Nibb31

This thread is drifting from "Science Labs" to "Science fiction nonsense" at warp speed.

No. The rover is still limited by sticking within a safe range around the MAV. The LRVs needed to stay within walking distance of the LM, so that if it broke down, rolled over, or got stuck, the astronauts still had enough reserves to walk back. A manned Mars rover could only venture further away if there was a second rover to rescue the crew. Otherwise, it would have the same safety range limitation as the old LRV. Also, speed (distance/time) is only relevant if you have a time limit. Unmanned rovers don't have such a limit, so their exploration speed and distance covered is irrelevant. Who cares whether you cover 42 km in one hour or in one year when there is no rush. Mars rocks aren't going anywhere, and going slow has the advantage of a more thorough exploration. Simulating gravity only complexifies the mission and makes it less likely to fly. The ISS has proven that it's perfectly possible to live and work in microgravity for the duration of a Mars mission with proper exercice and medication. Who cares really? What difference does it make if it takes 15 minutes to communicate with the rover? Again, there is no rush. It makes no sense to spend 100 times more on a mission to gain an operational reactivity that isn't required. So what, other than the fact that the politicians are the ones who are going to decide whether it happens or not. Politics and economy are the only things that you need. The technology details are trivial in comparison. But that demand doesn't exist. Joe Public doesn't even know that there is an ISS with people on it. Joe Public thinks that NASA is too expensive and that it's only purpose is to hide the alien invasion. Unfortunately, I'm afraid that the excitement and inspiration these days would only last a couple of days on Twitter or Facebook and people would switch back to the watching the Kardashians and football.

None of those events would kill 100% of the human species. 99% or 99.9% or even 99.99% maybe, but that would still leave a few million, which is a much larger bottleneck than we have been through before. There is no reason to believe there will ever be millions living in space colonies any time soon. The sheer amount of energy needed to propell millions of people from 0 to 26000km/h is beyond anything we can imagine. It's simply not going to happen. Realistically, we can expect a few science outposts, with at best a few hundred people doing exploration off-world, but massive colonization is pure science fiction.

There aren't any credible scenarios where humanity would be totally destroyed without at least a few million surviving. If we had the technology to build massive space colonies, we would also have the technology to mitigate the worse catastrophe scenarios. A few thousand stuck in an orbital colony isn't going to make any difference. Besides, nothing lives forever and if we do go extinct, it's no big deal. It won't make a difference to anyone, since nobody would be around to be sad about it. We, as an insignificant species in an insignificant corner of an insignificant galaxy are bound to go extinct one day or another. We aren't anything special. Whether that happens in 200, 2000 or 2 million years is irrelevant in the grand scheme of the universe. Lot's of if's. The whole argument hinges on the fact that there is not compelling space industry therefore no reason for space colonies. And even if we get to a stage where we are routinely mining space asteroids, there still wouldn't be a need for human presence, therefore we still wouldn't need space colonies. Reduce, and hopefully wind back human impact on the natural Earth without reducing or winding back population or 'standards of living'

They mop it up with absorbing towels when they're done playing. The rest is sucked up by the HVAC and recycled. I'd love to see the same experiment with a Mentos and Diet Coke.

It flew 8 hours after going silent and disappeared pretty much when it was supposed to run out of fuel. Both the CVR and the FDR are unlikely to provide anything that we don't already know.

La Rinconada is far from a place where people are going to actually settle. Who would want to found a family and have kids there? It's a corporate mining town, not an actual settlement. I'm pretty sure most people go there to work and plan to get the hell out of the place as soon as they've struck gold. It has an immediate economic/survival appeal for the people who go there. As I've said before, humans migrate to improve comfort and safety for themselves and their children. A gold mining town has the immediate appeal of making people rich, which is a way of improving their comfort. However, it's not a place where people want to actually settle and raise families. - - - Updated - - - But why would someone want to build something so massive that would need massive resources to build and thrive? What would be the purpose? Why would people want to live there and not in an equivalent glass dome arkology on Earth? What problem does it solve that can't be solved by much easier and simpler methods? There simply isn't a reason to build something like an O'Neill colony.

You can't compare the colonization of space with the colonization of America. - There were many reasons, economical, social, and cultural that pushed for the colonization of America. There are none for space. - The environment was fairly hospitable in America, with promises of resources and wealth. There were dangers, but it was not instant-death as soon as anything went wrong. You still had air, water, and opportunities for food without relying on critical technology. This is not true for space. - The people who went there hoped for a better life for themselves and their families. It simply is not possible for space. You also can't compare the development of intercontinental transportation with space transportation. - Before those methods of transportation were even developed, there was demand. Ever since the discovery of the Americas, there was a requirement for safe and fast travel. Sea and air travel evolved from that requirement because there were actual destinations that people wanted to get to. This is not true for space. - People want to go to a destination because they have an interest there: goods to sell, people to meet, places to visit, family reunions, business meetings, etc... None of that is true for space because space is not a destination. Other than the ISS or the Moon, we have no destinations of interest in space, therefore no incentive to evolve safe and fast space travel.

Even if we do find the main wreckage, and even if the VFR is exploitable, it won't be of any use because it only records the last 30 minutes of flighy by which time it was likely that everybody on board was already dead. So no, we will never know precisely what happened on board flight MH370.

If the goal, as stated by the OP is to serve as a base to "explore the Solar System", then surely you would be better off launching a few dozens of rockets from Earth that using hundreds of launches to build a base to launch the original dozens of rockets from somewhere else. It is far easier to launch an SLS from Cape Canaveral than it is to build the infrastructure that would allow you to source and build locally an SLS on Mars. If you want to benefit from space construction, then your primary requirements are a low gravity well and proximity to Earth. So either you build an orbital factory that you supply by mining NEOs, or you build a base on the Moon. Both of which are science fiction at this point. Anything beyond that silly Star-Trek-induced wishful thinking.

No they don't. No, typical bad journalism. They don't. This.

You don't know that. The coriolis forces from the rotation might have effects as detrimental as the microgravity. Any cosmic radiation that gets through might also be detrimental. Yes, learning about partial gravity, as well as cosmic radiation, dust mitigation, environmental toxicology, are all major prerequisite before we can even think about space colonies.

True, which is why I was opposing the OP's attitude of "Yes, of course". When the correct approach should be "Maybe, but..." It is certainly not a trivial problem to solve. Orbital colonies are science-fiction. First of all, you need some sort of resource to build the colonies, to extend them, and to produce any goods other that recycled food, air and water. You won't get the materials out of nowhere. That means that you need access to some sort of celestial body, whether it's a moon, a planet, or an asteroid. If you are getting your material from a celestial body, they why bother taking it all the way to orbit? And again, what is the point of building an O'Neill cylinder when you can build the same self-sustaining colony for much cheaper and much safer, on the ground? It serves absolutely no purpose.

They are not closed loop. They breath air and drink water that are supplied by the planet's ecosystem. They live in an open loop that relies on a constant resupply from what you can consider a semi-infinite reserve of air and water. Many of them are (or traditionally were) nomadic, which pushes them to move on when they have exhausted the resources of a given location. Stick a glass dome over their heads and cut off their rivers and they will die.

I upgraded all 5 PCs in my house from various versions of Windows 7 and 8 to 10, and it was absolutely painless. No reconfiguration, no drivers to download, no programs to reinstall. It all worked flawlessly and has been the smoothest upgrade I've ever seen.

"I've heard" is hardly a believable source. The Windows App store contains free and paid apps, just like the Apple App Store or the Google Play Store. You don't have to pay for extra software, but you can if you want to. They haven't stripped any "functionality" out of Windows, unless you count Solitaire and those other crappy games as "functionality". Who used them any way? If you want to read DVDs, do like you always did, with extra software of the free or paid variety. - - - Updated - - - *yawn*. Old meme is old. Windows 10 is actually pretty good. Why don't you try it before you criticize it?

Before claiming 'yes of course', show us a sustainable closed-loop system that can support advanced life here on Earth. Despite generations of people trying, nobody has succeeded yet. It might be possible, but it is far from easy or obvious. You claim that Earth is a "self-sufficient colony". First, it isn't a colony. We didn't dump people on it and build it. We evolved from it and we will keep on evolving as the rest of our environment evolves (and inevitable extinction is part of that evolution, whether you like it or not). Second, problems with runaway global warming, dwindling resources, and positive feedback loops indicates that it probably isn't. To demonstrate self-sufficiency, you need to maintain a balance over a long period. The larger the ecosystem, the longer you need to maintain that balance to prove that it is self-sufficient. Finally, setting up a self-sufficient colony in a hostile environment, either on Earth or in space, requires a huge effort, and therefore motivation. Humans migrate and settle places for only two reasons: - To improve their comfort and to ensure a better life for their children. - To preserve their safety and to ensure a safer life for their children. Colonizing space is going to be uncomfortable, unpleasant, expensive, and dangerous. There is nothing appealing in living in an underground vault and condemning your kids to drink recycled urine, hydroponic lettuce, and never feel a breeze of fresh air on their face (if you can even have any kids when exposed partial gravity and cosmic radiation). It is the total opposite of why humans have ever migrated. There is simply no reason for anyone to want to colonize the solar system at a large scale (beyond some remote research stations), because the most hospitable places in the solar system will never be more comfortable or safer than the most unhospitable places on Earth.

And you'd have to explain the chain of events that leads to losing navigation, losing comms, losing a flaperon, and staying airborne for several hours.

There is multiple redundancy in the navigation instruments and radio systems as well as power systems. If all the nav systems and radios failed at once, that either there was a general power failure that would also have also hit the flight computers and fly-by-wire systems that would have made the plane inoperable, or they were switched off on purpose. If the plane was inoperable, it wouldn't have been able to change course and stay airborne. There are really only two hypothesis that corroborate with the facts: - A pilot suicide, which would have been particularly long-winded. It's hard to imagine that the crew and passengers would have been unaware or incapacitated for several hours. Maybe a crewmember took advantage of being alone in the cockpit to shut out his colleague and then depressurized the cabin to kill everyone on board. - A failed hijacking, which for one reason or another, ends up with the plane going the wrong way. Maybe the pilots were killed and the hijacker didn't know how to control the plane. Maybe a shot was fired or a bomb went off and the plane depressurized killing everyone on board but kept flying until it ran out of fuel. The actual fate of MH370 will probably remain a mystery forever. Let's just hope that finding parts of the wreckage allows some closure for the families.

If we can create self-sustaining colonies off Earth, we can create them just about anywhere on Earth, including on the ocean floors or at the bottom on 10km deep shafts. They would be much easier and cheaper and provide just as good protection against pretty much anything.

Those are geosynchronous, but not geostationary satellites. Geostationary orbits remain in the same spot over the equator, which is ok for lower latitudes, but they can't provide coverage for higher latitudes such as Canada or South Africa. This is why some sats are at inclined geosynchronous orbits, which stay at roughly the same longitude but move around in the sky. They require a larger dish or a mobile one to track them.

Yes. You are not allowed to launch a satellite without a plan to mitigate launch debris and an end-of-life strategy for your spacecraft.

This thread would be so much better without the constant jingoistic chest thumping.

As a secondary payload on a Dragon, I doubt that the couple of weeks in microgravity will have any noticeable effect on the maturation process of whisky, wine, cheese, or any other food products. You could probably use it as a marketing gimmick that would allow you put an overinflated price tag on a niche luxury product for stupid rich people, but it would certainly not be sustainable basis for "an economy in space".

Point was that Reunion is a developed country, with a decent infrastructure and an organized government, unlike Madagascar and Easter Africa where most of the wreckage is bound to end up.