JoeSchmuckatelli

I'd say, however, that we can put the likelihood at 'miniscule'. Part of what supports your contention is that 'any' life found on a planet would make it, technically, 'habitable' or 'life-bearing'... but that's a far cry from hosting complex life. i.e. Mars if we find bacteria or one of our ice moons; same. Those would support Pan-Spermia as a theory... but not host humans. So if you go to an entire 'desert world'... I think that it is a safe contention that absent a whole lot of water... there's no complex life.

Back in Feb '21 I wrote here about my experiences with Covid. Back then, 1st wave, regular old Covid... I did not have it that bad. Maybe a day of feeling like the flu and then just kicking it waiting for the other shoe to drop. I watched Ted Lasso. I watched all 15 hours of Shogun. I read. I slept. I isolated. Eventually it just went away. The worst was the after-effects; specifically, losing smell and taste. I found it interesting, more than anything, at first. Losing taste left me only with one sensation when eating: mouth feel. I could distinguish hot or cold and shapes. But everything just tasted like nothing. Only sensation I got from smell was this weird 'rotting cucumber' scent - for everything. At the time I was just days out from getting my first shot. Got the second Pfizer after the Covid went away. Then we got the Moderna booster, as I had read about improved immune response by mixing shots. The lasting effects were no-to-diminished taste for several weeks, regular unique Covid-headaches for months and a loss of smell (and concurrent phantom-smells) for about a year. Whelp... I got it again on Thanksgiving; whatever variant is current. I figured I would be largely immune, having not only had Covid, but also the shots (no variant boosters). Wrong. This time around, the experience is much more flu-like. Head and chest congestion. Aching and tired. No fever as far as I can tell, but definitely feeling run down. Headaches. Notably different from the Covid headaches last time - these just feel like run-of-the-mill cold-headaches. Smell is diminished but I can still taste. Big thing is, I'm glad I live in a place where I can just take care of myself as I would with any flu-like symptoms. Very glad the lockdowns are far away. Major sympathy for those folks.

dune - How does Arrakis maintain a breathable atmosphere without vegetation? - Science Fiction & Fantasy Stack Exchange

The legend has it that the Sand People are native, tho. You need to go back to the Source Material: DUNE. Dune had massive underground water reserves filled with life. But reality; that place would not support complex life. You have to have a LOT of the simple stuff first.

Your inclination seems correct. Need oceans and lots of microplants

I see that now; was on my phone and did not see the blue, either. Looks like double patriotic duty. Is that George fighting the baby Targaryen pet?

Is that for fires or just excessively red to be red?

@intelliCom Tater posted this up thread and I found it informative

Very Kerbal

This has been a lot more informative of a Q&A than I anticipated. Always think of the 'vacuum of space' as bitterly cold. I also figured that we could see the nebular clouds/interstellar dust (what have you), either as backlit shadows, dust lit from within by new stars or reflected light... only. It did not dawn on me to consider that they could be so hot. To the extent that I would have recognized a temperature difference, I'd have gone back to my knowledge of IR and FLIR systems; where what you can see is a temperature differential. I can see a nebular cloud being warmer than the background of space... but by that amount? Very eye opening.

Sadly, for us, Thanksgiving is Chicken Noodle Soup from the can. Covid x3

That is an interesting point - and one I did not consider

See also:

This isn't a 'news article' per se - but rather an interesting dive into the current state of Fusion Research. The author focuses on three promising companies (he did a different video about a 4th MIT linked startup, linked in this video). He also talks about the current investment picture and shows why a certain amount optimism may be warranted. One of the companies is doing a SX-analog of rapid iteration - where they are already working on the 7th and 8th generation while testing and learning from the 6th... A marked departure from the traditional 'one-step-at-a-time-report-request funding - repeat' cycle of past efforts. The others are also prototyping and taking some novel, non-tokamak approaches. Enjoy!

Nate flat out said that every week they get closer to the EA release that the framerates are improving. To the point of them playing the game for fun... Not just testing this feature or that. He went into this whole thing about increasing part counts and improving frame rates on 'mid-tier machines'. My impression is that optimization is the primary focus of effort between now and Feb.

The extended cut of the interview did not have much more on MP than what was covered in the 'show'. I still think the word 'friends' is a hint of what is feasible. Upthread, 12 was suggested / speculated at b/c easily divisible by 4...and that has a certain pleasant symmetry to it, given what we do know (4 launch pads at KSC). The reality remains that we don't know what will be capable. The unspoken bit is what they are talking about w/r/t optimization. They are using the phrase 'mid tier machines' when talking about optimizing and improving the framerates. That seems to be the heavy lifting going on in the lead up to EA. I'm no game engineer - but I suspect that this work will have an impact on how MP plays out - which is another reason for having it late in the rollout. I get the sense that they see the implementation of MP to be sufficiently challenging that they want all the other core features nailed down before they see what is possible. If the game is otherwise well optimized, running with good frames on mid tier machines and the majority of the game is feature complete with no problems then the work on MP becomes a singular challenge on adding that layer of complexity (with the game being a known quantity rather than a shifting target that adds new issues with each update).

I think the key is the earth centric view. Change the view to be sun centric and then the path won't look so extreme

Those kinds of plots are crazy. Like you wouldn't guess that the paths look like that. First time I saw something like it was a representation of asteroid belt and the Trojans and Greeks. Kind of eye opening. If you find an answer to why the retrograde, let us know!

FWIW - that Han Solo action figure was the pride of my 11 year-old self's Star Wars collection. It got dumped with a whole shoe box stacked solid with the Blue, the Red and the Yellow Topps bubble gum cards by my 16 year old self who decided to 'put away childish things'.

Decadal survey came out before the JWST launch, didn't it? Fans and hype (and success) change priorities. The non-science-nerd excitement over Webb images does not run as deep as Hubble managed to back in the day... But there are a lot of people who otherwise never think about space sharing Webb images. If you want to push for funding for the next great observatory, now is the time

People have been using the inside of anumals for warmth since 'A Long Time Ago'

That's the slice I just don't know. Maybe it's all 'new series' production costs that aren't being reaped through traditional Theater Release and TV ads. The thing is... what will the market look like moving forward. I suspect that is something unknown. Box Office Drought Prompts Media Execs And Wall Streeters To Take Stock Of Post-Pandemic Movie Business – Deadline People are returning for things like Top Gun and Rise of Gru - so there's still demand for the big screen experience. But there's also lots of talk about how profitable some of the streaming services are (along with news that Disney and Netflix are struggling).

The only problem with this is that you can only run one dedicated mission at a time. No more dumping a couple of Kerbals into orbit around some place to passively collect / do science or leaving Jeb on the surface while you do something else. You're literally forcing players to think about - well before they launch - everything they might do to complete each mission and bring the Kerbals back home before you even think about warping to the next launch window and sending your Jool mission... oops Jeb died. Again - if you want to play like that, good on ya. But for most people? Probably not. Addenda: (The interesting thing for me, reading the countless threads in the KSP2 Sub is learning how many people "Role Play" Space Agency via KSP. For me it was always a highly challenging and educational game, with the emphasis on game - where I had a ton of fun doing stuff and learned along the way. Most of the content I have watched on YouTube has been of people doing silly and absurd stuff with rockets, planes, and rovers - or really creative solutions to problems humans have yet to solve (SSTO's and etc.) But here - with so many voices talking about their hopes for 2... There's been this thread of posts where people want way more realism, sim-lite and role-play than I ever thought anyone would want from this game. I don't begrudge them this; I just never considered it a feature.

Ad revenue would not explain the losses. Given that most of their IP is already produced and the profits received... to be a loss there has to be some kind of new cost associated with having a streaming service. Otherwise calling a loss 'well, we could have made $X from airing on ABC via ad revenue, but on D+ there's no ads"... that's not actually a loss. There has to be something that costs Disney money that they're not reaping via subs. And I find it really difficult to believe that getting (Let's call it 1$ per month average between paying and 'deal' subscribers, if @Scarecrow71 is correct) $164million/month isn't profitable. (We can presume the actual number is higher). Global number of Disney+ subscribers 2022 | Statista So something must be going on that is REALLY, REALLY expensive.

Laughing *literally* out loud! I'm learning a lot from what you've written. Thinking of a gas cloud as a 'body' and that the emissions we're reading from them are blackbody just flipped my brain a little bit. (Can we even call it properly a 'gas' cloud? Plasma cloud?) If pressed I would have said we were seeing reflected emissions from the conglomeration of stars and BHs within the galaxies. I'd also breezed past what Chandra was telling us - of course it's x-ray, and thus highly energetic. Intergalactic space now seems a lot more dangerous than I'd given it credit for! eep! This part I'm gonna have to wrestle with a bit. Because what you're describing is a lot like what I've thought I understood about light. You use the word molecule above - and I figured a hydrogen atom in a gas (skipping over the plasma part for now) would behave a lot more like regular matter than something like a photon. Just as a rock can have a temperature, I figured the constituent atoms would have a fraction of that... but now as I type this I'm remembering the phrase 'excited state' which I guess can be read as 'velocity'. So if I have a hot gas in a balloon, I'm guessing the temperature isn't measured in the atom itself, but rather by its velocity which is reflected by the hot gas expanding the balloon more than the same amount of cool gas - by kinetic force? Thinking of the temperature of the gas as not something that is a combination of all of the individual molecule's temperature writ large, but rather as a function of the combined molecular velocity? [Mind blown emoji] Here's an unrelated question: If a mix of gasses ejected from stars gets heated up to the point it all phases into a plasma... if that plasma cools, does it phase back into the original atoms? So when a star goes SN and creates a cloud of dust and gasses - if that cloud gets heated to such extremes that it phase changes into a plasma... how is the information retained of what it started as? Can you say 'hydrogen plasma' and 'oxygen plasma' in any meaningful sense... or is plasma just plasma?