lajoswinkler

I hope it explodes on the launchpad into a million pieces!

Perhaps he's just trolling us.

Trying to figure it out since he posted it. Not working. (╯°□°)╯︵ ââ€Â»Ã¢â€Âââ€Â»

And we have the first colour image released to the public. Red, green and blue filters. Image was taken on August 6th this year at 120 km distance. So it's gray. I've tried to boost the saturation, but this is a JPEG so not much can be accomplished. It might have a light green hue, although it's probably just gray to our eyes.

Oh, don't worry. Those will be great for killing kids on the beach.

Exactly. We could use such logic for basically all fenomena. Space. Charge. Spin. We could always twist the logic so that it goes along our "it's imaginary in our frame of reference". It's very real and measurable and it can be changed.

It's called spacetime. It's very realistic as it's stretchable and compressible. The very nature of how GPS works proves it and I've heard this meme from wannabe philosophers and hippie chicks only. Time is much more than a clock ticking.

Just because you've heard this doesn't mean it's true. This is a disinformation, a faulty meme that everyone keeps repeating like parrots. Time exists.

I think this is fascinating. °.°

Geologists wouldn't agree. There must be an incredible amount of water in Earth. It's not stored as free water, but it's there in the mineral compounds stuffed in magma. There is no reason to think all that water should've been expelled from the planet long time ago, and the amounts we're talking about are absolutely enormous compared to the realistic amounts of comets in the past. Most people think about pools of water but that's not how water hides. It reacts and forms compounds, not just by complexing with metal ions.

That won't happen. Silicon is a much larger atom and thus its orbitals' overlapping in compounds is poorer. Its analogues to carbon compounds are way less stable and readily decompose at much lower temperatures than carbon ones do. The element also tends to make crystalline compounds with other nonmetals which melt at very high temperatures. All this, combined with the large availability of carbon in space, put silicon away. Carbon is not good because it's carbon. It's good because of its electronic configuration. I understand now, but you're describing asexual reproduction. If you mean construction outside body and it doesn't involve intelect (because then that can't be included in the discussion), then how did those organisms came to be in the first place? They had to evolve. It's a very poor genetic diversity compared to sexual reproduction. If the evolution leads to sexual reproduction, the species gains a powerful tool for even better adaptation. Vast majority of the life on Earth evolved the capability to do so. Bacteria share plasmids, plants produce motile gametes, etc. It makes the species more resilient. Chances are such behaviour would occur elsewhere because it's not keeping all the eggs in one basket. A smart thing nature made by chance. Well, they are not. The sciences of ecology and biology disprove you. On the contrary, it's not equally unlikely. Sexual reproduction offers more diversity. More diversity results in less mortality when species is exposed to a problem. So you propose a species which is reproducing by cloning while it auto-introduces high levels of mutations to keep the gene pool different? There's one huge problem with your idea - such species would be short lived because no hereditary information is shared between the organisms. If huge mutations are introduced every time an organism multiplies, it has a large chance of dying (most mutations must be detrimental; it has a lot to do with entropy), not to mention the divergence would be extreme so we could not have stable and numerous populations. Of course, tweaking the reproduction rate could help, but it would require a large one, and such life or biosphere if you please, would be very similar to fire or any other chemical reaction where the equilibrium is shifted greatly towards the products. It would consume its environment and then what? I advise you to brush up on ecology. This is not genetics or biochemistry we're talking about. It's pure ecology and the system you're postulating is for most intents and purposes not sustainable.

1. There is no reason why should sexual reproduction and sexual dimorphism have to be DNA/RNA based just like having photoreceptors and motility organs. Evolution is inevitable by its very definition and, again, not inherently linked to DNA. As long as there are mutagens, hereditary material and reproduction, there will be evolution. 2. Robots are not organic life and will not form by biological evolution, so they can't be part of any argument here. Simple splitting without any change does exist on Earth, but it never made anything complex. We're talking about complex, evolved life, beyond procariot-like organisms. It is highly unlikely that animal-like organisms, motile and active, would behave like bacteria. Again, you seem to forget that sexual reproduction as a concept is not tied to the base mechanisms it relies on on Earth. There could be other mechanisms and biochemistries with sexual reproduction, just like other bases could and would yield bilateral symmetry for organisms actively moving in fluids. 3. It is highly unlikely for a highly complex species to arise by cloning, where by highly unlikely I mean "for all intents and purposes impossible". If you have hereditary material, vast opportunities are presented to you if you exchange it with another organism. Reproduction by pure cloning would make your species stagnant and, if suitable methods (huge population or very powerful repairing mechanisms) don't work, a cul de sac and prone to extinction. Think of sexual reproduction, of which there are many varieties, as expected as motility or sensitivity to touch, and not as something intrinsically tied to our genetics or biochemistry.

Yes. I don't think anyone was seriously considering comets to be the main source of our water.

This is not warp drive... It's an improbability drive from Hitchiker's guide to the galaxy. °-°

Absolutely possible and probable as it increases genetical diversity. There are multiple sexual systems on Earth, not just the ones we're most familiar with, so I'm sure such systems would evolve elsewhere. Plants, animals, bacteria... Sexual reproductions keeps life stronger.

There certainly is limit and those holes are sterile. It's organic chemistry. Complex molecules fall apart, they hydrolize. Only its atmosphere. It provides the photolytic molecules which then contaminate the surface, but it must be very, very slow. It's a chemically extremely slow environment (physical changes are pretty fast as we see) with unbelieveably inert solvent at cryogenic temperatures. Vast majority of the atmosphere is nitrogen. Amount of tholins on Titan is very low. It's the thickness of the atmosphere and the color of the compounds that fools us into thinking it's a rich soup. Maybe rich by composition, but not by amount. If there are some interesting chemical reactions on Titan, they are deep beneath its surface where it's warm enough and water exists. The surface is just a wasteland of ices and low hydrocarbons at temperatures used at labs when you want to stop a reaction in organic chemistry. Ice can flow under pressure. As Europa is squeezed by tidal forces, it does allow intricate "roads" on its surface, but there's lots of ice underneath. At such low temperatures and vacuum, free liquid water would quickly find its way to the top... like on Enceladus. In any way, any viable spore, not destroyed by vacuum will be sterilized by Jupiter. Lots of ionizing rays around it.

It was already there. Earth is just one more lump of matter in the Solar system. It's not "special".

We have a pretty good picture of the extremophiles we find on Earth. The only harsh environment we haven't probed yet is below the deepest holes, and that close to the mantle is sterile environment because no fluids are capable of ensuring the continuous flow of matter, and the temperature is so high the building blocks of living beings are coagulating and hydrolizing. If there are hydrothermal vents on Mars that can offer the nutrients Earth has, then our extremophiles could survive there, but it would require Mars to have tectonic activity and underground pools with free water. There might be free water pockets deep below the surface, but tectonic activity is gone. Vents capable of delivering nutrients can't exist in passive environments as they're are transient features of very active regions. They form, they clog and collapse. No plate activity, no new vents. No vents, no nutrient flow. No nutrient flow, no life. Chances are high nothing from Earth could live there without modifications. Maybe for a while, but it wouldn't be sustainable. Regarding the surfaces, all of them except Earth's are either airless (no matter flowing in dynamic equilibrium = no life in vaccum), extremely cold (no complex chemical reactions) or subjected to hard ionizing rays. Europa is bombarded with 5.4 sieverts each 24 hours. That is 0.225 Sv/h, which is roughly 1.125 million times the dose in my room. Even the most radioresistive bacterial strains could not endure that even under 1 atmosphere. They can survive large acute doses, but that's one exposure and then back to normal levels for repairing, taking up some time. Constant high exposure doesn't give them the time. Only the subsurface pockets would be shielded. Even if spores could survive vacuum and high ionizing radiation of Jupiter, they couldn't reach it so if there's anything in Europa, it's Europian. The question is if there are niches on Mars or other bodies which are substantially similar to our niches here. So far there is not only one evidence for that, but also nothing says it could be like that. There's more to a niche than just temperature, as you know. Also, mind that extremophiles can only live in their niche. Putting such strains into "normal" environment causes them to die like flies.

I will quote myself because I have nothing else to say.

I've solved the newest Career very quickly. I admit it is fun if one is new to KSP, but I've became too advanced. It's not bragging, it just happens after a while. And grinding is something I don't like. When things become different, and KSP matures, I'll give it another go. Until then, I'm building complex interplanetary ships in Sandbox. That's all you should be concerned in KSP - having fun. Personally, the game/simulator relaxes me. That's why I play it.

When you're already highly experienced with KSP and you've played Career for two times, you get tired of it and just want to build stuff in sandbox. It's normal.

What you see in the photograph is not a sterile environment, and the rover is certainly not sterile.

Why would you need to calculate it? If you have Kerbal Engineer Redux installed which shows you delta v and TWR, and you peek into one of those KSP apps which calculate the needed delta v for an orbital maneuver, you're good to go.

I can't say I like this. I like the will to resurrect the mod, but not the idea to change it drastically. Planet Factory was Krag's brain child and thus you should've respected his design. Ablate is ruined. It used to be an ablated ball with realistic, natural, complex terrain and now it's nothing like that. Also, Krag's addition was on the verge of going into needlessly complex, weird worlds and yours has crossed it. I respect your effort, but I don't like it.

Triton, Io, Titan Iapetus is cool, too.