SunlitZelkova

But this requires every single other planet to ever have intelligent life to be a super earth or lack propulsion technology, or requires every single species to have the exact mindset despite physiological and environmental differences. It still seems like a very unlikely scenario. In regards to No. 2, I just assumed every species will have its own "internal" conflicts, and that intelligence will cause them to become more complex, to the point where either no one solves them and they result in the destruction of the species or they get solved: a 100% chance of one likelihood or the other. This is based on how all species have some degree of "infighting", whether it be the males of some species fighting for dominance over each other or a freaking world war. It is indeed speculative however, and perhaps not necessary in discussing the Fermi paradox. But this concept of something "not being as cracked up to be" (not the slang term, the concept itself) entirely originates with humans. There is no reason to think advanced extraterrestrials would have the same thought processes that would lead to such an idea. Species generally attempt to "go further", naturally going further to find food and in the process "colonizing" different areas, whether they be humans on a boat crossing the Atlantic or terror birds on their feet crossing the Isthmus of Panama. Only for very specific historical and social reasons does humanity contain some individuals who don't want to engage in the physical world to the point of wanting to just sit in their house. They tend to be in the minority, there is no "real" reason why an intelligent species would completely go virtual beyond fiction.

I'm a little skeptical. It is certainly something that could happen, but as a solution to the Fermi paradox it presents some problems- 1. All aliens have to evolve to be lazy and self-centered, yet strive enough to survive long enough to be capable of creating a simulation. 2. If they reach this level of technology anyways, why don't they actually solve their society's problems and go interstellar, or at least completely colonize their own solar system? I think sociological theories regarding the Fermi paradox, and perhaps extraterrestrial intelligence in general, too, are mostly flawed because they consist of projecting human logic and behavior too much or entirely. If it is unlikely extraterrestrials would bear any resemblance to humans, it is even more unlikely they would share the same destructive thought process that leads to "I just want to sit on the beach with a drink for all eternity even if it isn't real"-type mentality.

This is not what appears to be happening based on that article. It's just a committee creating some preliminary concepts.

NASA has already modified the Neutral Buoyancy Laboratory for Artemis training and it has begun. Many months ago they shared a picture on Twitter of an American flag being erected by an astronaut wearing an xEVA suit.

I think this will fail. Didn't ESA actually get parts of its budget reduced/cut just a year or two ago? Astronauts, scientists, engineers, or groups of all of them have tried to put forward space program proposals to their governments in the past. There were a number of government committees comprised of former astronauts, scientists, engineers, and former NASA management people in the 80s in the United States that "recommended" or "advocated" for more investment in space exploration, including a return to the Moon and/or an expedition to Mars. They had all of the fluff about how it would benefit Earth (and "political leadership"), yet their proposals were ignored- despite the US (according to the history I was taught) being in a period of economic prosperity! The reasons for developing independent European crew transport capability listed seem to be basically identical to that of Hermes in the late 70s or 80s. The only instance I could see this coming to fruition is if ESA's members have interest in maintaining their own independent presence in LEO after the ISS. IIRC, ESA has made no statements regarding its stance on Axiom. If they build their own small space station they will certainly need their own spacecraft to reach it. Or, if the US and China destroy each other in a nuclear war, then ESA will be forced to start its own crewed space program if it doesn't want in on the ROSS.

I have heard about this. NuScale getting approved was a little bit of a local headline here. From an analytical point of view, would more reactors mean more possibilities for failure? Or will safety remain as it is now even if SMRs become widespread?

In his defence, he was watching human beings get launched to land on the freaking Moon! I have read the Apollo 11 launch transcript, annotated by NASA. It mentions he fumbled his words another time, too.

These definitions can be relative. But within people’s general perceptions, Apollo 8 was not an Earth orbital mission or a solar orbital mission. So I don’t think the Apollo stuff necessarily discounts Gemini 11. In any case, though, I just took a look and apparently there is no “highest Earth orbital mission”. Gemini 11 holds the official record for “highest altitude in elliptical orbit”. https://www.fai.org/records?f[0]=field_record_sport%3A2028&f[1]=field_country%3AUS&page=2 So the true record being broken by Polaris Dawn depends on whether they circularize or not.

Do transfer orbits count as normal orbits? If not, Apollo would not count as an Earth orbit mission because they all entered the Moon's SOI (obviously including Apollo 13). Unless we go really far and claim that the lunar landings themselves were "flights" and that the astronauts were "aboard" the Moon, which orbits the Earth. The CSMs don't count for that because they orbited the Moon and not Earth. I would assume transfer orbits are not considered identical to normal orbits. No one calls proposed Mars or Venus flybys "solar orbit missions"...

I don't think it is a rejection of "fun facts" so much as it is just happening to not align with English.

[snip] Starship has obviously been built, and has flown suborbital test flights, but many posts make it sound as though it is already flying payloads to orbit. I'm not sure about this particular discussion, it is long and a little rant-ish so I don't want to waste time reading through the past two pages, but in general, his points are- 1. Starship has many unproven/untested aspects of its design and architecture, so it is incorrect to treat it as an already flying launch vehicle, as many actually do or indirectly imply. It could, regardless of how unlikely, could end up having a development schedule delayed as Angara for all we know. Most on this forum are optimists, perhaps kerbiloid could be described as a pessimist (realist?). 2. It is unknown what the internal state of SpaceX is, so it is incorrect to assume that it will have 100% support for the next two decades and fly when it does and with the claimed figures it will. A possibility, no matter how unlikely, does exist that there are errors in the design that are unknown and will cause delays with or significant redesign of the system. Again the whole optimist vs. pessimist thing comes into play here. ------ By the way, I personally feel this discussion is completely relevant to the SLS thread, insofar as posts bashing SLS in favor of SpaceX and Starship are allowed here. This portion of the discussion is basically just a very detailed rebuttal of the criticisms of the SLS design process, and therefore are on topic.

The term "fun fact", has origins dating back to 1853, when "tidbits" were published in newspaper columns titled Fun, Fact, and Fancy. Tidbits themselves date to the mid-1700s. "Fun" and "fact" remained virtually independent of each other (usually listed with a third item) until the 1970s. There are two known isolated instances from the 1950s, one from a newspaper (albeit bearing bearing a typographical oddity in the form of a period after the word "fun") published three times between 1950 and 1951, and one from the name of a game at a club party in the same town in 1957. In the second instance, it should be noted it is unknown whether Fun Facts the game actually involved pieces of information called "fun facts". The first true "fun fact" likely originates in a Sunday colored comic called Wrigley's Fun Facts: Fun Facts to Know & Tell, probably first published in 1970. It was presented by Wrigley's Chewing Gum. Source with more info (a good read btw)- https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/333745/origin-of-the-term-fun-fact Unfortunately, unless anyone has a Sunday newspaper from 52 years ago lying around, we will probably never know what it was. It should be noted that this research entirely pertains to the English speaking world. We don't have "fun facts" in Japanese, the term is 豆知識 (mamechishiki, translated better as "tidbits"), which can be fun, but aren't necessarily. As fun facts are technically a Cold War cultural development, it would be interesting to know if the Eastern Bloc had any counterpart or equivalent.

Won't these modified humans have the same problems too? They aren't going to be psychic cultists. One modified human thinks the Dyson sphere should be built this way, one thinks it should be built another. Then the project's resources get split. Further conflicts over funding and status occur. The project is so heavily delayed and mired by issues it may have well been done by regular humans. +1 Last time I checked, when an infant of any animal that requires some form of parenting- rodent, bird, human- gets abandoned, it doesn't "do instinctual survival stuff" sans the parent and live, it just gets killed.

Politics does play a part though. What kerbiloid is implying about Thiokol doesn't appear to be true, but is sort of in play with how North American Rockwell (located in California) got the contract to build the Space Shuttle (California was vital for Nixon's reelection bid). So not "Thiokol needs money to build ICBMs so let's collude to let them build a spaceship to give them money" but instead "X company needs money so its employees will support my campaign so let's let them build a spaceship to give them money". Which could be considered "collusion" or nefarious in nature if you deliberately flout and misuse public interest and funds to achieve your goal.

What challenges are humans experiencing? Humans weren't made to take it easy. I don't think they were "made to do" anything*, but using human logic, it appears as though they basically develop, reproduce, protect offspring until it can manage on its own, and then die. They also do a lot for their community/tribe along the way. These modified humans you propose certainly could do stuff, but I still don't see their advantage over humans. Remember, just because they will immediately possess advanced knowledge from birth doesn't mean they will be use it. You could make them use it, but then that gets into dark territory like child labor. I suppose, looking at the rest of the discussion, that this event takes place under dark circumstances anyways though.

I don't see how they would have any advantage over humans. Humans are already building "stuff" out of instinct anyways. A complex web of instinct (at this point in societal and technological advancement), but still instinct nonetheless. These humans would still need to wait 20 some years before being emotionally capable of doing these things they wish to without throwing tantrums or giving up and engaging in some comforting leisure activity. Memory wise it is no different than humans who actually study the stuff "naturally" and then decide to improve upon it.

https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/13501/why-did-the-apollo-lunar-module-have-four-landing-legs#:~:text=In particular%2C chapter 6.4 notes,during 1963%2C decided on four. Two quotes from this that answer the question-

I think this portion of the discussion is flawed. This was/is caused by institutional and financial problems, not the rocket being expendable. Reusability does help solve those financial problems and thus I think it could be said that reusability is necessary for rapid iteration, but from a financial perspective- I still haven't seen any evidence that bringing back Falcon 9 has improved the design process over that of an expendable rocket. ------ One problem though is that it is hard to compare the development of Falcon 9 and the development of Soyuz because one is reusable and one isn't. It's obvious that Falcon 9 is going to have a lot of improvements, it is a freaking reusable rocket. In contrast, Soyuz won't see major improvements, not because of a lack of data, but because there simply aren't many improvements to be made. To use a metaphor, a train is going to see a lot of improvements over 100 years vs. the horse drawn cart in 100 years, but that's because the train is a train and has room for improvement. And while yes, the train is objectively better than the horse drawn cart, just because the horse drawn cart couldn't improve in the same way the train did, did that mean the "development process" that gave us the horse drawn cart was "useless" or "backwards" or even "bad"? I would say no, because the horse drawn cart helped drive societal development for the past 3500 years, development which enabled the train to exist in the first place. So to sum it up, if you want to build a reusable rocket, reusability is better, but if you don't, then non-reusability can be just as "good". Part of the problem with criticisms of *everybody else but SpaceX* is that the criticizers are expecting everyone else to do what SpaceX is doing. If I was CASIC and I was criticizing SpaceX for not trying to compete for weapons contracts to fund Starship, that could be a logically valid criticism, but SpaceX is SpaceX- they are where they are and they do their thing- so is it really justified and sensible to hold them to my standard? That said, this only goes for organizations like Roscosmos/RSC Energia and JAXA/Mitsubishi Heavy Industries with rockets that actually function. SLS is it's own nightmare (billions of dollars to send astronauts through the Van Allen belts multiple times), so I think criticism of it and the processes that led to it are justified.

Hopefully the core stage reentry drama gets moved to its own thread this time around.

Scratch this one- Air Force and Navy crews wore orange suits when flying overwater missions, so there would have been orange available.

Only result from an English google search- https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/31982/why-is-the-sokol-suit-white-instead-of-safety-orange For Sokol- Shuttle suits and Vostok suits were for spacecraft one either was intended to or could potentially eject from. You can’t eject from Soyuz so it just isn’t needed. This is a pretty reasonable theory- after all, Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo had white or silver pressure suits and also had no ejection feature (Gemini did technically, but it might not have worked anyway). Same with the modern Dragon. For Stryzh- Buran was a military asset, so it is possible it was intended to have camouflage in case it was somehow forced down over enemy territory. Or perhaps by that time (mid-80s?) orange dye was just not in the budget compared to widely available bland colors. Another possibility is someone decided to make it beige and simply no one questioned it. There are allegedly some Soviet weapons with odd designations due to a reason like this, although I can’t recall the exact examples. As to why Sokol M and Sokol MP are orange though, perhaps they are intended to be potentially marketed to private spaceflight companies? ——— Some questions- 1. Could very long range SAMs and AAMs (S-400, AIM-120) be repurposed as sounding rockets? 2. What were some of the non-Mir and non-strike related payloads Buran might have carried? “Just satellites”? Probes like how Galileo was? 3. Code names were used for prototypes of certain weaponry in the USSR. Tanks were referred to as “Object” while aviation design bureaus used the term “izdeliye” (translated as “product”). Did rocket and space design bureaus have any such code names, or were missiles and space launchers so secret that they could just use the real designation?* *For that matter, I find it interesting that the RVSN just accepted the designation given by the design bureau instead of assigning their own. Object 137 became the T-54 and izdeliye 330 became the MiG-17, but the UR-100 is just the UR-100.

Their complaint isn’t about “debris”, it is about space traffic control. Here is the full complaint- https://www.unoosa.org/res/oosadoc/data/documents/2021/aac_105/aac_1051262_0_html/AAC105_1262E.pdf

These sorts of animals would be great to have. I was originally fine with "just microbial life or none at all" but I hope they do something like this now. +1 Some possibilities these open up- 1. Biology/ecology science rewards (that is, part of the Science in the game) 2a. Fossils which will be presented to you during mining 2b. Evolutionary studies? as science rewards 3. We can build zoos 4. Fun with off-world zoos and artificial reverse panspermia. IIRC, no animal-like organisms on Kerbin apart from Kerbals is canon- but what happens if we capture some of these and bring them back? Which may or may not be possible, but it would be nice if it is. Some questions- 1a. Will these be killable/destroyable? 1b. Does this mean it will be possible to drive them to extinction either on purpose or accidentally? 2. If yes to 1a, will they reproduce? Or rather have their own "boom events", I guess. 3a. Can these be domesticated as livestock? 3b. Can these be used as food resources? Assuming some sort of food resource exists in the game, given the greenhouse-like structures we have seen in images released so far. ------ One comment I would like to make though. Prior to Mariner 4's historic flyby, speculation regarding plant life on Mars was serious, but some made a bigger, more speculative leap and said that the existence of plants meant animals must automatically exist to consume them. This was regarded as silly and thus I don't think plant life on Lapat necessarily allows for the existence of animal life. That's not to say we can't ask for it and hope for it though

I shall share some stuff I missed recently. These two things are also especially intriguing. I wonder just what exact pace the LM-5DY program might have. If the first launch is in 2026, and Artemis (SLS specifically) keeps getting delayed, they could end up on much closer schedules than was previously envisioned. Long March 9 has been approved "for real for real" now This came only a few days before the summit between the heads of state Presidents of the two nations. Also, something major that no one (including myself) noticed- By Exploration Mission 1 he means Artemis I. This is a little spooky, as NASA lost a major PR talking point they had used for the mission due to the delays with SLS and Orion. If SLS had launched on time in November (or years before earlier) it would have accomplished this achievement. It may not seem like much, but amidst the backdrop of the wider competition between the US and China and comparisons between the state of their science and technology industries, it is interesting.

That is extremely epic!