Nikolai

To be fair, this seems to be a topic of some controversy. Some see "science" as an endeavor that sprawls from technicians to the forefront of research. Others see it as more restrictive. The debate seems to follow many of the same "tyranny of the small" principles as those who care about whether that thing in the back of a rocket that provides propulsion should rightly be called an "engine" or a "motor". With that in mind, the way to convince people of your stance is not merely to repeat your assertion. Okay. What was your point in mentioning the circularity, then?

The primary definition of "engineering", as found in the 2017 Random House dictionary, is as follows: the art or science of making practical application of the knowledge of pure sciences, as physics or chemistry, as in the construction of engines, bridges, buildings, mines, ships, and chemical plants. Sure, it uses science in its methodologies, but practical application of science is itself a form of experimentation, and thus a form of science. They're not synonymous, but that's not a requirement. I never said it wasn't circular. You're erecting a straw man. But circular does not imply pointlessness, and it does not imply insignificance, and it does not imply meaninglessness. Most of what humans do is circular. We play sports to find out who's the best at playing sports. We have kids who may very well, in turn, have more kids. We work in order to eat in order to get the energy to work. We answer questions in order to ask more questions. All of these things, and more, are circular, but observing that tells us nothing about whether or not the endeavor is worthwhile. I believe that the more options humans have, the better off we can potentially be. It follows from that that pursuing greater capability and greater human presence is generally a good thing. A human race with the option to live places other than Earth are, it seems to me, better off than a human race that is stuck here.

Right. But my point was that it is not only planetary science that requires being on a planet. (Or are you of the opinion that engineering is not science?) My objective was to expand the discussion beyond things like geology as a reason to send humans to Mars (eventually). The only place we can test all the different components of a Martian environment simultaneously against our engineering cleverness is Mars. This kind of testing will be necessary if we seek to establish a permanent human presence on Mars. Again, I'll try to be plain: If geology, or things that operate on geological time scales, are your sole reason for going, then robots make a lot of sense now, and will make even more sense in the future. But I don't think that fact means that we have no scientific reason to be there with people at all, ever. If we want to use "Science!" as a reason to send people, we have to expand the conversation beyond geology into the sorts of science we can't do with robots. (Then we can discuss how well we're doing those other sciences -- if we're honest, kind of in a half-assed way, it seems to me -- but sticking with geology only presents part of the picture, and we can't really treat the "Science!" claims with any merit if we stick to only particular kinds of science.) Yes. And while we're there, we'll have to pit our scientific wherewithal against the challenges the planet presents. We do that already, in a smaller sense, because humans can't rump naked and eat berries from the local wildlife everywhere we live on Earth; we depend on a certain technological prowess in order to make certain locations livable year-round. But that's just a difference in the scale of technological ability. At the moment, yes, aside from infrequent bits of science and engineering that test our understanding of what happens to humans there, or tests our cleverness at coming up with solutions to keeping humans alive in a hazardous environment. But I don't begrudge it that.

Why are we necessarily concerned about sciences that primarily exist to return data (presumably, to people on Earth)? I would argue, for example, that a valuable component of manned exploration is as a prelude to manned habitation. There are engineering disciplines that would need to be done on Mars, for example, because they'd be the final test bed for implementation. I admit that many sciences could be more comfortably, conveniently, and economically explored right here and now -- especially if we're talking about ones attempting to boil natural phenomena down to overarching theories that should apply every bit as well here as there. But science is about much more than reduction to theory -- and ultimately, in applied sciences, there's no substitute for being there. Note that this does not mean that I think that Apollo was doing it right, nor that the proposed mission using multiple SLS launches to get us to Mars was doing it right. I concede that geology is more comprehensively performed with rocks. I don't want to pretend, however, that that's the only reason we go places in space, with robots or with humans. Let me be plain. It's not my desire to create a metric that would justify Apollo with this. My point was that asking for Mars papers written over the last three decades that used manned versus unmanned expeditions seemed like a rather pronounced exercise of motivated reasoning.

"From a science perspective"? That's a weird modifier, and kind of debatable. Perhaps from the point of those specific sciences that can be done in situ and that require maintaining a certain level of controlled experimentation and abstraction, but that's not the only kind of science that can be done. That's okay. It's not what I'm addressing, though. If I thought that only geology needed to be done, or only things that take place on geological time scales, then yeah, I think a robots-only stance makes sense. I'm also not opining that uncrewed missions are pointless, or even second-best. They have an absolutely critical role to play. I know that. That's why I suggested that one should measure the return per dollar spent.

It seems to me that you're treating geology as if it is the sum total of the reasons that we go, or that all of the reasons that we want to go move at the same pace as geologic time. A fairer comparison might be the number of science publications produced per Apollo dollar versus the number of science publications produced per unmanned mission dollar.

That definition requires knowing what the developer's "model" is. Since SQUAD hasn't explained precisely what their "model" is, and since we're not telepathic, no one is cheating when they use the game in novel ways. This also ignores my point that toys don't have to be models. Whether Kerbal Space Program is a model or not can be debated, but the very fact that it can be debated reveals that it's far from clear. Since it's far from clear, it seems a bit of a stretch to insist that someone can clearly cheat with it.

Precisely my point. Cheating has nothing to do with simplification, and everything to do with following rules. Toys have no inherent rules, so one can't cheat with them without agreeing to play a game with rules in it.

I think this is only true if one embraces your unique definition of "cheating": Under that definition, every new rule added to a sport to simplify it becomes cheating, even if the players follow it. For example, this year has seen a new rule added to professional American football: Players can no longer jump over the line of scrimmage to attempt to block field goals or extra points. This certainly simplifies the scoring of those points for the team attempting a field goal or an extra point. What justification do you have for using this special and singular definition for "cheating", as opposed to a word that is clearer and already accurately reflects the definition you've chosen (e.g., "simplification")?

Some toys are. Some toys are not. (What's a diving ring a model of?) But even if it is, that doesn't imply a "correct" way to play with it. Is a kid "cheating" when she pretends that her toy truck can fly? Is it "cheating" when a kid plays with her die-cast model car to exploit ways that it behaves like the thing it is modeling (by running it on the floor), and exploits other ways that it doesn't (by letting it crash into the television at high speed)? Some might even say that one of the defining characteristics of a good toy is that it can be used in ways the designer never intended or imagined (e.g., Lego). Whether or not it behaves in accordance with any real-world counterpart it might happen to resemble is incidental. The one who plays with it can decide to engage in realistic play or not -- but I'd be hard pressed to call unrealistic play "cheating".

It seems to me that a sandbox game like Kerbal Space Program is functionally closer to a toy than a game. A game implies rules -- rules by which play is conducted and points scored and all that sort of thing. A toy is an implement for play, not an arena for play. Once you have a toy, you can invent games to use it -- but there's no set of rules that one must play by with a particular toy. As such, I think what people have said about following the rules of a challenge is spot-on. At that point, you've invented a game to play with the toy, and breaking the rules of that game is cheating. But cheating with the toy itself? That seems about as nonsensical as asking, "What constitutes cheating at playing baseball mitt? State your reasoning."

The same way they eat without any food, but backwards.

I've been enjoying the Back to the Future comics published by IDW that began their run on the date Marty visited in 2015 (in Back to the Future Part II). A number of stories flesh out things the original trilogy did (there's a whole six-issue arc devoted to explaining what Biff did with his stolen time machine in Back to the Future Part II), and we get some original stories as well(*). They're not groundbreaking stories, but they're fun, and they focus on the characters more than the time travel (an excellent decision, IMHO). EDITED TO ADD: Oh, and they're written by Bob Gale, who wrote the original trilogy, so it seems to me that you can consider them canon if you want to. --- (*) For example, there's a point when Marty recalls the events of the first movie, and remembers that he left the Twin Pines Mall in 1985, but returned to the Lone Pine Mall when he came back to watch himself run off to 1955. What, he asks himself, happened to the Marty he watched disappear? He didn't change his past. Which brings us to a scene in which Marty is sorting family pictures where he appears into three piles: Remember; Kinda Remember; and Don't Remember. I found it wonderfully haunting.

I fondly remember arcades. It didn't take long to develop a trained ear so that you could know which games an arcade had to offer as soon as you walked in the door. (Some of them were easier than others. Spy Hunter, for example, was alone in its thumping bass for a long time.) Unfortunately, when I was a kid, the city where I lived passed an ordinance that kids under 12 could not play arcade games without adult supervision... and my parents had no interest whatsoever in them, of course, so opportunities were very rare. Before that law passed, I sank far too much money into Space Invaders and a handful of others. I waited impatiently to hit 12, which I did just in time to move elsewhere.

Luckily, spacesuits aren't pressurized to a full atmosphere.

I worked on some software for a satellite dedicated to looking for Gamma Ray Bursts while I was in college. Unfortunately, the technology was quickly superseded by efforts elsewhere, and it was never launched. I'm a volunteer educator for JPL. (They let me talk to folks on space teams, and I take what I learn to museums, schools, libraries, or anywhere they'll let me talk about space.) Beyond that, the usual tourist-y stuff -- I've been to the Cape and the NASM and a handful of smaller museums with space artifacts, met Story Musgrave and Christina Koch and a few people working on various probes, and have a reasonably impressive library of technical aerospace materials and astronaut biographies.

Then burn your engines toward the center of the thing as you fall. You'll leave faster than you approached. Also, if it's in orbit around the Sun and you slingshot with it, you can steal some of its (considerable, given the mass) kinetic energy and dump it into your spacecraft. But they do have the advantage of their surfaces not getting in the way as you accelerate towards the center and move through it.

The nth term can be found with (521/560)n7 - (2587/90)n6 + (43291/120)n5 - (170393/72)n4 + (2085781/240)n3 - (6369907/360)n2 + (638962/35)n - 7219, assuming I haven't screwed up and forgotten to carry a two someplace.

A bit hard to find, but maybe 1967's Countdown, starring James Caan? It was based on the Pilgrim Project, a proposed (but never seriously considered) last-ditch plan to put a man on the Moon if it looked like the Soviets would beat us there. The plan was essentially to launch him to the Moon in a modified Mercury capsule, and then to send him supplies roughly 22 times a year until a method was devised to bring him back. EDIT: I seem to recall that the movie used a modified Gemini capsule.

I've actually heard the term "rocketpunk" used to describe this sort of thing.

Good grief. My point wasn't that they need to memorize planet names so much as what the lack of memorizing planet names would do to remove space issues even further from the public consciousness. There are probably things that would work every bit as well for retaining that consciousness and leave people better informed than memorizing a bunch of names. I'd rather have that than rote memorization any day. But when a common public sentiment with regards to education is a demand that every morsel handed down be directly applicable in the things they need to devote conscious attention to in their daily lives, it can often be a struggle to convince people that space exploration confers any benefit worth considering. That's the downside I mean to point to, in the hopes that we can come up with better strategies for educating the young about space.

I don't disagree, but I perceive a potential downside: Children will no longer memorize the names of the planets; they might no longer even have a unit on the Solar System. This might well make space exploration seem even more irrelevant to your average human than it already does.

Yes, I understand that; I was playing a bit loose with the term "location". The idea is that if Planet Nine exists, it must have orbits within a certain range and a mass lower than a certain amount. If further discoveries show that even those orbits cannot support a substantially massive Planet Nine, then we can reject the notion that there's something like that there.

... or until we uncover enough data to rule it out. (Note that the size and location of Planet Nine, if it exists, are already constrained by data.) But even if we were to take this for granted, why would it necessarily be bad? We learn a lot about other things while we're looking for one thing.

Hallucigenia, a genus from the Cambrian era that we find in formations like the Burgess Shale. It's so odd that it was debated for a long time which end was the mouth and which was the anus, as well as which side was the ventral and which side was the dorsal -- not to mention whether its mouth was in its head or whether it had a mouth at the end of each of its tentacles.