel all responsible and smart.

I've got a BSc in biotechnology and I'll be starting my master's thesis this fall. It's more biochemistry and diagnostics than biology but I'm happy to help with what I can just out of curiosity. A small scale bio experiment is relatively simple in theory but I have no clue how a launch provider would feel about it if you're not from a certified bio lab. In any case it should be something that deals with short term exposure to LEO conditions to justify the need for a cubesat.