cubinator

Dry cricket food. They have a paper towel saturated with water, and I spray a little extra in between the egg flats occasionally. It's pretty humid in there.

Somehow, every time I measure the mass of my crickets' food dish, it keeps consistently getting heavier. I see them eating all the time from there, so it's all a big mystery. Do they prefer to eat each other? I hope not! Is the food just taking on water from the air? Maybe. I need to count them again tomorrow to see if many more have died...I see the females laying eggs often, so at least I'm pretty sure I'll get a good second generation. I'm pretty sure it's not because I've created or purchased free energy crickets.

Receives Dantooine. Sprays water into receptacle

Red lights don't actually prevent your car from moving through an intersection. You should still be able to go!

No, stuff should be able to fall through the event horizon from our perspective because at that point it's not travelling at quite the speed of light. Only if it got to the singularity would it actually reach the speed of light.

If you imagine space as a sheet bent by gravity (yeah, yeah, I know) then the tidal force is analogous to how steeply the sheet is bent. A supermassive black hole is really huge, like bigger than the whole solar system, so its sheet doesn't bend very quickly over a short distance like the height of a person, or even maybe the size of a planet. But if you look at a stellar-mass black hole, it has essentially the same gravity in the middle (infinite) but it is much smaller, only the size of a city or maybe a large island. So its sheet is practically folded in half, so you'd be torn apart being near there. Imagine laying on a bed that was folded 80 or 90 degrees in the middle, versus laying on a bed that had a slight downward incline. The difference in how comfortable each of those beds are is the difference between a stellar and a supermassive black hole.

I'm browsing the user's guide for making an appropriate research payload for the ISS. It's good to know these things ahead of time.

And Starship keeps its fuel cold inside...It's not a water tower, it's a giant fridge!

If I had a penny for every time someone didn't finish their sentence

Photosynthesis.

Pants were invented by sailors because it was thought that the sight of naked men angered the sea gods.

Merging in heavy traffic? Try spinning! It's a good trick!

Kind of weird to think that most insects have basically 14 limbs or so

Well that's not quite true, we've got a picture of one and it looks pretty black inside. Maybe the singularity is what never forms instead? The event horizon is the distance at which the escape velocity is c. So, you can reach the event horizon travelling at less than escape velocity, though you'll probably be close to it. I think you'd have to solve some indefinite integrals with relativity equations to calculate which happens first between the collapse of the black hole and your reaching its center. I'm not sure the answer would come intuitively.

I have recieved my initial colonies of about 50 crickets and 250 mealworms, relocated them into their respective houses, and given them consumables - food, water, heat-disinfected sand in the case of the crickets. I think we're looking at an order of 100 kg of consumables for 1 astronaut for a 1000 day trip, which does not sound bad at all to me. That is based on only one data point, though, so ask me again in a few months. I might make this a topic in Science & Spaceflight at some point, as it is a real science experiment and funded research project.

This piece of plywood with a list of emails on it. I don't need it anymore.

So Blue Origin plans to turn the Moon around by 2024, I think that is unrealistic. In any case, that crew cabin looks better than the old design, now it seems like you'd actually be able to stand up in it.

"Yip yip!"

We'll call it "convergent evolution" then. Don't fix what ain't broke.

I'm already not a fan of soft foods like that, and I cut out most of the animal fat from my vertebrate meat. I love Manduca for their contribution to science, but I think doing that would be wholly unpleasant for me (having seen what's inside firsthand). However, simply because I'm conducting this research experiment, and because it's right there, I have considered trying it once with a cricket or mealworm - but probably not more than once.

McTharsis, open 24 hours and 39 minutes a day Mole crickets are pretty beefy, they could make for a good food a little later on. One thing we'll surely bring along is a variety of detritivore insect species, such as earwigs and springtails, just to keep the greenhouses clean. Mealworms are a type of beetle - the larvae look worm-like and have a hard exoskeleton, and the adults are dark colored beetles. They live happily inside any kind of cereal bran, and have been considered a pest of grain storage. They multiply with very low effort and, like most beetle grubs, are dense in nutrients. To be fair, insects are actually safe to eat at any level of preparation because they don't carry most food-borne pathogens that can actually make us sick. So there's nothing wrong, at least sanitarily, with eating a cricket that was still chirping. I probably won't do this.

Quite true. But I do like the fact that there are groups with the resources to "try it anyway! It'll be fun".

Yes - those crickets and mealworms. I'll let you folks know how they taste and what I think about doing it on Mars.

My bugs have shipped! They'll be here within a couple days, and I'll start farming. I will be having a rather atypical diet starting in July... All in the name of science and Mars colonization!

Lock me down, and I shall become more powerful than you can possibly imagine...