Diche Bach

Wow, those are all awesome! This is not really the "right" thread for this, but . . . given it is about images, maybe you or someone will be able to answer, and maybe me posting it will generate a little 'legit' traffic by astro-imagers I was having a look at the wiki page for mars curiousity rover, and I was looking at this photograph When I noticed a strange "anomaly" which I show in the yellow circle here. What the heck is going on there?! Capricorn One all over again!?

Are you just speculating? I seem to recall reading some stuff that suggests the trip itself might be extremely debilitating, and not simply because of the baseline radiation exposure (and potential for much higher--basically lethal--radiation depending on Sol's "mood" at the time). Longest time spent in LEO is what? 13 months? That poor guy could barely walk if memory serves. ADDIT: and one other question: why!? send people to "scout?" That is what robots are for!

You can count me out on that consensus. I'm still going for my "grappling hooks, can opener and machetes" boarding parties approach. Too easy to miss with a 50 Gigs, multi-billion funds relativistic kinetic warhead scientific probe. NOT so easy to miss with a small, highly maneuverable, capsule with a couple of grappling hook/can opener/machete wielding roughnecks inside.

Classic. Don't know if this person still hangs around here, but I wanted to pay homage by quoting this gem.

OP asked "Mars Colonial Transporter: What will it look like?" My first thought was "It will look like a flying coffin." Like I said, most the pics I found weren't suitable to convey the messsage, but the propaganda leaflet with the "FLYING COFFINS" headline struck me as pretty apt, given the penchant these days for "Mars or Bust!" marketing schemes.

"Hammer of Faith" that has a real ring to it . . . Given that degree of maneuverability, why bother with ballistic weapons? Just send them up with grappling hooks, a "can opener" and some machetes = far less likely to blow a hole in your own fuel tank. I cannot even comprehend how hard it would be to hit a target moving at 8km/s with a machine gun . . .

And BTW, I really like your flame-broiled hamburgers, but . . . the french fries leave a bit to be desired. Couldn't you just copy how Ronald and the gang make theirs?

My first reaction when I saw the title of this thread was to do a Google Advanced image search for a string that starts with F and ends with N and has two words (3 morphemes I think it might be . . .) in it Most images weren't particularly fitting but then I found this one . . .

How long will "specially trained personnel" last though? Mars' atmosphere provides pretty much zero protection against solar and cosmic radiation eh? Or are the folks who lead the way just "expendable?" You know: land, dig a bit, croak, send the next "pioneers?" ADDIT: I mean . . . not trying to be a spoiled-sport, but . . . have the geniuses and tycoons really thought it all through? Wouldn't a base on the MOON be a logical first step? You know, its a lot CLOSER and rescue would be a much more feasible project in the event things don't really go as planned? Plus, great "test site" for the various technologies that will be necessary? ADDIT^2: LOL! I missed your pic on first glance Kerbi! . . . Ahhhh! I gott it inow! Just send up some burly looking stars and starlets who are salty and charismatic and everything should be okay . . .

Anybody who thinks an Acheulean axe "is not a true tool" should try to make one using ONLY materials in the natural environment (no metal, no plastic, no bandaids, no safety goggles . . . well, go ahead and wear the safety goggles but keep in mind when those flakes peck into your goggles that that might well have equated with "eye damage" for grand-ape-ma & pa) Pretty sure Homo erectus was better at geometry and crystallography than your average bear . . .

Isn't "colonial transport" a bit premature at this stage? Don't we first need to send up an army of miner robots to carve out some caves where people can be relatively safe from radiation (and likely miserable)? Wait . . . actually . . . shouldn't we have decent maps of the Martian physiography (particularly the hydrosphere), maybe even some clues as to where any usable ores or organics are located before we even send up the army of miner robots? And then of course, I have to ask: why? Why would anyone want to live a miserable cramped existence in an underground hovel on a cold windy nearly airless planet, dependent on an intricate and fragile resource reclamation and extraction technology just to cling to survival? Earth isn't THAT bad is it? Send more robots, they love it up there!

Not only that but, given the obvious facility with the English language and typing at the tender age of <1, he/she/it (might be an early sentient AI??) might well BE the important events of the next century.

I was one, no memory of the first landing. Honestly no memory of the other ones either, though I'm sure I must have watched them. I do recall watching the original Star Trek in reruns though!

Same here, though I leave Steam in Offline mode 98% of the time, so all I can muster is a "hundreds of hours" estimate of total play time. Even at $100 for 100 hours of enjoyment, that is far better value than most forms of entertainment, and even better than most forms of non-subsidized post-secondary education! I've paid $45 for games I literally could not stand to play after 6 hours (Call of Juarez comes to mind) and been suckered into buying some distributors "deal' of an old game for $5 and then realized it did not improve with age and there it sits in one of my digital libraries or on a shelf collecting dust.

That is a good description, though I'm too brain dead to fully grasp it. Will come back to this tomorrow!

Well said PB. I don't think anyone who wants to argue that other animals have culture, need to argue that they have "human culture" or even "human like culture." It is really just pointing out that there is some degree of continuity in the social psychological apparatus which facilitates shared learned behaviors across many social mammals, although the chasm between humans elaborations of that is way above/beyond the "curve" of the other social mammals, with the other extant homininae being a bit above/beyond the curve, and perhaps some exemplars from other families/classes also being "above average" (crows, parrots, certain cetaceans, elephants, etc.). Linking this back into Fermi: we (well, a significant, arguably "predominant" contingent of behavioral/psychological/evolutionary scientists, and perhaps even a slowly growing contingent of the more "soft" social science varieties) now understand that, social intelligence, personhood, individual identity, even to some degree theory of mind, and the capacity for symbolism and linguistic creativity are not unique to humans. Indeed, most of the psychological "pieces" of human psyche seem to be present to some degree in several animal species. However, those pieces do not form into the potent, self-propelling force that they do in every human child who has some benefit of socialization with conspecifics. Interestingly however, those few poor children who have been denied anything resembling proper socialization (Genie being the key example, but there are others too) are in some respects less humanlike in their psyche than are thoroughly nurtured nonhuman animals like Kanzi the bonobo or Alex the math-doing grey parrot, or Koko the gorilla, etc., etc. What this tells is that, we may have been "fairly human like" though not quite truly human for a long time. The archaeological record is surprisingly correlated with this idea: the sudden "explosion" of art and tool diversity sometime before 35,000 years ago (the dates seem to have drifted farther back over the years, but still 50,000 seems to be a reasonable contemporary early boundary I think). Part of the problem with inquiries in this area is that neuroscience and neurobiology are still quite infantile in their models and psychiatry and psychopharmacology even moreso. By the time a functional MRI can be carried around like a camera and can be used more-or-less anywhere these fields will have reached the starting line of their adolescence and within a generation I predict that models of what "minds" are and how they relate to the cells and structures that comprise them will have revolutionized to the point that our current models will seem nearly like medieval superstitions. Sadly, you cannot say these sorts of things if you are hoping to work in academia; the modal 'tolerance' for revolutionary thinking and for skepticism about prevailing models in general seems to be at an historic ebb tide, though not because people are less curious I think. More so simply because of the bureaucratic and institutional nature of scholarship at this stage in Western history. So, Fermi: even if there is life on other planets, the fact that our "ascendance" into full-fledged "Ravager of Worlds" level mind seems to have been such a random occurrence (coming as it did many millions of years after we had assumed the general outlines of our current phenotype) suggests that life on other worlds may well keep evolving along as pre-sentient (though intelligent and with the 'rudiments' of sentience) for a long time, perhaps even forever. So the way I see, what we know about the evolution of life, and the evolution of humanness on Earth suggests that there are two enormous "hurdles" or "eyes of the needle" that stochastism must weave matter through in order for exobiota to evolve: 1. The emergence of ecosystems. 2. The emergence of minds that are fully capable of theory of mind, self-reflection and all the rest that truly distinguish humans from all the other animals of Earth.

True. It probably is "gravity." But it might not be, and given it doesn't seem to have "mass" in the same way that normal matter does, that has to be kept in mind. That is all I'm saying. If one assumes that one's current paradigms are perfect and sufficient to explain all that there is to know, then avenues which could shed light on new paradigms might be stifled. This is certainly something Lee Smolin has argued with respect to String Theory.

Well . . . I'm not so sure it works "the same way as an ordinary burn exactly" though do correct me if I'm not quite grokking it yet (still!). 1. Prograde burn: effect? ALWAYS pushes the point on the opposite side of the orbit farther away from the center of the gravity well being orbited. Will it ever have the "reverse" effect (bringing the point on the opposite side of the orbit closer . . .): As far as I know, NEVER. 2. Retrograde burn: same as prograde, but reversed. . . . skipping Radial / Anti-radial . . . In contrast. 3. Normal burn: effect? depends on where you are relative to the AN/DN. If you are near enough to AN, the effect will be to increase the inclination. However, if you get too close to the DN, suddenly you will progressively decrease the inclination. No? I'm a bit embarrassed to admit that this still puzzles me but it does, and my observations may be completely erroneous.

Nice! So, something like 0.1 to 0.5% of the galaxy has undergone a "preliminary" survey. I don't put it that way to degrade the achievement, but rather to highlight the marvel of it, and the wonder of what lies ahead for us, but especially for generations as yet unborn.

Enhancements to the flight planner, edits/revisions to game physics, tweaks to the UI, texture touchups, a modicum of new parts (to fill gaps in existing stock parts), optimizations that improve performance/enhance use of mods, bug fixes, etc. : I agree these should be free to all who have bought any version of the game for as long as Squad can manage to continue to improve those areas of the application. In sum, anything that is integral to the core vision of the game should never have a price tag; but expecting such updates to come infinitely is nonetheless unrealistic. The game will NEVER be perfect, but the effort to benefit ratio from continuing to pin down issues and move toward perfection gets smaller and smaller and no one should expect Squad (or any studio/developer) to keep tweaking until it truly is perfect (not to mention the fact that subjective differences between users mean that even if the game is technically perfect it can never be "perfect" in everyone's eyes). Significant new parts packs (as in, a couple score or more and covering two or more new themes within the game), brand new functionality (too myriad to list but the possibilities seem virtually limitless), "re-releases" of existing mods by Squad staff which also include significant new stuff : In my opinion such things as this are perfectly legitimate for Squad to consider as ethical, reasonable, and appropriate realms for pay-for DLC, and as a fellow user and forumite what I will say to anyone who has a strong allergic reaction to such a suggestion is: go jump in a lake. You shouldn't expect anyone to work for you for free, and indeed, if someone is a favored client you should be generous enough to allow them to make a decent living. Squad and its people deserve to prosper and they will only do that if we are willing to continue to patronize them, and that doesn't mean being a forum fly or making mods (though those things 'help') it means buying their products.

I'm afraid I cannot point you to any specific reading in which the subject of "distance not affecting dark matter" is addressed. However . . . consider this: where "is" dark matter? Is it everywhere? Is it nowhere? Does it move? Is it fixed in space time? I get that it can be inferred to exist in a halo around galaxies and larger structures by the observed bending of radiation from objects farther away. But that doesn't necessarily mean that dark matter only exists in those places does it, or that it is evenly distributed throughout the internal space of the normal matter it seems to surround, does it? It may or it may not have discrete boundaries in the way that observable matter does. It may be everywhere, it may be nowhere (in the sense that it is neither matter nor energy but something we have yet to fully comprehend). In order to calculate the distance between two points, one must be able to determine where those two points are, and it seems to me that the current models of "dark matter" are not nearly that precise. So the degree to which the attractive force of a "particle" of dark matter (or clump, halo, cloud, field, web, scaffold, whatever) is or is not moderated by the distance between it and either other dark matter or normal matter is not a topic of inquiry, and thus it wouldn't surprise me in the least if there are no scholars concerned with the question. But that doesn't settle the question I think. In order to address the question of whether distance matters to dark matter, one must first know where dark matter is, and if it exists in discrete packages interspersed with boundaries of "no dark matter here," where dark matter is NOT. It seems to me they are not yet in a position to consider the phenomena they call "dark matter" in this way, thus my reference to it as a "deus ex machina" in a preceding post. The attractive effects of dark matter may be just as subject to distance as normal matter, or they may not be. Without knowing where it is and is not, and if it is in fact NOT everywhere, they are in no position to address the question I suspect.

I'll never understand the mentality that gaming studios should provide perpetual content expansions and updates for the price of a preliminary purchase. Agree many studios take it too far and milk the expansion thing for maximal cash for minimal quality. But there is a happy medium by which a studio and its owners/publishers provide both ongoing updates/expansions for free AND for fee. I would hope Squad will strive toward such a middle ground for the simple reason that I would like Squad to make many games for many decades to come, and not simply grind themselves financially into the grave by trying to live up to an expectation of providing infinite free updates when/if their continued sales do not afford such infinity.

Well then why does distance not seem to matter to dark matter? What it does is obviously analogous to gravity, But given it may lack one of the fundamental characteristics that is required for gravity (mass) it seems presumptive to me to conclude that what it is doing is exactly the same thing as gravity, i.e., the attractive force observed between normal matter and depending on mass and distance between objects. I believe I have read some scholars who make a point of NOT referring to the effects of dark matter as gravity, but instead as the "attractive force" or some such. Anyway, not trying to be argumentative, merely discussative I am certainly no expert and welcome being instructed by those who know better.

Well you're not alone Baron. Most social scientists also continue to reject the idea that nonhuman animals could have psychological or social characteristics that could meaningfully be referred to as "culture" and thus (paradoxically) cling to to a notion of human exceptionalism that is analogous to the Great Chain of Being. But we digress too much I think . . . back to Fermi and his putative paradox . . . if there is anything more to be said on that topic.

Well correct me if I'm wrong, but gravity is defined in terms of mass. Dark matter cannot be directly observed in the same way that normal matter can--although it can be indirectly observed by gravitational-lensing--and so the "mass" of dark matter (if it has any) also cannot be observed directly. Apparently they have reason to believe that, in very rare instances, dark matter DOES interact with normal matter, but this is apparently so rare an occurrence that the experiments seeking to observe this sort of interaction have been running for years without any detections as yet. Dark matter, otherwise does not interact with the rest of the universe in any way which can be observed. In the sense that the total gravity which could exist as a result of normal matter is insufficient to account for the behavior of galaxies, and with something ("dark matter") observed to exist as a network of "halos" enveloping the strands of the superclusters in the observable universe, one can conclude that dark matter appears to have mass and thus exerts "gravity," in the same way that normal matter does; but dark matter otherwise does not interact with normal matter, i.e., it also behaves as if it has no mass. To say nothing of the fact that, dark matter's effects do not appear to be moderated by the space between objects in the same way that gravitational forces are moderated. My take on this is: dark matter does something which appears superficially like gravity, but it may not be gravity, and indeed the fact that its effects on the cosmos defy some of the predicted effects of gravity suggest that what dark matter is doing is not "gravity" in the strictest sense. Of course referring to what it is doing as gravity makes sense for the time being, and in the loose sense that we use the word "gravity" to refer to any attractive force it is as good as any other I suppose. Even laypeople have a notion of what "gravity" is, and without more insights into what dark matter actually is, there is no point in making up a new word to refer to the attractive force "it" exerts in the cosmos. But that does not mean that dark matter operates through gravity; it may or it may not is what I gather. In sum, the universe is imperfectly understood at present, and thus I remain skeptical that our projections of what it will be doing trillions of years hence are robust.