KerikBalm

Yes, if there is life, it must reproduce relatively fast, which is one reason why I really doubt anything is there. To your other point, yes it was an energy starved environment, but it was to generally express the point that conditions in which life can live don't necessarily mean conditions where lufe can live fast. I mentioned xerophiles growing orders of magnitude slower. That could still be fast- but generally speaking, there is an a_w where they stop growing at all. As one gets arbitrarily close to this, the doubling time gets arbitrarily large. The clouds of venus would be very nutrient limited in some aspects... Nitrogen, water, (phophorus?), trace minerals, sodium, potassium, etc. Maybe they can pull water from the atmosphere in an energy intensive process to hydrate the cell... pulling scarce resources from the environment slows growth related to how fast the resources can be pulled, and may be energy limited. Bottom line, they compare specific and well defined abiotic processes to vague and undefined biological ones. The only conclusion is that we don't know how it is being produced. Lets not assume life. There is no positive evidence for that yet.

https://www.nature.com/articles/nature10905 Stable but extreme environment, biomass turnover on the order of hundreds or thousands of years. You can't assume that conditions that allow life automatically mean high reproduction rates.

Yes, they need to reproduce at a rate that is faster than the number falling down. They can float for a long time, but they are equally likely to float up as to float down. Strong winds can just mean better mixing. Some circulation cells can reduce the loss, but the loss rate would still be very high. But they won't... and keep in mind that xerophiles on Earth reproduce very slowly, orders of magnitude slower than non xerophiles. Some specialist archea/bacteria are thought to take decades or even centuries to reproduce. Reproducing like crazy in an a_w of about 0.15 is far from something that can be easily granted for the sake of argument... And they would need to

Not at all the same. Life on Earth can go dormant, and emerge just fine. Cloud life needs to reproduce fast to compensate for the mixing with the lower atmosphere/falling out of suspension. Dormancy for 10 years isn't an option if that means descending deep into the atmosphere where ver bad things happen due to the heat and pressure.

I am very pessimistic about Venus cloud life. Martian subsurface life, perhaps. Gas giant life? I doubt it, but maybe more likely than venusian life, I think it depends on the temperature gradient, and how hot it is when you get deep enough to have much more than hydrogen and helium. Below the surface of frozen moons, very interesting possibilities.

They'd have to be enclosed, but if there is a tiny leak, you don't neccessarily have to rush to contain it. On the other hand, if it contains a deadly pathogen, you could be in big trouble. A big glob of water for something not used to it can be deadly. A very simple example is dumping a sea-going fish into fresh water... https://sfamjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/1462-2920.12598 The organisms we know of that can tolerate low aw fare very poorly when put in an aw of close to 1. The even more extreme conditions of Venus would suggest that any Venusian organism would be killed by the salt, pH and water content of our bodies. I'm in favor of more exploration. I just think its #1 Nearly impossible that there is life resembling Earth-based life/that is contamination from Earth/that poses a threat to Earthly organisms #2 Unlikely that there is life on Venus, but if so it will be very different from ours and not even have DNA/RNA #3 Very likely that we will learn something new about Venus or chemistry.

but you said I would say definitely not. That would lower the known aw range of earth-life from 0.6 to about 0.15, among other issues. Define "similar", and define "survive". I would not define metabolically inactive spores that would still be viable if returned to milder conditions as capable of surviving in those conditions. If the life form cannot reproduce under those conditions, it cannot survive (in the long term) under those conditions. In particular on Venus, the reproduction rate needs to be fairly high to account for mixing of the upper atmosphere with the lower atmosphere where it will certainly be destroyed. We know of no life on Earth that can replicate itself at anywhere even close to the aw range of Venus. So we know of no life capable of surviving in similar conditions to the upper atmosphere of Venus. Define "unconstrained". In this case, the environment itself is a constraint. In my review of aw limits of life, it seems most life lives in an aw of 0.9-1.0, and although some life can still replicate at aws much lower, the division rate starts dropping by orders of magnitude. Growth is very very very slow around an aw of 0.6 for all known Earth-life. For the purposes of this discussion, if they cannot replicate in those conditions, they cannot survive long term in those conditions. There are some places where the atacama desert surface samples come back seemingly sterile. What is there is thought to have blown in. On the surface without active DNA repair (thus active metabolism), UV light renders many spores non-viable rapidly. Of course just a mm or two under the surface can prevent that. Some stuff is blown in, other stuff can wait it out for the very rare rain or at least elevated humidity. In the worst parts of the atacama desert, the humidity / aw is about 3x better than the best case for Venus. The atacama desert is an oasis in comparison. If we don't find metabolically active life in the worst part of the atacama, then we won't find any life with earth-similar biochemistry on Venus. Cryptobiosis isn't good enough, especially when relying on suspension in droplets/aerosols to stay above the kill conditions. Even favorable circulation cells have mixing, and survival will depend on reproducing faster than the average lifetime of a particle in suspension. They cannot wait very long for better conditions, they must be metabolically active a significant portion of the time. Earth-life won't do it if the best case situation for the worst of the atacama is a state of cryptobiosis most of the time. Which is one reason that aw is very important. DNA's structure depends on said H-bonds. It will start to lose its ordered structure at an aw of less than about 0.55. Such an aw is wildly optimistic under any scenario for venusian clouds. I'm not saying there can't be life in the clouds of Venus, I'm saying it can't have Earth-like biochemistry. If it is there, it can't be contamination from Earth. That is what the authors of this phosphine observation propose in a separate publication: https://www.liebertpub.com/doi/full/10.1089/ast.2020.2244 (note the author overlap with https://www.nature.com/articles/s41550-020-1174-4#MOESM1 ) However, they pull a little switcheroo in their speculation, and switch from talking about water activity to water content. They start talking about the water content of droplets that are by their own admission, only 15% water - and thus have an aw of about 0.15, which is 1/4th what anything on Earth has been observed to reproduce in. So this reproduction in droplets is plausible for Earth-life in water droplets on Earth - but it does not seem to be plausible for Earthlife in droplets with a composition similar to what we see on Venus. Metabolically active microbes in Earth's atmosphere (for which its still unclear if there is significant sustained replication up there, or if the airborne biosphere is basically due to ground-based life being swept up but surviving in the short-term) Well, based on the literature research I've done in the past couple days, the earth-life that does survive at low aw does not survive at high aw. Anything surviving in a droplet that is 15% water, and 85% H2SO4 is going to find that human lungs are extremely basic, with very different hydrogen bonding properties, that is very very very likely going to gum up all the works and kill it. On top of that, as I mentioned, the biochemistries would have to be so different, it won't know what to do with the biomolecules it does find. I wouldn't worry about it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_activity#Selected_aw_values On earth, we don't observe any life in areas with an aw less than about 0.6. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4438321/ https://sfamjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/1462-2920.12598 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1693405/ Which has previously been brought up with regards to the suitability of the putatve salty brines on Mars: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7358355/ Life on earth simply does not appear to be able to function with an aw of less than 0.6. Given the very dry conditions in some places such as the atacama and Sahara deserts, and other hypersaline environments (some of which have extremophiles, others are even saltier and don't seem to have life), if life on Eart hcould have adapted to such low water activity, it should have already done so. Its extremely unlikely that it would be able to do so from small amounts of microbes on the surface of a probe that was not assembled in those extreme environments (favoring non-extremophile contamination), followed by a long period in space subject to ionizing radiation without conditions allowing active DNA repait, to be shed in small amounts on a very different environment, as opposed to the gradual transitions that we observe in earth environments. I think the possibility of contamination from Earth is overblown for Mars, and especially for Venus. Europa and Enceledus on the other hand... I'm not sure how briny the subsurface water is there, it may be quite mild for Earth life. The atmoshere of Venus is very very dry, with a very low water activity: https://www.liebertpub.com/doi/10.1089/ast.2020.2244#:~:text=2.3.&text=Venusian water activity is much lower than any analogous habitat on Earth.&text=The habitat inside liquid droplets,of liquid water (15%). Its not contamination from Earth probes, and I doubt its life. If it is life, it must have fundamentally different biochemistry, because Earth life's biochemistry does not appear capable of living in such low aw conditions, despite prolonged contact with such conditions, and all manner of intermediate environments to facilitate the evolutionary transition.

Or, "ore" is just sub-surface ice: H2O + energy > H2 + O If you want, you can throw in some carbon (its often in asteroids), and do: C + 2H2 > CH4 Then you've got methane and liquid oxygen. Of course, there is a bunch or ore often on equatorial places where ice shouldn't be just below the surface (like moho), so.... whatever

I wish it acted like that. It used to act somewhat like that (improving the transmission amount, so it seems labs back on Kerbin are more advanced). Instead I use it as a way of funding missions without bothering with contracts. Lab provides science... use the admin building to do science> fund conversion. Thus I can fund my missions using this, and ignoring contracts.

I would bet 10:1 odds against it, which is still fairly high. The combination of conditions makes it very unlikely, even if any one particular condition is not a deal breaker. Some abiotic source is still much more likely.

#1) bacteria are smaller than blood cells, without needing any discussion of viruses or mitochondria/chloroplasts. #2) the principle cells of blood (hemocytes, responsible for oxygen transportation) cannot replicate, but immune cells in the blood ca Where did you go to school anyway? Seems like they failed you. By sci fi, you mean fantasy, but in space?

Well, for specific things, its relatively easy, like golden rice. Improving the efficiency of a system that has already been evolving for billions of years towards optimal efficiency? Not easy, perhaps impossible unless something is stuck in a local optima.

I once had a guy try to sell me "organic" salt while my wife and I were on vacation in Croatia. I started asking him about how that can be possible and such. He wasn't so fluent in English, and my wife told me to just say no thanks and leave the "poor guy" alone. I think he was selling minimally processed sea salt. I think people equate "organic" with "natural", people used to say all natural back in the 90's, whatever happened to that (even though aresenic, and uranium, are also all natural)?

You really are obsessed with this aren't you? how many threads have you started in which contain the premise that one has access to such a thing? "Gut instinct" is worthless, and the presence of an ocean around Europa's core is well supported. Enceledus on the other hand, that may be pockets of water without a moon-wide ocean

I didn't think it worked that way either, and if the storage bays work like fairings, then the props that I make that are covered in fairings wouldn't work, like so: Also, if you use the backwards nose cone for LF, then you would be duplicatng volume, but.... Do you mean something like this? This is about the limit for me. As for duplicating volume, I could just offset them vertically. In other instances when wings are clipped, it gets you unreasonably short wingspans, which do matter when it comes to not knocking naything during landing, fitting in fairings, etc. However, that can almost always be avoided by vertical offset, with your wings ending up looking like a very thick box... so yes, I accept clipping for aesthetics, but not performance. I think I better example is just clipping everything into one tiny fairing/service bay, so your craft has ridiculously low drag. Other examples are stacking engines end to end, then clipping them so they don't obstruct each other's thrust, and thus giving you a ridiculously high thrust:cross section ratio (one of the things that makes the vector so good). Clipping all the tanks into on small area also makes it trivial to avoid shifting CoMs... etc But I agree with you, clipping for aesthetics is fine.

You mean sometimes closer than Jool... Eeloo isn't that far away, I want something like OPM. Pluto has some rock at its core, but is completely covered in ice. The water ice behaves more like rock, but its "ice" by normal definitions. The darker parts are just dirty ice. We have very little idea what Eris looks like. It may look very similar to Pluto. I doubt they will too, but to be an eris analogue, it needs to move farther out. Eeloo's cracked appearance makes me think it should have some source of tidal flexing. Pluto doesn't look like that for sure.

I don't think it would be a hindrance... As long as you can also make planets through text files, height maps, etc alongside the planet editor

then what was the suggestion? I don't think it would, I was just commenting on the specific assertion that the game needs to appeal to console players

Such decisions are increasingly rare, with CEOs focused on short term yields for their shareholders. You really need a strong CEO with a big stake in the company like Musk to be able to pull off longer plans. That said, I'm having doubts about the sequel from a gameplay perspective but that's for other threads. So far the only gameplay doubt that I had that has subsequently been removed relates to the orbital dynamics of Rask and Rusk... it seems like they will do that properly.

I don't see what playing on a console has to do with anything. Modern consoles all connect to the internet. I really don't see why console = no mods. Honestly, I don't think it does need to. I remain unconvinced that taking KSP to the console was the right decision. The platforms are a bit too different. If its not targetted at the console, then console players feel shafted. If it is targeted at the console, then PC players may feel like the game was handicapped. Either way, it makes for ill-will and is perceived as a money-grab that compromises the game (money-grabs aren't inherently bad, companies do need to make money, but they shouldn't compromise product quality).

Not so much. Adenoviruses are pretty good at getting DNA into cells, but not into the nucleus per se, and certainly not getting incorporated into the host cell genome. If you want to do that, Lentiviruses are preferable. In fact,, Adenoviruses are attractive because they do not integrate - this makes them safe, although only transiently effective. But if you want to do expermentation, and not deal with the hassle and blowback of making GMO humans, non-integrating viruses are obviously attractive. Personally, I've made a few variants of Ad5 - but these were not for gene therapy per se. They were CRAds- conditionally replicating Adenoviruses... Ads are widely used to make oncolytic viruses. Ad normally encodes anti-apoptotic proteins to stop a cell from killing itself when the infection is detected. Cancer cells likely already have their apoptosis pathway disabled. Productive infections in tumors would result, but not in healthy cells. This modification is ismply deletion of an Ad protein. Then you can also change the sequence of the fiber knobs that attach to the cell surface to get the virus to target different cells for entry. You can also replace the viral promoter with human promoters. The viral promoter is a general promoter that would have high transcriptional activity in pretty much all conditions. If you instead replace it with... say a promoter for Telomerase that is normally not active in human cells (only stem cells, and many cancer cells), then the viral proteins shouldn't get made after entering. But what about if it enters a human stem cell? well, then change a different viral promoter to something that is only active in differentiated cells.... say the promoter for a gene involved in making melanin if targetting Malignant Melanoma... then essential viral proteins won't get made in stem cells because the melanin promoter isn't active in those cells, and the virus won't replicate in normal skin cells because the telomerase promoter isn't active in those cells...

Well, they are going to have some physics LOD, and I wouldn't be surprised if that results in some parts acting like they have been "welded"/fused. So on this point, I will just wait and see, and not complain. That's a big understatement/strawman, but I thought you didn't want to bring this topic up, you even have a quip in your sig Really? When I argue against pixie dust rockets, some people counter with the unrealistic toy scale of the system - which I discounted because I thought obviously people would realize that its toy scale and the implications of the scale - so it wouldn't be comparable to promoting other bad science. I guess I was wrong. I wonder if I should start a poll to see how common this misconception is

The selection looks pretty much the same to me

@mcwaffles2003 Just because they aren't as big doesn't mean that they are lackluster. Addinng OPM and some Eris/Sedna analogues to the Kerbal's system wouldn't compete with Rask/Rusk, that ice world with equatorial seas, the eyeball planets... etc. There's no more room in the Kerbal's system for habitable bodies (even Laythe doesn't belong there), and adding an outer system wouldn't change that. Other systems could have fewer planets, but bigger planets... hot Jupiters, Super Earths, etc. Other systems could be much smaller red Dwarfs... There's no reason that I'm aware of that other systems need to show the same relative size to each other, we already observe large variations in apparent planet number... But the KSP systm has clear analogues to our inner solar system, and thus it seems to lack our outer solar system. I think there would still be enough draw to go interstellar, and it would be good gameplay progression.