PakledHostage

Recognizing it's just a story and without giving too much away, the topic of slavery does figure into the movie "Quest For Fire" (set about 60,000 years ago). It ends up working out well for them.

As an aside, they kind of did. Almost 2000 years earlier, Eratosthenes correctly estimated the size of the Earth, within about 1%. Then 300 years after that, Ptolemy redid the calculation incorrectly, but his answer stood as valid for 1500 years because the church liked Ptolomy better than Eratosthenes. So when Columbus came along and wanted to reach Asia via a "shorter way" than by going east, it was reasonable to go west. It was only after Magellan's flotilla first sailed across the Pacific 25 years later that they realized the Earth was a lot bigger than Ptolemy had estimated.

Richard Branson's quip about how to become a millionaire ("Simple: first become a billionaire and then start an airline") springs to mind about airlines...

In my own experience watching nieces, nephews and my own kids grow, kids much younger than 7 regularly express concern for the wellbeing of people and animals around them. I would be worried if they didn't.

This. Looks. Awesome. (found in comments in an article about the repairs that are the subject of this thread)

Yes, but I'd say not comparable. One solution required multiple experts working for months to identify a cause and fix it, while the other involved a single expert knowing the system so well that they could immediately recognize the pattern of faults and know the solution. Both problems could have resulted in loss of the mission, but one was solved with only seconds within which to find a solution. That's not to say that this Voyager patch isn't impressive as heck, but it's a different category of impressive than "SCE to AUX".

This CNN article says Voyager 1 is back in business as of April 20th, following a firmware update that works around the bad memory location.

Everest has been gentrified. It was once only the domain of world class experts, but today the two "normal routes" are more of a high altitude via ferrata. People who don't even know how to put on their own crampons are regularly guided up it. That's true for many of the 8000'ers. Orbit was also once just the domain of world class experts, but that is changing. And that's going to eventually be true for the moon too. When Apollo 11 first landed there, the crew was under no illusions about how serious the commitment was. Nixon even pre-recorded an address to the nation that would have been aired if Armstrong and Aldrin became stranded. When we eventually go back to the moon, it will be less "on the edge" than the Apollo missions. The risk will only decrease as technology and experience increases. And even though "riding an explosion" into space will never be truly safe (just as climbing Mount Everest will never be truly safe), common people will eventually do it. What they'll do when they go there (e.g. research, work, recreate, etc. ) is the only outstanding question.

Yes, and if you read my posts earlier in this thread, you'll see that I said that there too.

I don't understand the eye roll? I said earlier in this thread that I don't see Mars colonies being a thing until several centuries from now. And by "Mars colonies " I mean something more than a scientific outpost. I honestly don't think there's any reason to go there. If it ever happens that a colony arises there, it will probably happen organically. An exotic "sin city" arising there 100s of years from now seems as plausible as anything else.

Perhaps. I can believe that it may eventually turn into an exotic destination for wealthy adventurous tourists. Heck, even Everest Basecamp now has TVs, feather beds and masseuses. Maybe it becomes a sort of Las Vegas like destination (what happens on Mars stays on Mars)?

So it's a bit like ours here on Earth, standing 5.5 km tall, adjacent to the Gulf of Alaska:

Needs an inlaid chess board...

I mean for the round trip. Fly there, land, perform the mission and fly back. Depending on how they do the transfers, it could very reasonably be upwards of two years.

I don't think we'll have humans on Mars by 2040. That's only 16 years away. Before that can happen, a manned spacecraft is required that can operate unsupported in deep space for 2+ years. That does not and has never existed. Realistically, we'll have to learn how to walk first by going back to the moon in the next decade or three, then once we can walk we'll be able to run to Mars. A robotic sample return mission is still our best bet before then.

I've been on test flights where they dumped fuel merely to demonstrate that the jettison system was working. Nobody got fined. Just saying. That story is apocryphal. Just the other week, CNN went for a ride along on a B-52 and the crew happened to need to shut down an engine while near Japan. They continued the mission, flying all the way from Japan back to Louisiana on 7 engines.

So no bell-bottomed polyester tape in Voyager?

There is maritime law with respect to salvage. I don’t know the details, but maybe someone here knows a bit more? Regardless, I don't think anyone would be able to claim salvage on a fairing half when SpaceX's recovery vessel is on the horizon from where the part came down.

Off topic, but an aircraft that's over its maximum landing weight can still land. It just needs an overweight landing structural inspection done before it can fly again. (A long runway and careful touchdown helps in the event, too.) We had a few older 767s that didn't even have a fuel jettison system installed. I remember one of them needing to make an air turnback and the flight crew being seriously irritated to find out that they couldn't jettison fuel before landing, but that was on them. They should probably have familiarized themselves with what they were flying before they took off. After that, we were asked by flight ops to look at modding those aircraft to add a fuel jettison system, but the cost of the mod was deemed too high so they continued to fly without.

The difference is that people can breathe all over the world. People also don't need radiation shielding throughout most of our planet's surface. Anywhere else is going to kill us pretty much the second our technology fails. And the present-day limitations of that technology also preclude building actual desirable places to live. In the near term, any artificial habitat on the moon or Mars is basically just going to be an underground bunker, with all the associated mental health challenges that that will entail. (..."All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.")

That's kind of my point. I don’t see a colony being viable on Mars. Moon, yes. Mars, no, because the Moon has potentially useful resources (helium-3 for use in fusion reactors and ice to make rocket fuel in reasonabe proximity to Earth), while Mars has...

That's what I had tried to say yesterday. I don’t see a Mars colony as viable, other than as a sort of tourist destination for wealty adventurers. Maybe eventually it would turn into a real-world Canto Bight, but that's probably a few centuries off. The idea that it could be a colony of highly educated remote workers doesn't sit well with me, because what highly educated individual is going to want to live in a box under 6 feet of Martian regolith? Highly educated workers tend to gravitate towards more desirable places to live, with outdoor recreation opportunities, etc.

That's the thing. They would need to have something. They're not going to write new code and upload it without testing it on the ground first. Maybe they don't have actual hardware for all of it, but I suspect they at least have the core equipment. Or maybe they have a virtual machine Voyager that they can test on? The VM would have to be very high fidelity in order to serve as a meaningful test platform, so maybe they even have both a VM and a hardware reference system? (i.e. do the initial development and testing with the VM and then do the final testing on the reference hardware.) I'd sure be interested to know.

Flippant, but with a grain of truth... the colony would need to be able to supply something that we need here, but that's difficult or impossible to get here. Mining helium-3 on the moon for use in fusion reactors on Earth is the first idea that springs to mind. But then your "colony" is just a mining community in an inhospitable environment, the likes of Nanisivik. It'd be a place people would go for work, not because they dream of living there. Sure there might be some associated tourism infrastructure for people to go see the sights and experience 0.15 g... (Heck, swimming in 0.15 g would be fun - supposedly it'd be possible to leap like a dolphin or whale, depending on your physique...). But the economic activity generated by that tourism and helium-3 extraction would be a tendril of the Earth's economy, it wouldn't be a stand-alone lunar economy. Likewise, I think a colony on Mars would struggle to be able to provide anything other than a tourism experience. They'd just be a space banana republic or real world Canto Bight... people would go there for a visit and spend some money, but the colony wouldn't have anything useful to sell.