Green Baron

... with a toothbrush !

Good news concerning FH. Seems like they don't expect any problems with the design ?

Sounds very similar as in e.g. Germany and Spain, except that the check is done by a dedicated technical services company (not the garage) and the times between checks may vary. A missing reverse might remain undetected. Thanks.

I'd rather repair the gear. Question: isn't there a periodic check for cars in (i assume) the US ?

I recall this footshooting was much more funny in times of Fortran, CP/CMS, RPN, ... RPN (reversed Polish notation): foot youself shoot you [execute] The high tech printer stamps a hole in the magnetic strip. CP/CMS (IBM mainframe, 70s): You write a 500 page documentation, attach your foot and the gun and send it down to the operators. 4 weeks later you get a letter stating that a bullet was mentioned in the docs but missing and your request could not be processed. Fortran: You can't shoot yourself because there is no foot, no gun and no bullet. etc. pp. :-)

As a casual C tinkerer i frequently have to use my fingers when it comes to check if a pointer meets the end of the data structure or not. https://www.funnycleanjokes.com/how-to-shoot-yourself-in-the-foot-using-any-programming-language/

Brass ? Hmm, depending on the kind of brass, it can break when you bend it cold. Brass is more brittle than steel. Best would be to warm it (~500°C) and then bend it over a mold, depending on what radii or torsion you have ... if it is a hollow profile you can fill it with dry sand and seal the ends before bending to avoid kinks. Attention: if you heat it too much(*) it looses a lot of its strength permanently ! If i think about it, is there any possibility to avoid bending it and adjust the fittings in a respective way ? (*) edit: ... which can happen very quickly locally if you use an acetylene soldering torch on a thin profile ...

I didn't watch the video, but in general microbial life in porous parts of earth's crust is nothing new, in principle it can occur as deep as temperatures permit. But i don't precipitate on speculations about et life :-)

Very nice idea, mockups from cardboard. Will keep that in mind for the future when it comes to life in the scene. Right now the western canary islands are struck by heavy wind and rain which is typical for the time of the year and won't last long. But i don't want to cut the plywood sheets inside because of the dust, so i must wait. In the moment it seems to me that the 8mm plywood glued and screwed with 4*30mm screws every 20cm to the rather heavy frame is stable enough. Once fixed i can lean on a cassette size 80*90cm and it'll bend maybe 5mm in the middle. Later, when it comes to the ribs for the second storey (ground level) the connections between floor and ribs will provide additional stability. I am heading for a distance between ribs of 30cm. Anyway it'll still be possible to add additional beams to divide the cassettes. That is necessary where two sheets meet in free air, without a supporting beam, which happens, thanks to my ignorance improvising talents. I can already estimate that the size 5m by 1,6m is not enough for what i want, i might need an annexe. Which is no problem spacewise. Will keep you informed :-)

No domino ? How disappointing ... :-) I was only commenting on the artist's impression :-)

Imagine the domino effect ... :-)

@PB666 gave the point. What many people fall for is the notion that any earthly experiment (including LEO) could replicate extraterrestrial conditions. But it doesn't work that way. I give another example: dormant desert life on earth has nothing, i repeat absolutely nothing to do with eventual preservation on other planets. Studies like this, interpretation here, must be read with great caution. a) Dormant life is everywhere in earths deserts, it is blown there by wind or brought by the rare moisture that condensates. No desert point is really isolated from the rest of the planet, not even the center of the pacific ocean. Every desert on earth is relatively inviting to (earthly) organisms, micro or macro. It is no news that bacteria, even pollen (e.g. from Miocene) can sleep for millions of years and reactivate when conditions become favourable. Though the Atacama is one of the oldest deserts on earth, it is no older than a few (not many) 10s of millions of years. Pollen easily last that long. b) Blown in and locally evolved bacteria have a much higher chance to survive and adapt. Modern day bacteria have proven to survive and evolve everywhere where they aren't destroyed mechanically, they even adapt to aseptic hospital conditions (causing a lot of trouble). Mars, if it ever had something like "habitable" conditions, lost those billions of years ago. It is very far fetched to project preservation and evolution in the Atacama to Mars. The Atacama is, comparably, up to date with things life on earth has brought forward and in constant excahnge. Jurassic Park's "Life finds a way" is too simple for a valid explanation. It cannot be excluded that life evolved on Mars, but it is less than probably that, whatever it was, it could have survived Marsian surface conditions for 3.5 billion years and be restarted like it is the case after a rain in an earthly desert. Don't compare earth's biosphere with a place like Mars. Life may have found the one and other way here, but not necessarily, not even probably on Mars.

Maybe, idk. I meant this http://eden-iss.net/ Seemingly/apparently/maybe something controlled and watched over with a potential for a reliable outcome. Or so, who knows :-)

Nature Astronomy is a nice condensed source i think, and not as pricey as some other journals. Yes, it happens sometimes that lay astronomers point the professionals to a new discovery :-)

An experiment for independent (except power) growing of greenhouse stuff is running in Antarctica. I have linked it somewhere here. And that reflects our current possibilities. Not nanobots, intelligent robots (to a degree, e. g. rovers) and superduper spaceships. None of these exist and will not for the next decades. The Mars society will not go to Antarctica, they stay in rural America where they can buy tarps and tents in diy stores and have their trucks parked at the side of the road to get home for dinner. I recon they aren't the guys that drink "tea, hot", but "beer, cold" :-) We can fantasize about what's in a century (the economy has crumbled, mankind has reduced themselves to a quarter of today, and people got more nature bound because tech levels sank ;-) but that doesn't help in estimating the chances. We are running in circles. If we assume the the holy company SpaceX are the first who try then we must first see how successful they really are in building their bfr, or if they must stay with missions based on fh for a while because tech cannot just be sized up linearly.

Proposals for supersonic jets are in the news every now and then. Maybe two or three companies are even reluctantly working on something, but i think the market is limited and it'll never be a service for the masses if it is much more expensive than a normal flight. But idk, maybe just a marketing gag ...

Boy, let's see how long this is being suffered by the moderators :-) The discussion is imo only a political one ... I am a European, so this doesn't apply to me and i should up. Firearms are strictly forbidden if no reason exists to carry one (hunting, sport included under heavy regulation, country dependent, but open carrying isn't allowed anywhere me thinks) and respective licenses are obtained. Nevertheless, i'd wish me more education health wise for the public. Just a few days ago a lady reported of the wonders of homeopathy and that i shall free myself from what she called old school medicine. I have two medical doctors and two pharmacists in my family, how could i ... ? Ok, i can't add more without getting political :-)

Dremel 3000, plug-in. I already broke a cutting disk when it dropped from the table :-) Don't expect more reports before the coming weekend ....

Not at all, mate ! You helped me out with a basic physics error before ...

Sure there is. Fischer Tropsch conversion does it.

Yeah, he probably wants to test a hypothetical Mars fuel station thingy. We'll yet have to see, until then it can be doubted he extracts 3000tons of fuel from the atmosphere when he can just buy it around the corner ;-) Edit: is anyone thinking about drawing fuel out of the atmosphere for classic applications, like cars or planes ? I mean, if that was running, i'd believe Elon's words ...

Nothing is built yet. Due to the nature of spaceflight it'll always be less safe than atmospheric flight, higher pressure, higher fuel flow, more fuel, less stable structures and all. Gas turbines spool 10.000s of hours without failures before they are exchanged (and still working !), rocket engines have only demonstrated minutes, 10s of minutes in case of the Merlin so far. I am cool :-)

Outch. Bad, very bad. Like 3 magnitudes higher than a B747 or A380 ? But there is no reliable data on bfr yet, could be 2.9 magnitudes ;-)

Yeah, between the wars and until the early 60s smoking was even recommended to people with a low blood pressure. The downsides weren't known or seen. But the link you posted was never based on scientific publications, in contrary, the article mentions several published papers in the early 50s that connect smoking directly to lung cancer. Science lives in such publications, not in company driven propaganda and advertisements. And after the 70s, in the early 80s, if companies then still kept up with this sort of paid and bribed "science" and people still believed it, as a rectification for smoking habits, then they wanted to, which puts 50% of the responsibility into the consumer's hands. The cause why the review process exists is exactly to part the nonsense from the serious work. That does not totally exclude the possibility of deceit or corruption, but it lessens its occurrence. And there is nothing better until now, in contrary, with the internet and for example pre-print servers, Wikipedia etc. it becomes punctuated. And that is why for example "The march for Science" is so important, to counter attempts to discredit scientific work. But that touches politics .... Don't get me wrong, serious work doesn't last forever and may be overthrown, but it reflects the momentary view on things. Just last week, it was published that our direct precursors on earth, the Neandertals, had the same mental capabilities with only gradual differences as modern humans. A view that lasted for almost 150 years must be replaced. You are right, keeping up to date isn't trivial if you really want to. Use the official channels if they are not reported to be under political influence and/or pay a bit and support science :-) You're a blacksmith ? How about a journal of metallurgy and material science ? :-) Edit: much of this is just my personal opinion, of course.

It would have impacted and left a crater in the ice, but i see no reason to totally exclude that the block might have landed on ice. If it impacted billions of years ago an eventual crater might have been blown by wind. The surface seems to confirm that it is laying there a loooong time. Exposure to particles in suspension by wind cause a typical "shine" on surfaces exposed to them for a long time. They can even form facets through constant abrasion by prevailing wind directions, fooling 1st semester archaeologists into interpreting artificial things into them :-) This may be the case here. Or not. :-)