sndrtj

Entirely agree. I just accepted "build an outpost on Duna", when I haven't even done a flyby of Duna yet, and got 774 science in advance. That's just ridiculous. The reward should come from achieving it, not in advance. Also, mission failures do not end in science points being subtracted. It will loose you money, but not science.

Thanks! I'll head over there for the moss discussion :-).

Hi there, Molecular Biologist/Bioinformatician here. P patens is probably indeed the species you want since it is the moss model organism (i.e. intensively studied). Furthermore, mosses come in two different shapes; a gametophyte type and a sporophyte type. The sporophyte is for sexual reproduction, but gametophytes grow significantly better so you would probably want to use a colony of gametophytes. As other have said, I'd reckon temperature control is going to be a major issue. Humidity probably plays a far smaller role (P patents being native to temperate regions, which can be alternatingly wet and dry), but you probably want temperature to be as stable as possible. Futhermore, there's the issue of light; it seems that light is necessary for proper tip growth.

Well.... we might not have flying cars and hover boards for the general public, but i'd still say technology has taken a huge flight since those movies. Just not in the expected direction. We've had pretty much a digital revolution in stead. Even dumbphones weren't even in general use back then; now we practically all have a supercomputer in our pockets with touch screens, and so much connectivity no one could even have dreamed off.

I'm very late to this discussion, but where can I donate to this project? Not that I have much to spend, but every penny's something, right? As a biologist I really love the moss idea! Could someone perhaps summarize what are the targets for the moss experiments? Thanks! :-).

It's not working for me on Ubuntu. I already did the mozroots --import --ask-remove thingy, and certificates were imporrted, however ./ckan.exe update results in: mono ./ckan.exe update Downloading updates... Downloading https://github.com/KSP-CKAN/CKAN-meta/archive/master.zip Unhandled Exception: CKAN.UnsupportedKraken: JSIPartUtilities v0.2 requires CKAN v1.2, we can't read it. at CKAN.CkanModule.FromJson (System.String json) [0x00000] in <filename unknown>:0 at CKAN.Repo.UpdateRegistry (System.Uri repo, CKAN.Registry registry) [0x00000] in <filename unknown>:0 [ERROR] FATAL UNHANDLED EXCEPTION: CKAN.UnsupportedKraken: JSIPartUtilities v0.2 requires CKAN v1.2, we can't read it. at CKAN.CkanModule.FromJson (System.String json) [0x00000] in <filename unknown>:0 at CKAN.Repo.UpdateRegistry (System.Uri repo, CKAN.Registry registry) [0x00000] in <filename unknown>:0

Life increases entropy at the global level, but locally it seems to actually reduce it. Actually, it's one of the major hallmarks in determining what is "alive": homeostasis. That's not a contradiction; AFAIK, thermodynamics is fine if entropy is decreasing in a local area, so long the entropy of the entire system keeps increasing. Take the following analogy: We have a sea, and a sun. Water is evaporated by the sunlight heating the sea - the sun's energy is now sort of in "stasis" as evaporated water. To increase entropy, that energy must be released. How to release that energy: condensing the water (which in itself releases energy), forming rain, which releases most of its kinetic energy again as heat when it smashes into the surface. However, when having pure water, that condensation is rather inefficient. One needs some contaminant, a disturbance, to nucleate the condensation. Once that nucleation has happened tho, condensation is inevitable, your cloud of water vapor rapidly condenses into rain drops, and entropy will increase much faster than without contaminants in the sky. Life is basically that disturbance. Life converts sunlight super-efficiently into (waste) heat. Once one has life, it's probably quite inevitable that it spreads and catalyzes that entropy increase all over your environment. Just like our drop of rain - which is highly ordered on a local level as compared to the unstructured mess of a cloud of gas - life _itself_ tho is highly structured. It's probably difficult to get life in the first place, but once it is there, it will likely rapidly colonize your entire planet. ("Rapidly" is of course a relative term). I wouldn't say it's however inevitable life will arise by definition, as there will be some requirements for its formation. Just like rain requires the correct mix of vapor pressure, saturation (humidity) and temperature no matter whether there is a nucleation, life requires some (so far mostly unknown) general requirements to exist. Unlike our rain analogy, however, life can adapt, and it is inevitable it WILL adapt and actually become ever better at its job once it exists. That's evolution for you. Everything that can self-replicate and self-mutate can and will evolve; that's pure and simple logic. As for viruses, I entirely agree with you it's rather arbitrary to not include them into "life". They do carry genetic information, evolve, replicate and mutate. However, it would be ignorant to ignore the fact that they are indeed different from canonical life. They rely on other living things to replicate and mutate. They don't self-replicate and and self-mutate.

It's called Google Now. It depends on your model and android version what button you need to press to activate it. On mine: long press home button. Then say something silly like "How old is Barack Obama?" or "What's the weather today in Timbuktu?", and it'll answer . My primary use: "set alarm in 10 minutes", useful when you need a timer! .

If you could see it on Earth, it would be pitch black. However, in pictures from space (where this no lighter background!), it would look grey.

Faster != more efficient per se. The total energy per gram of dead tree as used by detritivores is probably much higher than a simple forest fire. So life is, in the end, better at it. Not necessarily faster, but better.

We've made a flyby to comet Halley at an astonishing relatively velocity of 60km/s (the griotto probe), send an impactor to a comet when the mother ship was moving away at several km/s (deep impact), and even rendezvouzed with a comet (Rosetta/Philae). I'd say this just reduces the problem to an engineering one rather than a physical limit. And humanity has shown it becomes absolutely great at engineering when faced with its own imminent destruction (e.g. we probably wouldn't have had all this rocketry business if it weren't for WWII)

Damn. I wasn't even born when you threw away all those books! For some reason tho, I've been somewhat hesitant to read the 1930s stuff, though I've recently read some Arthur C Clarke (The Last Theorem). I guess the advantage of the golden oldies is that there's a decent chance my local library will have them; the never seem to have the new stuff! And of course the Hitchhiker "trilogy" lines my bookshelf! .

I've got the faint idea that that straight line is not really how it works, but I could be mistaken. In any case, 1000km still seems very close; I haven't done the math, but that's probably well within its roche limit. Make it something like 50k km, that sounds safer. Anyhow... all current "solutions" on this thread imply we either have to flee or act on Pallas directly. In stead of trying to push Pallas, which is going to be difficult, why not redirect something far smaller, but with enough impact to do some decent damage. E.g. comet 67P has a weight of of approximately 1E13 kg, which makes it 7 orders of magnitude easier to push than Pallas. Decent nuke can most certainly do that. If we manage to intersect a similar object like that with Pallas' orbit, assuming the relative velocity is 10km/s, the energy released in that collision would be 5E20 J. That's enough to change Pallas velocity by sqrt(5E20/(0.5*2.1E20)) = 2.18 m/s. Not exactly hundreds of m/s dV, but it's getting somewhere.

Hallo medelander! ;-)

I've done some math. Lets assume we need to change Pallas' velocity by about 100 m/s. That's a wild assumption, but one has to assume something. The kinetic energy required would thus be, following E(k) = 0.5m*v^2 = 0.5*2.1E20 * 100^2 = 1.05E24 J Tsar bomba had an estimated yield of 240 PJ, i.e. 1.05E17 J. So that's almost exactly 7 orders of magninute too small. You'd need 10 million Tsar Bomba's to yield that energy, and assume all of its energy would be directed as pure kinetic energy (which really won't happen). More likely you need something like 100 million Tsar Bomba's. To calculate the amount of nuclear material needed: 1 kT is roughly 4.18 TJ. You need about 6kg of fissile material/kT. You need at least 2.5E11 kT (= 250 gigatons of TNT), so roughly 1.6 billion tons of fissile material. Good luck with that.

Europe, Netherlands.

What's wrong with orange?!

Thanks guys, I'll check it out! :-)

Mounting is basically the computational equivalent of "inserting". Like, in Windows you can "eject" usb drives; that process is called "unmounting" in UNIX/Linux parlance. So the reverse of this is mounting. When it comes down to bootable usb drives, I have had this issue before tho. I just reformatted the drive.

Damn! So... where the hell do we get our water from?

Would it be possible to send some self-replicating 3d printers to it and have them coat the entire surface in some kind of inverse solar sail: a huge "mirror" that slowly pushes the entire asteroid to a different orbit? That would have the benefit if generating the trust on-site. Just two things to solve: design 3d printers that can so rapidly self-replicate as to coat the entire surface in mere months, and find a way of converting regolith into highly reflecting material.

As I understand it, pretty much any colonization effort would violate that treaty. This has been written during the Cold War - perhaps it's time to revise it. I'm all in favor of seeding lifeless planets, and seeding those with life is going to be pretty unavoidable since those planets are the most likely we will colonize anyway. A human presence anywhere means seeding; the human body contains approximately 10 trillion bacterial cells (10 times more than actual human cells); just touching the ground with your index finger means several hundred of thousands of microbes touching that soil. Sometimes I believe that seeding planets with life is perhaps even a moral goal: we owe everything to our little ball of rock with its myriad life forms - we humans might be the best hope it has for "reproducing". @ KerikBalm: Ah, thanks, I forgot about the UV radiation (been two years ago since I last did tissue culture).

That's why they'll prolly not be used for early exploration. Once there is a base, however, it's a very attractive option. With a series of cyclers, you basically get a shuttle service from Earth to Mars.

First of all: there is no such thing as antigravity! Antimatter (probably) attracts matter just like matter attracts matter. As for energy released: E=mc^2, assuming all matter and antimatter is totally consumed. Thus: E=(2*Earth_mass)*c^2 = 1.19E25 * 229792458^2 = 6.28E41 J, which is about one-thousandths of the power of a Type 1a supernova explosion.

Any other (sci-fi) book worms here? I'm looking for some new books to read, as I'm through my own bookshelf. I've read all of Alastair Reynolds, Iain M Banks, Peter F Hamilton and Kim Stanley Robinson, and most of David Brin, so there's my taste in books (obviously space-opera ). Does anyone have a suggestion for some more reading? Thanks! :-)