Green Baron

No problem with fictitious spacecrafts of all sorts, dreams of habitats and abundant resources, easy to obtain, refine and use. But none of it survives a reality check right now. Moar data ! If all goes well we might have a closer idea in 10 or 20 years of what it takes and if it is possible at all to send people to Mars. Until then we'll have to rely on robotic missions and their data and a whole lot on the interpretation of what they send home.

I think it was invented in the 13th century in Europe accidentally when searching for a way to turn charcoal into gold (those alchemists :-)). It appears earlier in China, but afaik not BC. It is still used today in fireworks, together with salts for colouration, and in traditional musket shooting, where people cast their own bullets and fabricate their own charges for the front-loading guns and do things like shoot at a lake surface to hit a target on the side (ricochet, but not accidental).

Proxima Centauri is not the right place to look for or construct potentially habitable planets. Unrelated: would it be possible to scan the recently fabricated star catalogues for the dispersed members of the cluster our sun is from ? I know they exist and some have been identified by relative movement. I would speculate that among those might be candidates that might have a similar composition and history to our solar system and thus (wildly speculating) maybe there is a higher probability for you know what i mean. Also, wouldn't it make for a nice story ? But, really, i do not know.

Ah, okay, i'm not a chef you know, so my creations might not be everybody's taste ... :-)

And take enough ketchup with you. That feeling of desperation when it runs out ... Seriously, i quote from the above linked text: "These data show that the combined effects of at least three components of the Martian surface, activated by surface photochemistry, render the present-day surface more uninhabitable than previously thought, and demonstrate the low probability of survival of biological contaminants released from robotic and human exploration missions." So, no potatoes on Mars. If even bacteria can't survive. At least not before it is clear how to deal with inhospitable and toxic environment. And lack of water, and that of an atmosphere, and radiation, and and and :-)

Who said one can grow potatoes in Marsian soil ? :-) It must be refined before it can be used. Techniques would have to be developed. One would surely have to separate the growing grounds from the natural soil to avoid contamination. A real life Whatney would have died. https://www.nasa.gov/feature/can-plants-grow-with-mars-soil https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-017-04910-3 Otoh it seems unlikely that bacteria on the outside of the landers might survive. Is that good news ? The whole Mars colony thing is pretty premature.

Wow. What happened to their brains and are they still alive ? I read they lack volunteers for human experiments ... no wonder. Quite a lot of dogs were less lucky. Mengele reborn ? No, that goes too far, but somehow at the limit of what ethics allow, or not ?

Science & Tourists for money to space ? There is a video game i know ... Sounds like the 5th element ... :-))

Sorry, i was unclear. I simply meant "Centauri" and was too lazy to type it out.

I am sceptic concerning CO2 emissions. Some countries apparently dream about falling back into a steam age while others work on fusion technology. Btw., random science ... err ... "fact", i read an interview with one of the scientists of Wendelstein 7X, where he said that we might expect a working fuison reactor in the second half of this century. Reading tea leaves :-) Provided one of the currently researched technologies Tokamak, (e.g. Iter) or the above Stellarator proves in the next 2 decades that it can hold a plasma long enough. Maybe before someone flies to Mars ?

Depending on where the boundary between chemistry and life is drawn it (hypothetically) may have started not only once but several times after the crust had solidified, at vents, ocean ridges, shallow continental seas, being destroyed by impacts/volcanism, forming again. Sure is it is there 3.5by before now, probably 3.8, maybe 4.1 and lately discussed 4.28 (and here), which is short after ocean forming. Btw. this timespan is the same than that from the late pre-Cambrian to right now ;-)

"Ozone hole" apparently as small as almost 40 years ago: https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/IOTD/view.php?id=91212&eocn=home&eoci=iotd_title Could the Montreal protocol of 1989 have a positive effect ?

No. :-)

New work on Proxima C.: https://arxiv.org/abs/1711.00578 I think a paper is about being published in the Astrophysical Journal.

There is much more water in the Sahara air and a little less than half the Co2. Could one fill a spaceship tank there ? ;-) Edit nonsense.I forgot a zero. It is less than a tenth of co2 on earth. 0s do matter.

Sorry, i can't see the link, javascript error. May you want to clarify your thoughts on it, because "100% 24/7" is not true, in contrary, sorry :-) It is not impossible that rel. hum. reaches 100% in low areas at night at very low temperatures (acc. to NASA). Still absolute hum. is very low, i doubt it is technically usable but i do not know that. Last i heard that irl timewarp is buggy :-)

No hard fact because no data from that time. Abiogenesis and the RNA-World hypothesis are the widest accepted and most promising approaches. I'd call them "good explanations" until better ones come up. *shrug*

That would still be a bit more than nothing. But it can't be. Why ? Hint: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_of_Mars#/media/File:PIA16915-MarsCuriosityRover-Humidity-GaleCrater.jpg

So it seems until now. This view has made it into literature as the "rare earth hypothesis", as another one of the numerous takes on the so-called fermi paradox.

A report on the state of US climate research and climate change: https://science2017.globalchange.gov/downloads/CSSR2017_FullReport.pdf If someone is interested, browse through it, there is a lot of information in it, but it is a national report, not all the work is included and it is geographically biased (of course :-)) and overall rather conservative.

Morning :-) Nor do i, i can't judge the significance or know the source of the table but it fits well into the (in my eyes overhasty) thinking that a Marsian colony can somehow be a real thing in the medium future (i say 30 years). My general thoughts: This is all based on a few presentation slides of a visionary guy who surely has his successes (F9 is a giant leap imo), but in general tends to dream a little ahead of reality or communicate without a real plan ("steal underpants"). I mean in KSP you slab together an ISRU ship, fly to wherever, timewarp till the tanks are full and then fly back. Jeb's moronic grin will be with you all the way and F5/F9 if you landed at the wrong spot is routine. Reality is a little different, right now there is no prototype, little to no knowledge about density or concentration (heck even availability) of resources. Even on earth with its rich crust and resource pools everywhere the exploration is a work for geologists and geographers, then engineers to judge the how, when and with what before work can begin. In my opinion, thinking that one just lands, hangs out too funnels one tagged CO2 and the other H2O, suck in whatever and do some blackbox magic that fills your tank will not work. It might just be that H2O once was there but now is gone or out of reach. Or there are traces but in the next valley over yonder. If you want to do exploration to check the feasaibilty for a colony to support more than a few specially trained people for more than a few years you must do more than send probes and automated laboratories. You'll need data, charts, analyses, blabla, like how much of what is where and how can it be obtained. Technologies to actually obtain things and do something with them to make them useful. That's a universities job and one for a huge industry ! Even Jeb looses his facial features for a second when thinking of it :-)

Good night, guys, see you all tomorrow !

I like the 2018 statistics They really had more than 50% in 2018, wow !

Ay sir O7 lol. It's always the same, isn't it ? I would be very disappointed if such a company did the same error twice Are you on their pay roll ?

I don't think Musk actively betrays, he just underestimates difficulties and complexities. He shouldn't at that age and with that experience :-) Huge engineering projects are not comparable to software projects. Tesla as a company performs bad, yeah, the cars work, but they just can't deliver. Despite of being in the high price category. SpaceX's record is not that good any more after the err incident. There must be a reason why Ariane and consorts still launch ;-)