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Recently the founder of the Mars Settlement Research Organization and author of The International Mars Research Station Shaun Moss agreed to sit down and answer any questions you had about space exploration and colonizing Mars. Below you will find his answers to your questions. Mars One?
by quantaman

What's your opinion on Mars One? I'm extremely skeptical that they can achieve their roadmap or anything close to it, do you share this skepticism? If so do you think they're mostly finished at this point (ie the project will fade into obscurity) or do you think the Mars One group will achieve something significant in the future?

Moss: Having looked over the Mars One plans I must say I am also highly skeptical, but hesitantly so, because you never know what can happen. Humans are remarkable, and entrepreneurs are among the most remarkable of humans because they see what does not yet exist and believe they can make it exist. They have tremendous faith and self-confidence, and although I haven’t met Bas, having heard him speak I’m convinced of his genuine and well-meaning intentions. I have met and interviewed Arno Wielders (Mars One CTO), who is also a Mars Society member, and there’s no doubt these guys are on the level, at least in spirit. It is not a scam, despite what click-hungry web “journalists” would have you think.

The architecture has some good features. Not returning to Earth enables a range of optimizations to be introduced, greatly reducing the mass to be launched to Earth orbit and to be delivered to Mars, which significantly reduces cost and thus increases viability. However, I consider it incomplete.

Mars One’s approach is that they themselves will not do any engineering. They are merely providing the high-level vision, while engineering and manufacturing will be outsourced to firms who will produce the hardware necessary for the missions. However, this strategy can only work if the architecture is already rock solid.

Another key element of their philosophy is that the mission will be assembled from existing technology, i.e. (to quote them) “No new technology developments are required to establish a human settlement on Mars.” It is highly questionable whether this is possible, depending on your definition of “technological development”. For example, spacesuits for Mars (marssuits) will be required, and these do not currently exist. Will not the design and manufacture of these suits constitute technological development? Other examples include the rovers to support the mission, vehicles to transport astronauts and supplies to Mars, the living units, EDL system for capsules, ECLSS, communications satellites, and so forth. These will all need to be developed, so to say that “no technology developments are required” is simply bollocks. However, that’s arguably a question of semantics. Let’s assume for now that they will have all the time and money necessary to produce the hardware on which the architecture is based.

The intention is that the Mars One astronauts will live on Mars in living units, which are space capsules similar to the SpaceX Dragon capsule, except larger, with a diameter of about 5 meters. The Dragon has a diameter of 3.7 meters. So, there are a few problems with this. SpaceX and Mars One are not currently in business together (as far as is generally known), and Musk has his own plans for establishing a colony on Mars that do not require Mars One. It is therefore unlikely that SpaceX is currently planning to develop a 5 meter variant of the Dragon.

There are only a few scenarios that could play out from here:

• SpaceX join up with Mars One and begin developing the 5 meter capsule. How they would fund this technological development (not to labor the point) is another question. Keep in mind we are yet to see a 3.7 meter Dragon land on solid ground on Earth, let alone a 5 meter one on Mars. But this would be the best possible scenario for Mars One.
• Another company, e.g. Boeing, offers to develop the required capsule for Mars One. This would be significantly more expensive, as it would require them to exceed the engineering that SpaceX has already done. Without a major injection of funds this would also push the Mars One timeline out even further.
• Mars One decide to use the 3.7 meter Dragon for the living units instead. This would probably be an acceptable compromise, but would have significant knock-on effects for the architecture, reducing the volume and mass budget available for the inflatable habitat, furniture, ECLSS and food production systems, energy systems, etc. It would mean fewer astronauts per living unit; perhaps 2 instead of 4. This is perhaps the most likely scenario.

Assuming that the challenge of providing the living units and landing these on Mars is solved, the next difficulty is positioning them and connecting them up. Mars One have said that this will be achieved using multipurpose rovers, which will be sent out in advance of the astronauts in order to scout out a good site, deploy solar panels, and things of this nature.

The capsules will not be landed in their exact final position and orientation, which is most likely because the thrusters used in landing will kick up a lot of dust and dirt, which could damage nearby hardware, in addition to covering any solar panels that have already been deployed with dirt. Therefore, Mars One are planning to land capsules up to 10km away from the base, and tow them into position with the rovers.

This begs several questions. Mars One say that the rovers will be “capable and powerful tools”, each with a robotic hand and a trailer that will be used to tow the capsules. The problem here is that a Dragon capsule weighs about 4.2 tonnes empty and each will carry up to about 1.9 tonnes of cargo, for a total mass of around 6 tonnes each. A fully-loaded 5 meter capsule would be significantly heavier. We don’t know the size of Mars One’s rovers, but they will need to be fairly sturdy to somehow lift a 6-tonne mass onto a trailer, tow it across up to 10 km of rocky ground to an exact position, unload it, and connect up the necessary hoses and cables. This aspect of the architecture seems like pure fantasy; but, who knows, there may be engineers associated with the project who have a very clever way to achieve this. Perhaps two rovers working together could do it?

Each living unit will contain an inflatable habitat extension, possibly in addition to all the furniture, equipment, electrical wiring and plumbing which is to be assembled inside of it. This also seems difficult to imagine. The inflatable habitat is not a thin plastic shopping bag. Aside from being able to contain at least half an atmosphere pressure (the minimum required for health and safety) against a near-vacuum, the inflatable section’s walls must be thick enough to support a covering of dirt. It is hard to imagine such a thick-walled bag, large enough to expand into a volume of 1000 m3, squished into a capsule along with all the fixtures and fittings. Perhaps these will be carried in the supply capsules. Note, however, that the living units must include an airlock for EVA.

Another question about the habitat is: plumbing? Where is the latrine? How will it be emptied, what is the recycling or disposal plan for the waste, what about the smell, etc.?

The astronauts are not supposed to have sex with each other on the mission. To send mixed-gender crews of intelligent and healthy young TV stars to another planet and expect them not to get freaky is wishful thinking at best, particularly if they start brewing their own alcohol, which is virtually certain if any Australians, Americans, Canadians, Brits, Irish, French, Spaniards, Germans, Italians or Russians are included in the mission.

One of the most important aspects of the mission plan that seems to have not been fully examined yet is the astronauts’ nutrition. Even assuming that all other nutritional needs are satisfactorily met, a purely vegan diet is known to be deficient in certain essential nutrients such as vitamins B12 and D. Vegans on Earth typically require supplementation in order to compensate for these deficiencies.

It has been suggested that crickets could be grown in the habitat, as a source of protein and B12, but it’s hard to imagine sharing close quarters with 1-3 other people and hundreds of noisy crickets; or, for that matter, going through a daily process of grinding up a new batch of protein powder each day. Perhaps they could synthesize B12, which researchers on Earth have only just figured out how to do, but this would require lab equipment, the space to use it, and considerable scientific expertise. B12 is made by bacteria in the lower intestine, which is why it only comes from meat, and why some vegetarian animals eat their own shit; so they get enough B12. In the face of chronic B12 deficiency the astronauts could also do this, but since they will probably already be feeling depressed due to lack of sunlight, living in a smelly cave, being (on average) 225 million kilometers away from everyone they have ever known and every place they have ever been, and not being allowed to shag each other, they would probably rather die. Hence, the most likely solution to the B12 problem will be supplementation, which means sending sufficient quantities of pills or injectables to Mars. This can only be a temporary solution, however, due to the disparity between the available money and mass budgets and how long people generally like to live. This places pressure on the settlers to somehow develop a local source of B12 as soon as they can.

The food system to be used by Mars One involves growing hydroponic crops inside under LED lighting which only produces photons with frequencies that plants utilize, i.e. blue, red and infra-red. Growing plants indoors using LED lighting seems inefficient, and inconsistent with other aspects of the architecture. To provide the astronauts with air and water, Mars One are making use of local resources such as the gases in the Martian atmosphere and water frozen in the ground. This is called ISRU, or In Situ Resource Utilization, and is much more efficient than shipping everything out to Mars from Earth. This strategy underpins most modern Mars missions. However, Mars One are not planning to directly use the free photons from the Sun in order to grow food, but rather, to first convert them into electrical energy using solar panels, then convert that electricity back into photons with the LEDs. To me this seems inefficient.

The habitats have no windows. Yes, that’s right. The astronauts are going to spend 90% of their lives effectively living in a low-gravity cave, surrounded by technology, body odor, and danger. From a psychological perspective this seems to be one of the most serious oversights. If I was on Mars, I would want to wake up each morning and look out on that glorious, planet-sized vacant lot. It might get boring after a few months, but it would be much better than never being able to see Mars without actually going EVA, which has a high barrier in terms of suiting up and passing through the airlock. Having no windows also means wasted energy in terms of the lights needing to be on inside all day. Mental illness could be significantly more likely in a habitat without windows; far worse than ordinary Seasonal Affective Disorder. Perhaps on a short mission it would be acceptable, but not for the rest of your life. Having no windows and no sunlight coming into the hab also means no vitamin D, since it won’t be present in their diet. They may get a little sunlight through their helmet on EVA, but considering the small area of skin exposed, the small amount of time spent outside, and the fact that sunlight intensity on Mars is about 40-50% of Earth, this will hardly be enough to be healthful. Vitamin D deficiency has been associated with sore bones, muscle weakness and depression, among other things. Consider that the Mars One astronauts will already be at risk of musculoskeletal problems due to living in a reduced gravity environment, and depression, additional adverse affects associated with vitamin D deficiency are ideally avoided.

Here’s what I would change about the Mars One plan:

• Modify the architecture to use the 3.7 meter Dragon. This may require reducing the crew size per living unit to 2 or 3, but it will be much quicker and cheaper, and arguably the only way to make the plan possible within anything like the proposed timeline and budget. It also might bring SpaceX in as a partner which would be incredibly valuable.
• Forget about moving the capsules once landed and forget about connecting them together. Where they land is where they stay. Astronauts can move between the living units by walking (or driving) the intervening distances in suits. This means each capsule would need to include its own self-contained life-support system, which might be very difficult.
• Include many windows along both sides of the inflatable section of the living units.
• Send additional capsules containing inflatable greenhouses, rather than attempting to grow food inside the habitats. Design the food system to directly use sunlight rather than, or in addition to, LED lighting. This will make it possible for the environment inside the greenhouses to be optimized for plant growth. It would also mean going EVA to get food, but humans have a lot of experience with this, generally speaking.
• Design the food system as an integrated aquaponics system in which fish and plants grow symbiotically. This will provide a significantly better nutrition profile in addition to a means of disposing of food scraps and vegetable waste (i.e., the fish will eat them). A fatty fish with edible bones such as salmon will provide – especially if they eat the bones and livers – long-chain fatty acids, all essential amino acids, minerals such as calcium, zinc and iron, and vitamins D and B12, all of which would be lacking in a vegan diet. Anyone can learn how to scale and fillet a fish, and they have the non-trivial advantage of being delicious, and salmon can be eaten cooked or raw. There is also the psychological benefit of having animals to care for.
• Include several ATVs and ideally at least one long-range pressurized vehicle. This will greatly increase the territory that the astronauts can explore and thus the science return, preventing them from becoming extremely bored, and making it easier to travel between the living units and greenhouses if they aren’t all gathered in one location.

Mars One certainly aren’t finished yet. However, as much as I would love for them to succeed, I do not think they will unless their plans are majorly revised and they get a serious injection of capital. Having said that, they have already achieved something significant, which is to cause virtually the entire Earth to not only take human missions to Mars seriously, but to take private human missions to Mars seriously. It has also exposed considerable interest in the global community in going to Mars despite the risks, which is useful information for future entrepreneurs.

Becoming multiplanetary represents a massive quantum leap in our evolution, and Mars One have done a lot to raise awareness of this tremendously historical transition. Whether they succeed or fail, whoever tries next will benefit from what they have done.



Radiation abatement
by tbg58

Primary galactic cosmic radiation bombards the surface of Mars because its magnetic field is too feeble to turn high-energy charged particles aside, but most colonization plans envision human-constructed habitations on the surface. How much work is being directed toward finding subsurface features (lava tubes, sinkholes) which can provide radiation-hardened locations for long-term habitations? (and perhaps a word about popularizing both the risk and subsurface habitation to address it).

Moss: The radiation risk of Mars missions is not as serious as many would make out. There is less than half the radiation on the surface of Mars than there is in interplanetary space due to half being blocked from underneath by the planet itself, and the atmosphere serving to block some from above. Plus, the solar radiation at Mars is only 43% that at Earth. However, you are right, without a magnetosphere or ozone layer, the radiation environment on Mars is somewhat more extreme than on Earth.

The most popular method of providing additional radiation protection on the surface of Mars is to shelter below a layer of dirt or rock. A few people have been looking at this. Gus Frederick has investigated the use of lava tubes as habitats on Mars, and Martian lava tubes were also the topic of this year’s Space Apps Challenge. The Mars Foundation developed two concepts for Mars settlements, named the Hillside Settlement and the Plains Settlement. The Hillside Settlement is created by burrowing into the side of a mesa; the Plains Settlement has a deep tray filled with regolith above the habitat modules. Both of these concepts are way early exploratory missions. Mars One are planning to cover their inflatable habitats with “meters” of dirt, although how practical this actually is remains to be seen. Missions based on Mars Direct or Mars Semi-Direct often show the hab’s roof covered in sandbags, which is practical, and much easier than trying to place the hab in a cave or lava tube. In the mission architecture I describe in The International Mars Research Station, the surface habitat is based on a Bigelow B330 module, which will supposedly provide radiation protection equivalent to or better than the ISS.

I am not aware of any major work being done by NASA with regard to locating lava tubes, caves or sink holes for locating a habitat. This may partly be due to the difficulty of locating a suitable structure from space, as uncollapsed lava tubes are difficult to see from above, or it may simply be a matter of priorities. Early human missions will be targeted at locations offering maximum science return, and only require temporary habitation solutions. Considering the investment required in locating suitable structures, inspecting them for structural integrity, and constructing or moving habitats inside, lava tubes are probably more suited to permanent habitation, and this will not be a requirement for several decades.

The radiation level in LEO is also about half that in interplanetary space, i.e. similar to that on the surface of Mars. Thus, despite some people’s concerns about radiation on Mars, astronauts on the ISS, some of whom have spent more than a year in LEO, have already demonstrated that humans can tolerate radiation doses similar to what astronauts on Mars will experience.

The greater risk will be during the trip out and back, which emphasizes the importance of short trip times in a well-shielded transit habitat.

It is arguably inconsistent to be pathologically concerned about the radiation risks in space missions while simultaneously tolerating so many carcinogens in our air, food and water. In fact, it may even be the case that going to Mars lowers your risk of cancer due to the astronaut’s air, food and water being much cleaner and containing fewer carcinogens than what we are habitually exposed to on Earth.



What's the point?
by StikyPad

I don't mean this in a cynical, "why do anything," sort of way, but what exactly is the objective? Glory? No breathable atmosphere, no native food source, little to no natural resources, high radiation, and likely a very shortened lifespan as a consequence. Not to mention social isolation. Most explorers come back, and most migrants travel for a better life, so it seems like you are doing this wrong.

Moss: There will always be people who wish to see beyond the horizon, which is a good thing, otherwise we might all still be living in Africa; or, more accurately, most of us may never have been born at all; in fact, without adventurers we may have died out thousands of years ago. Aside from the fact that biological organisms will always expand into every niche they can, just as surely as gas will expand to fill a container, there are obvious benefits to expansion. The migration of humanity to new lands stimulates scientific discovery and innovation, which, due to communications and transportation, benefits everyone. Countless inventions are produced by people living on the frontier. Necessity is the mother of invention, as the saying goes, and the challenges of living on the frontier have stimulated all manner of innovation, as have the challenges of living in space. Mars will be the same. We don’t know what we will find there, but there’s no question that living on Mars is already leading to new technological innovation as we ramp up to make the leap. Thus, just as people living everywhere benefit from inventions developed on the frontiers in America and Australia, and those produced as a result of the space program, the people of Earth will benefit greatly from the inventions produced by humans settling Mars.

Consider how America, founded as it was on principles of freedom and self-realization, has benefited all humanity. Electricity, automobiles, air travel, the internet, and many other inventions fundamental to technological society worldwide, were developed in America primarily as a result of its culture of innovation, optimism and ballsy self-confidence. This culture is still very much alive and well today, as evidenced by the thousands of new startups pouring out of Silicon Valley, NYC, Seattle and elsewhere every year. Imagine what we can achieve on Mars by building a society incorporating the very best aspects of Earth culture, based on liberty, equality and science. Space is the new frontier, and the frontier is always a zone of tremendous creativity, driven by a feeling of true freedom, inevitable resourcefulness, and the sharpness that comes from living on the edge. Mars has the significant benefit of being extremely resource-rich, offering an abundance of metals, water and carbon with which to construct countless new settlements and technological marvels of which we can now barely conceive; inventions that can be shipped back to Earth to benefit everyone else.

Another common answer to this question is survival. Every now and then, Earth gets hit by an asteroid large enough to wipe out most life on the planet. Although this tends to happens less frequently over time, as Jupiter and the Sun mop up the leftover rocks, there are still hundreds of thousands of them in our Solar System and another large impact will almost certainly happen again sooner or later. Human expansion into space will stimulate the development of two main strategies to help us protect ourselves against this eventuality.

For starters, we will learn how to work with asteroids, including mining them as well as pushing them into new orbits. Therefore, whenever the next extinction-level rock swings into a collision course with Earth, we’ll hopefully be able to deal with it.

However, if we cannot – for example, if it is larger than what are capable of shifting or breaking apart at the time – then it will be advantageous to have settlements on other worlds. In my opinion it would be very difficult to wipe out all human life on Earth, because humans are so resourceful and tenacious. Even if the sky is blacked out by dust and ash from the impact and most plant life dies off due to lack of sunlight, humans would find ways to survive. Nonetheless, having a population on Mars (and ideally many other worlds) provides a backup plan for our species; the genetic and memetic equivalent of storing your most precious files in the cloud. Mars offers more potential for creating an independent branch of humanity than any other world we know of, due to its proximity, favorable temperatures, 24-hour day, and abundance of all the elements necessary for life and technological civilization. The more Earthian organisms we can implant there, the better.

Going to Mars will affect humanity more positively than anything else we will ever do. It will inspire generations of young people to continue and broaden their education, particularly in the highly valuable STEM topics, much more than Apollo ever did. It will also bring the people of Earth together psychologically, as humanity begins to perceive itself not as a species of many lands, but as one of many worlds. It will produce remarkable new inventions, especially related to resource utilization, life support, communications and transportation, which can be exported to Earth for everyone’s benefit, as our planet’s population grows to ten billion and beyond, and we expand into deserts and oceans, and underground. Technologies and strategies developed for terraforming can be exported to Earth to help heal the environmental damage caused by the industrial revolution. New systems developed on Mars for planetary self-governance and global resource management can be exported to Earth, transcending outmoded political and economic systems. Technologies and systems developed on Mars, and the experience gained by settling Mars, will lay the technological and cultural foundation for expanding Earthian life to countless other worlds; worlds around other stars that are capable of supporting our kind of life, which we will soon begin to discover.

Not everyone who goes to Mars will want to come back to Earth, just as many Europeans who traveled to the Americas and Australia did not want to return to Europe. They came from cities that were filthy, crowded, aggressive and classist; places where it was hard to get ahead. It was worth the significant cost and risk associated with migration. The new lands offered wide open spaces, clear skies, and new opportunities for leadership and creating fortunes and dynasties. Mars will be the same. Enough people will want to go and live on the frontier to make it worthwhile. Even if it’s not for you, it is impossible to prevent adventurers from seeking adventure.



Lunar Space Elevator
by NoImNotNineVolt

Decades ago, Jerome Pearson produced detailed plans for a lunar space elevator for NASA Institute of Advanced Concepts, seeking to enable lunar mining and lower-cost access to water in space. Since any human missions to Mars would benefit from (if not outright require) large amounts of water (either split into propellant and oxidizer, used as radiation shielding, or even just for life support), do you feel that construction of such a device would be a net benefit? Why or why not?

Moss: I do not see any reason to build a space elevator on Earth, Luna, Mars or anywhere else, because I believe (hope) we will soon see the emergence of antigravity a.k.a. gravity propulsion technology. This will be a superior means of transporting anything into space. I realize most space enthusiasts are focused firmly on rockets and are somewhat dismissive of gravity propulsion, consigning it to the same bin as UFOs, conspiracy theories and Apollo-deniers, but, frankly, if gravity propulsion is possible then we owe it to ourselves to pursue its development diligently, as it could dramatically lower the cost and difficulty of getting into space and thereby open up the space frontier just as surely as air travel opened up Earth.

Setting aside for the moment the controversial question as to whether various national governments already have this technology but keep it secret for military reasons, the work done by people such as Podkletnov, Puthoff, Brandenburg and many others suggests gravity propulsion may be possible, and that we will ultimately develop practical applications including spacecraft. The advent of this class of vehicles, which I estimate/hope will be between now and about 2050, should make both rockets and space elevators obsolete.

If I’m wrong, then space elevators are a good solution, once we work out how to economically manufacture suitable materials. However, there are enough researchers interested in gravity propulsion that I believe it’s more likely to be developed sooner. In my opinion more funding should be made available to develop this technology as a priority, as its advent would offer many benefits to society.



Teraforming
by Charliemopps

I believe the most likely way we'll actually have any impact on Mars is via genetically engineered microbes, as we've recently seen Darpa has mentioned. This, at first blush, seems harmless, Mars is already dead. But given the increasing evidence that Mars and likely many other celestial bodies have in the past and maybe even at the present microbial life on them, and that it's extremely likely all of the planets in the solar system routinely trade biological materials via asteroid impacts. It seems that logical to assume that Biological Tera-forming of Mars is also Biological Tera-forming of Earth.

In short, the Bugs we design here, and send there, will eventually come back to haunt us. Do you have opinion on this? I love science, and want us to use it to our benefit. But I'm not ignorant to the fact that nature has the uncanny knack of turning our best intentions to ashes in our mouths.

Moss: It’s by no means certain that Mars does not harbor any LAWKI. Life can be found everywhere on Earth where there is liquid water and all the necessary elements; thus, because Mars does have all the necessary elements for life, if liquid water was present on the Martian surface there would be a strong likelihood that biological (as in, water and carbon-based) life would develop. Conditions at the surface of Mars can sometimes support liquid water, but only rarely. However, there’s quite a lot of water on Mars, and underground, where temperatures and pressures are higher, there could well be aquifers harboring chemotrophic microorganisms.

If life exists on Mars, then it may have already reached Earth via panspermia, as you say. If so, has it taken root here, and, if so, has the effect been positive, negative, or nothing? Earth is covered in life, which means the answer must logically be either positive or nothing. If any genetically engineered microbes migrate from Mars to Earth, the risk of them traveling by impact debris, landing on Earth, and flourishing in a way that has a devastating effect on Earth’s biosphere, is minimal. For starters, most species would not be able to survive such a trip due to the extremes of temperature and radiation; although, to be fair, this is exactly the type of organism we would engineer to survive on the surface of Mars. Any organisms hitching an interplanetary ride on the surface of a rock would most likely die, although perhaps they could survive if encased within the rock; or, they would simply die of old age, as the trip time by this route would be on the order of millions of years, a period most likely be longer than the life of the organism unless it was somehow able to cryogenically hibernate.

Panspermia by this means is not the real risk. The real risk is that organisms will travel by spacecraft, in protected conditions, with trip times of just a few months, reducing, over time, to days.

Just as all kinds of plants, animals, fungus and bacteria migrated between continents on human-operated boats (and now, planes), such will also be the case between Earth and Mars. On Earth we have customs controls to restrict species migration, but this is hardly water-tight and almost completely unenforceable across land borders. It will be the same between Earth and Mars in the future, with the frequency of species migration events increasing with interplanetary travel and trade. While measures may be taken to prevent the unauthorized transportation of macroorganisms between planets, any number of microbes will be able to hitch a ride in exported goods, food, on boot soles, or on or inside human bodies.

We already have innumerable case studies of what happens when foreign species enter new ecosystems. Sometimes the effect is nothing; the organisms cannot find a niche, cannot reproduce, and die out. In Australia, however, we have several well-known cases of catastrophic effects. The introduction of the influenza virus, for example, was disastrous for the indigenous inhabitants. Cane toads, brought into the country to control cane beetles, with no natural predators have become an ugly pest. Similarly, rabbits, brought into Australia for sport hunting, are now in plague proportions in some parts of the country. Domestic cats gone feral have wiped out many species of marsupial, lizard and frog. (But none of these come anywhere close to the most destructive invasive species in Australia – can you guess which it is?)

The data suggests, however, that introduction of new species to an ecosystem, while the results may be unpredictable, are never absolutely catastrophic, which is to say, the ecosystem as a whole survives. Populations of various member species may ebb and flow, but the biosphere itself persists. I very much doubt that anything we will engineer for Mars could have truly calamitous effects on Earth. Perhaps one possible scenario would be something like what is happening now with soybeans, corn and other GMO crops, with more resilient engineered variants displacing the originals as they spread into new areas. However, even this is unlikely. Regardless of the mode of transport, organisms from Mars will have either evolved or been created for Martian conditions, which are very different to Earth’s, and hence they will be at an evolutionary disadvantage compared with native Earthian species. It seems unlikely they would flourish to the point of displacing native species to any great degree.

There is one species far more devastating to ecosystems and responsible for more extinction than any other, and I think you can guess which one it is. It’s precisely the same one we are planning to spread to Mars and beyond. This could be a problem for extant Martian life, if present.



How much infrastructure needs to be there first?
by Dr. Spork

Some people think that we should send someone to Mars as soon as possible, even if they can't do much before they return home. Simply leaving a human bootprint would be worth it. Others think that unmanned missions should first build up enough Martian infrastructure to support human "colonists" with a reasonable level of comfort. Only then should people be sent. Where would you put yourself on this continuum? What sort of activities should Martian astronauts be able to do before you would think the expensive trip there was worth it?

Moss: I am surely of the latter camp. Mars is not going anywhere. We shouldn’t delay, but we also shouldn’t rush in where angels fear to tread. We should send humans to Mars as soon as possible, but within the boundaries of safety and well-considered strategy. A series of unmanned missions to build up infrastructure on the surface and in Mars orbit such that a human crew can spend 1.5 years on the surface, perhaps not with a reasonable level of “comfort” but at least a reasonable level of safety, is essential.

Short missions to Mars do not make sense. If it was in any way practical to visit Mars for just a few days, such a mission would be comparatively simple and light, and could be sent fairly soon, without too much infrastructure installed in advance. However, due to Mars’ orbit, mission durations totaling 2.5 years, including a 1.5-year surface stay, are more practical. To sustain a human crew on the surface of Mars for this period of time requires significant investment in infrastructure, including satellites to provide 100% communications uptime with Earth, reliable ISRU systems capable of producing sufficient water, air, electricity, and rocket propellant for the mission, and surface habitats and vehicles. Everything they need for the mission needs to be set up and tested before the crew even leave Earth, including a fully-fueled return vehicle.

As for what activities Martian astronauts should be able to do, the main thing is that they should be able to work outside as much as they want. Considering they are going to Mars as explorers, field scientists, and representatives of humanity’s adventurous spirit, they need to be working outside a lot. Therefore they need very robust, lightweight and maneuverable suits, long-range pressurized surface vehicles, and good cameras, tools and instruments.

You may be surprised to hear that I do not think we should go to Mars next. Despite being a passionate Mars settlement advocate, it’s my considered view that we should first conduct a new series of lunar missions, far surpassing what was achieved with Apollo. The intention would be the addition of some basic infrastructure elements to the lunar surface including habitat modules and pressurized surface vehicles analogous to what we will need on Mars.

The positive benefits of this strategy will be include development of the public and private space sectors, technological innovation, improved confidence in human missions beyond LEO, more capital being made available for space projects, and practice missions similar to the human Mars missions.

While it’s true that Earth provides useful Mars analogs, these pale in comparison to the Moon in terms of value, as the Moon offers real danger, real science and exploration, and real issues of space and surface transportation, communications, life support, dust, radiation, human factors and so on. The great advantages of the Moon over Mars is that we can go any time, trip times are short, there’s virtually zero communications lag, and missions can be of any duration. We should be planning, right now, a series of lunar missions ranging in duration from weeks to months, to be conducted over the next decade by an international consortium of space agencies, as preparation for the considerably more ambitious human Mars missions. Doing this will be significantly more valuable than continuing to operate the ISS because of the degree to which it will inspire everybody, particularly students, scientists, engineers and entrepreneurs. We’ve seen LEO, people! Let’s go somewhere new. If Mars is still too far, the Moon is right there.

The immense benefit of practicing for Mars missions on the Moon is that you get the Moon. The Moon is greatly undervalued; it’s an absolute goldmine to the visionary space entrepreneur. Mars may have more potential for supporting life, but from a business perspective the Moon is currently a much better proposition. It can be done sooner, for less money, with higher return. In the current entrepreneurial climate I think it will not take many publicly-funded missions to inspire a slew of private lunar ventures, which will open up the Moon, expand the space industry and economy, and significantly improve the state of the art in space technology. This will effectively set the stage for human exploration and settlement of Mars.



How long till boot on surface of Mars?
by painandgreed

Given Apollo level funding and political will (from the US and other involved nations), what do you think the major steps to getting to Mars will be and how long do you think it would take to actually put a man on Mars?

Moss: It is difficult to estimate a time frame as we are currently going through a period of major global change which may significantly affect funding available for space. Exponential growth in world population combined with increasingly intense weather events will place pressure on food and water supplies, diverting attention away from “luxury” topics such as space and towards more immediate survival concerns. Therefore, I suspect the amount of both funding and political support available for Mars will decrease in the near future, although I could be, and I hope I am, completely wrong. It will rebound eventually, however, because of people like us, and because, despite whatever else changes, technologically consistently improves, which means getting into space will inevitably get easier and cheaper.

However, I realize this is not your question. The main area of technological development necessary is transportation, as this represents the most expensive aspect of the mission; hence why almost everyone in the Mars community hopes that SpaceX will be successful in developing reusable rockets, which will reduce the cost of space travel by 1-2 orders of magnitude, and why I hope gravity propulsion vehicles will be developed soon. Another important area of research is in the suits. The new generation of space suits, which are mechanical counter-pressure (i.e. skin-tight, like SCUBA suits) are much more comfortable and flexible and can be worn for longer periods than the current gas pressurized suits. However, some considerable investment is needed in this tech to make it ready for Mars.

Development in materials science is also important, particularly 3d-printed nanostructured materials, which will make it possible to manufacture space hardware stronger than steel but with a fraction of the mass, thus lowering launch costs. Items of ISRU hardware that can make breathable air, potable water and methalox propellant from indigenous Martian resources need to be developed and tested on Mars. We also ideally need to place communications satellites around Mars and possibly also the Sun in order to provide 100% connectivity with Earth.

Thus, if we are truly intent on sending humans to Mars, in my view we need to shift the focus of Mars missions away from science and towards engineering. At the moment the engineering is serving the science; we need to reverse this, using what we now know about Mars to develop and test the technologies needed for survival. We need a series of technology demonstration missions that prove each piece of equipment in the critical path of the mission, including transportation, communications and ISRU. To achieve all of these things will require significant investment in terms of time, money and human resources; however, it will greatly contribute to our success. Apollo missions 11-17 would not have been the successes they were without Apollos 1-10.

For 25 years people have been saying Mars is only 10 years away. In my book I set a more realistic timeline of about 20 years before boots on Mars; 10 years for building the consortium and developing the technology on Earth, plus 10 years for uncrewed precursor missions. If I had my druthers, as mentioned, a lunar program would precede the Mars program, however, this does not necessarily mean pushing the timeline for Mars further out, as the technological evolution and general enthusiasm for space stimulated by a lunar program would significantly amplify interest in, and funding for, Mars.

In reality, with the global environmental, geopolitical, economic and moral situations being what they are, it’s really anyone’s guess how the next few decades will unfold. Having said that, we should not wait; we should try our guts out to get there as soon as we can. The benefits of settling Mars are truly immense. Really, it’s up to us. We cannot wait for anyone else to do it for us. We are the space generation. The more we think and talk about it, and develop our plans and designs, the sooner it will happen. So, let’s keep talking, thinking, drawing, calculating, sharing and dreaming.



Why Mars instead of building in space?
by SoftwareArtist

Why colonize Mars instead of just building colonies in space? It seems to have many disadvantages and hardly any advantages. It's incredibly far away. You still have to deal with a large gravity well every time you want to come or go. You can't create artificial gravity on Mars, so you're stuck with 38% Earth gravity. We don't even know if humans can be healthy long term living in such low gravity. Colonies in space seem as good or better in nearly every respect. About the only advantage Mars has is access to raw materials, but space colonies could mine those from asteroids or the moon.

Moss: Mars has several distinct advantages over colonies in space.

As you say, the main one is its abundance of raw materials, including all the elements necessary for life and technological civilization, including metals, carbon, water, nitrogen and more, which you cannot say about the Moon or asteroids. This is not a minor advantage, it is a HUGE advantage. Space colonies could, and indeed, will, mine asteroids and the Moon for materials, but this is orders of magnitude more difficult than just digging up as much iron and silicon as you want from the back yard. Besides, some essential elements, for example, nitrogen, may not be available from these places, and would thus always need to be imported from Earth, Mars or elsewhere.

The raw materials available from asteroids and the Moon will mainly be of use to people living there.

Mars provides a land area equivalent to the land area of Earth, which is a huge platform on which to build. In free space you have to build the platform first, using resources that need to come from somewhere else. Until we have mining facilities on the Moon and asteroids, this place will be Earth, which is a much deeper gravity well. Due to the massive cost, there would be severe limits on how much “land” can be created in this way, constraining the possible population and scope of activities.

To compare Mars and space stations is really comparing apples and oranges, as Mars has orders of magnitude greater potential. Mars is a world with the potential to become home to millions of people. It may even be possible to engineer its environment such that it can host an uncontained biosphere, which cannot realistically be claimed for any world in our Solar System, at least with our current scientific understanding. The value of such a thing would be inestimable. A large city in space may potentially contain perhaps thousands of people, and one or several ecosystems, but these would all rely on complex life support technology requiring constant maintenance. An uncontained biosphere, however, thrives on water, sunlight and dirt; no human effort required.

Living on Mars may be challenging, but much will be familiar – land, horizon, Sun, moons, wind, clouds, dirt, and so on. Eventually, with a little warming, rain, snow, lakes and rivers will appear. People can explore the surface in buggies and trucks, or fly over it in balloons. It has fascinating geomorphology – caves, valleys, mountains, craters, dunes and more – all with their own character and history. Mars speaks adventure! It’s the frontier, where we will experiment with new ways of living together. Surely this cannot compare to living in an extremely expensive technological container floating above Earth, most likely subject to Earth’s laws and antiquated systems.

Mars is really not far away; a quick look at a map of the Solar System shows how close it really is. It’s only far away compared to how far we currently travel. But this will change.

It’s true that we don’t know if living in 38% gravity long term is healthful, but since we know living in microgravity is certainly not fatal, it’s reasonable to imagine that people will adapt. There should be more than enough gravity for the body to be able to orient itself, and to maintain sufficient muscle and bone to remain functional within that environment.

We will probably build cities in space, because enough people want to. However, it may be very expensive to live there. Elysium had it right; space stations will probably be a home for the super-rich.



Surfacism - why Mars and not Venus?
by Luminary Crush

There are actually some compelling reasons to go to Venus first including cost and transit time but also more human-favorable gravity, greater protection from radiation and possibly the only other place in the solar system which currently offers temperatures and atmospheric pressures close Earth norm - albeit only at a 30-mile altitude. So, why not cloud cities on Venus?

Moss: A cloud city on Venus would be even more difficult to build than a space station in Earth orbit, so the previous question’s answer applies even more here. You cannot get the raw materials to build such a city from Venus, because mining operations on the surface would be extremely difficult due to the high temperature and pressure. Therefore, the materials would need to come from Earth, the Moon or asteroids, and the cities would need to be constructed in space, which would limit their size. Note, too, these cities cannot have any exposed metal, which would be corroded by the sulphuric acid in Venus’ atmosphere; neither would any visiting ships, for example, supply ships. This would present an engineering challenge.

These cities would need to be shipped out to Venus and lowered into the atmosphere at the right altitude. Due to the difficulty of engineering, and cost of fabrication and shipping, if such a thing was ever created it would most likely be home to a few planetary scientists who wanted to study Venus. The population could not expand without adding more cities at great expense. In any case, not as many people will be excited about living in sulphuric acid clouds.

Mars, on the other hand, has the potential to host millions of people and a planetary biosphere.



Revolution?
by wbr1

One of the more interesting aspects of Robinson's books to me are the socio-political ones. Specifically, the fact tha Mars was a new place, with initially a very intelligent population, it came to be a place to rethink society and economics, in often painful ways. Also, there were attempts due to resource pressures on earth, of using it as an escape valve for human populations, which it could never completely be.

Assuming we ever make it to Mars, do you see it as a likely spot to foment revolution? Do you see a presence there as being able to relieve or change issues here on earth? How so?

What do you see as the primary reason we should go to Mars? I agree we should and have my own reasoning, but I want to know yours.

Moss: The primary benefit of settling Mars will be its effects on humanity as a whole. It’s an historic, evolutionary-level venture, which will do much to bring humanity together. There will be a sense of “we achieved something truly great”, which is why I am so strongly I favor of an international mission; so the “we” will not refer to the US or China or whoever, but humanity as a whole. Either way, it will herald a new frontier, and a new age of human exploration and scientific and technological achievement. It will induce strong feelings of optimism and inspiration in a world that greatly needs them.

Perhaps the most compelling reasons for going to Mars will not become fully apparent until decades or even centuries have passed. Every time humans have expanded into new territory it has presented opportunities to review our values. Mars will cause us to re-examine our ideas about economics, politics, morality, sex, health, education, food, resources and more; i.e. virtually every aspect of society. Geography has a profound influence on culture, as any traveler can tell you. Thus, Mars, because of its extremely different geography, living conditions, and the characteristics of its population (i.e. scientific adventurers), will inevitably produce a very different culture.

This will affect Earth in a similar way that the creation of new nations (the US being the most obvious example) has affected the rest of the world, particularly if the new society embodies values that the rest of the world generally agrees with, or that prove themselves over time by producing happier, healthier, more prosperous people. We may imagine that the Martian society will be formed from the very best elements of Earth’s political and social systems, incorporating values of equality, tolerance, rationality, freedom, fairness, compassion, universal health care, sustainability, free education and communications, and so forth.

As an example, consider that Martians may be highly reliant on genetic engineering for optimized food production, planetary engineering (terraforming), and possibly reproduction (self-directed evolution). Thus we can expect to see great advancements from Mars in this field, not only with regard to the science and technology, but also policy and regulation, which is sadly lacking on Earth. The same can be said about robots (technically the first inhabitants of Mars), which will share Mars with humans and other Earthian organisms, and evolve alongside them. Mars, being basically an enormous sandpit with no wildlife to disrupt, is the perfect place to play with interesting and capable robots of every shape and size. They will mine, build, make, plant, carry, and do almost all other physical work on Mars, because, let’s be honest, it’s so frickin’ cold outside. Imagine how the evolution of robotics technology on Mars will benefit Earth.

It may be that the Martian nation evolves as a single planetary society from the beginning, and due to the ubiquity of communications, a common language, and a single planet-sized continent, never fractures into competing tribes. The formation of a planetary government on Mars, including associated systems for planetary environmental and resource management, could be highly instructive in the formation of a similar world government on Earth.

Planetary engineering of Mars for the purpose of terraforming will produce advanced computer simulations of planetary systems, and a suite of strategies for influencing and controlling atmospheric constituents and pressure, surface temperatures, climate, and thus the biosphere. On Earth, where the effects of climate change will escalate until we are forced to enter a more proactive regime of regulation and planetary repair, this effort could eventually be greatly aided by planetary engineering techniques developed on Mars.

These and other similar feedback effects can be summed up as what I call “reflective planetary evolution”, as the evolution of Mars will reflect back on to Earth and pull it forward as well. It will similarly drive evolution of societies on the Moon and elsewhere. Of course, every world will affect all the others, just as all nations affect each other on Earth now. However, Mars is unique in its immense potential, and the unfolding story of Mars will drive considerable evolution throughout the Solar System. Indeed, the historical foundation laid down during human settlement of Mars will echo throughout millennia of future human history as we expand to other worlds throughout the galaxy.

This, I believe, will be the primary benefit of settling Mars.

Recently the founder of the Mars Settlement Research Organization and author of The International Mars Research Station Shaun Moss agreed to sit down and answer any questions you had about space exploration and colonizing Mars. Below you will find his answers to your questions. Mars One?
by quantaman

What's your opinion on Mars One? I'm extremely skeptical that they can achieve their roadmap or anything close to it, do you share this skepticism? If so do you think they're mostly finished at this point (ie the project will fade into obscurity) or do you think the Mars One group will achieve something significant in the future?

Moss: Having looked over the Mars One plans I must say I am also highly skeptical, but hesitantly so, because you never know what can happen. Humans are remarkable, and entrepreneurs are among the most remarkable of humans because they see what does not yet exist and believe they can make it exist. They have tremendous faith and self-confidence, and although I haven’t met Bas, having heard him speak I’m convinced of his genuine and well-meaning intentions. I have met and interviewed Arno Wielders (Mars One CTO), who is also a Mars Society member, and there’s no doubt these guys are on the level, at least in spirit. It is not a scam, despite what click-hungry web “journalists” would have you think.

The architecture has some good features. Not returning to Earth enables a range of optimizations to be introduced, greatly reducing the mass to be launched to Earth orbit and to be delivered to Mars, which significantly reduces cost and thus increases viability. However, I consider it incomplete.

Mars One’s approach is that they themselves will not do any engineering. They are merely providing the high-level vision, while engineering and manufacturing will be outsourced to firms who will produce the hardware necessary for the missions. However, this strategy can only work if the architecture is already rock solid.

Another key element of their philosophy is that the mission will be assembled from existing technology, i.e. (to quote them) “No new technology developments are required to establish a human settlement on Mars.” It is highly questionable whether this is possible, depending on your definition of “technological development”. For example, spacesuits for Mars (marssuits) will be required, and these do not currently exist. Will not the design and manufacture of these suits constitute technological development? Other examples include the rovers to support the mission, vehicles to transport astronauts and supplies to Mars, the living units, EDL system for capsules, ECLSS, communications satellites, and so forth. These will all need to be developed, so to say that “no technology developments are required” is simply bollocks. However, that’s arguably a question of semantics. Let’s assume for now that they will have all the time and money necessary to produce the hardware on which the architecture is based.

The intention is that the Mars One astronauts will live on Mars in living units, which are space capsules similar to the SpaceX Dragon capsule, except larger, with a diameter of about 5 meters. The Dragon has a diameter of 3.7 meters. So, there are a few problems with this. SpaceX and Mars One are not currently in business together (as far as is generally known), and Musk has his own plans for establishing a colony on Mars that do not require Mars One. It is therefore unlikely that SpaceX is currently planning to develop a 5 meter variant of the Dragon.

There are only a few scenarios that could play out from here:

• SpaceX join up with Mars One and begin developing the 5 meter capsule. How they would fund this technological development (not to labor the point) is another question. Keep in mind we are yet to see a 3.7 meter Dragon land on solid ground on Earth, let alone a 5 meter one on Mars. But this would be the best possible scenario for Mars One.
• Another company, e.g. Boeing, offers to develop the required capsule for Mars One. This would be significantly more expensive, as it would require them to exceed the engineering that SpaceX has already done. Without a major injection of funds this would also push the Mars One timeline out even further.
• Mars One decide to use the 3.7 meter Dragon for the living units instead. This would probably be an acceptable compromise, but would have significant knock-on effects for the architecture, reducing the volume and mass budget available for the inflatable habitat, furniture, ECLSS and food production systems, energy systems, etc. It would mean fewer astronauts per living unit; perhaps 2 instead of 4. This is perhaps the most likely scenario.

Assuming that the challenge of providing the living units and landing these on Mars is solved, the next difficulty is positioning them and connecting them up. Mars One have said that this will be achieved using multipurpose rovers, which will be sent out in advance of the astronauts in order to scout out a good site, deploy solar panels, and things of this nature.

The capsules will not be landed in their exact final position and orientation, which is most likely because the thrusters used in landing will kick up a lot of dust and dirt, which could damage nearby hardware, in addition to covering any solar panels that have already been deployed with dirt. Therefore, Mars One are planning to land capsules up to 10km away from the base, and tow them into position with the rovers.

This begs several questions. Mars One say that the rovers will be “capable and powerful tools”, each with a robotic hand and a trailer that will be used to tow the capsules. The problem here is that a Dragon capsule weighs about 4.2 tonnes empty and each will carry up to about 1.9 tonnes of cargo, for a total mass of around 6 tonnes each. A fully-loaded 5 meter capsule would be significantly heavier. We don’t know the size of Mars One’s rovers, but they will need to be fairly sturdy to somehow lift a 6-tonne mass onto a trailer, tow it across up to 10 km of rocky ground to an exact position, unload it, and connect up the necessary hoses and cables. This aspect of the architecture seems like pure fantasy; but, who knows, there may be engineers associated with the project who have a very clever way to achieve this. Perhaps two rovers working together could do it?

Each living unit will contain an inflatable habitat extension, possibly in addition to all the furniture, equipment, electrical wiring and plumbing which is to be assembled inside of it. This also seems difficult to imagine. The inflatable habitat is not a thin plastic shopping bag. Aside from being able to contain at least half an atmosphere pressure (the minimum required for health and safety) against a near-vacuum, the inflatable section’s walls must be thick enough to support a covering of dirt. It is hard to imagine such a thick-walled bag, large enough to expand into a volume of 1000 m3, squished into a capsule along with all the fixtures and fittings. Perhaps these will be carried in the supply capsules. Note, however, that the living units must include an airlock for EVA.

Another question about the habitat is: plumbing? Where is the latrine? How will it be emptied, what is the recycling or disposal plan for the waste, what about the smell, etc.?

The astronauts are not supposed to have sex with each other on the mission. To send mixed-gender crews of intelligent and healthy young TV stars to another planet and expect them not to get freaky is wishful thinking at best, particularly if they start brewing their own alcohol, which is virtually certain if any Australians, Americans, Canadians, Brits, Irish, French, Spaniards, Germans, Italians or Russians are included in the mission.

One of the most important aspects of the mission plan that seems to have not been fully examined yet is the astronauts’ nutrition. Even assuming that all other nutritional needs are satisfactorily met, a purely vegan diet is known to be deficient in certain essential nutrients such as vitamins B12 and D. Vegans on Earth typically require supplementation in order to compensate for these deficiencies.

It has been suggested that crickets could be grown in the habitat, as a source of protein and B12, but it’s hard to imagine sharing close quarters with 1-3 other people and hundreds of noisy crickets; or, for that matter, going through a daily process of grinding up a new batch of protein powder each day. Perhaps they could synthesize B12, which researchers on Earth have only just figured out how to do, but this would require lab equipment, the space to use it, and considerable scientific expertise. B12 is made by bacteria in the lower intestine, which is why it only comes from meat, and why some vegetarian animals eat their own shit; so they get enough B12. In the face of chronic B12 deficiency the astronauts could also do this, but since they will probably already be feeling depressed due to lack of sunlight, living in a smelly cave, being (on average) 225 million kilometers away from everyone they have ever known and every place they have ever been, and not being allowed to shag each other, they would probably rather die. Hence, the most likely solution to the B12 problem will be supplementation, which means sending sufficient quantities of pills or injectables to Mars. This can only be a temporary solution, however, due to the disparity between the available money and mass budgets and how long people generally like to live. This places pressure on the settlers to somehow develop a local source of B12 as soon as they can.

The food system to be used by Mars One involves growing hydroponic crops inside under LED lighting which only produces photons with frequencies that plants utilize, i.e. blue, red and infra-red. Growing plants indoors using LED lighting seems inefficient, and inconsistent with other aspects of the architecture. To provide the astronauts with air and water, Mars One are making use of local resources such as the gases in the Martian atmosphere and water frozen in the ground. This is called ISRU, or In Situ Resource Utilization, and is much more efficient than shipping everything out to Mars from Earth. This strategy underpins most modern Mars missions. However, Mars One are not planning to directly use the free photons from the Sun in order to grow food, but rather, to first convert them into electrical energy using solar panels, then convert that electricity back into photons with the LEDs. To me this seems inefficient.

The habitats have no windows. Yes, that’s right. The astronauts are going to spend 90% of their lives effectively living in a low-gravity cave, surrounded by technology, body odor, and danger. From a psychological perspective this seems to be one of the most serious oversights. If I was on Mars, I would want to wake up each morning and look out on that glorious, planet-sized vacant lot. It might get boring after a few months, but it would be much better than never being able to see Mars without actually going EVA, which has a high barrier in terms of suiting up and passing through the airlock. Having no windows also means wasted energy in terms of the lights needing to be on inside all day. Mental illness could be significantly more likely in a habitat without windows; far worse than ordinary Seasonal Affective Disorder. Perhaps on a short mission it would be acceptable, but not for the rest of your life. Having no windows and no sunlight coming into the hab also means no vitamin D, since it won’t be present in their diet. They may get a little sunlight through their helmet on EVA, but considering the small area of skin exposed, the small amount of time spent outside, and the fact that sunlight intensity on Mars is about 40-50% of Earth, this will hardly be enough to be healthful. Vitamin D deficiency has been associated with sore bones, muscle weakness and depression, among other things. Consider that the Mars One astronauts will already be at risk of musculoskeletal problems due to living in a reduced gravity environment, and depression, additional adverse affects associated with vitamin D deficiency are ideally avoided.

Here’s what I would change about the Mars One plan:

• Modify the architecture to use the 3.7 meter Dragon. This may require reducing the crew size per living unit to 2 or 3, but it will be much quicker and cheaper, and arguably the only way to make the plan possible within anything like the proposed timeline and budget. It also might bring SpaceX in as a partner which would be incredibly valuable.
• Forget about moving the capsules once landed and forget about connecting them together. Where they land is where they stay. Astronauts can move between the living units by walking (or driving) the intervening distances in suits. This means each capsule would need to include its own self-contained life-support system, which might be very difficult.
• Include many windows along both sides of the inflatable section of the living units.
• Send additional capsules containing inflatable greenhouses, rather than attempting to grow food inside the habitats. Design the food system to directly use sunlight rather than, or in addition to, LED lighting. This will make it possible for the environment inside the greenhouses to be optimized for plant growth. It would also mean going EVA to get food, but humans have a lot of experience with this, generally speaking.
• Design the food system as an integrated aquaponics system in which fish and plants grow symbiotically. This will provide a significantly better nutrition profile in addition to a means of disposing of food scraps and vegetable waste (i.e., the fish will eat them). A fatty fish with edible bones such as salmon will provide – especially if they eat the bones and livers – long-chain fatty acids, all essential amino acids, minerals such as calcium, zinc and iron, and vitamins D and B12, all of which would be lacking in a vegan diet. Anyone can learn how to scale and fillet a fish, and they have the non-trivial advantage of being delicious, and salmon can be eaten cooked or raw. There is also the psychological benefit of having animals to care for.
• Include several ATVs and ideally at least one long-range pressurized vehicle. This will greatly increase the territory that the astronauts can explore and thus the science return, preventing them from becoming extremely bored, and making it easier to travel between the living units and greenhouses if they aren’t all gathered in one location.

Mars One certainly aren’t finished yet. However, as much as I would love for them to succeed, I do not think they will unless their plans are majorly revised and they get a serious injection of capital. Having said that, they have already achieved something significant, which is to cause virtually the entire Earth to not only take human missions to Mars seriously, but to take private human missions to Mars seriously. It has also exposed considerable interest in the global community in going to Mars despite the risks, which is useful information for future entrepreneurs.

Becoming multiplanetary represents a massive quantum leap in our evolution, and Mars One have done a lot to raise awareness of this tremendously historical transition. Whether they succeed or fail, whoever tries next will benefit from what they have done.



Radiation abatement
by tbg58

Primary galactic cosmic radiation bombards the surface of Mars because its magnetic field is too feeble to turn high-energy charged particles aside, but most colonization plans envision human-constructed habitations on the surface. How much work is being directed toward finding subsurface features (lava tubes, sinkholes) which can provide radiation-hardened locations for long-term habitations? (and perhaps a word about popularizing both the risk and subsurface habitation to address it).

Moss: The radiation risk of Mars missions is not as serious as many would make out. There is less than half the radiation on the surface of Mars than there is in interplanetary space due to half being blocked from underneath by the planet itself, and the atmosphere serving to block some from above. Plus, the solar radiation at Mars is only 43% that at Earth. However, you are right, without a magnetosphere or ozone layer, the radiation environment on Mars is somewhat more extreme than on Earth.

The most popular method of providing additional radiation protection on the surface of Mars is to shelter below a layer of dirt or rock. A few people have been looking at this. Gus Frederick has investigated the use of lava tubes as habitats on Mars, and Martian lava tubes were also the topic of this year’s Space Apps Challenge. The Mars Foundation developed two concepts for Mars settlements, named the Hillside Settlement and the Plains Settlement. The Hillside Settlement is created by burrowing into the side of a mesa; the Plains Settlement has a deep tray filled with regolith above the habitat modules. Both of these concepts are way early exploratory missions. Mars One are planning to cover their inflatable habitats with “meters” of dirt, although how practical this actually is remains to be seen. Missions based on Mars Direct or Mars Semi-Direct often show the hab’s roof covered in sandbags, which is practical, and much easier than trying to place the hab in a cave or lava tube. In the mission architecture I describe in The International Mars Research Station, the surface habitat is based on a Bigelow B330 module, which will supposedly provide radiation protection equivalent to or better than the ISS.

I am not aware of any major work being done by NASA with regard to locating lava tubes, caves or sink holes for locating a habitat. This may partly be due to the difficulty of locating a suitable structure from space, as uncollapsed lava tubes are difficult to see from above, or it may simply be a matter of priorities. Early human missions will be targeted at locations offering maximum science return, and only require temporary habitation solutions. Considering the investment required in locating suitable structures, inspecting them for structural integrity, and constructing or moving habitats inside, lava tubes are probably more suited to permanent habitation, and this will not be a requirement for several decades.

The radiation level in LEO is also about half that in interplanetary space, i.e. similar to that on the surface of Mars. Thus, despite some people’s concerns about radiation on Mars, astronauts on the ISS, some of whom have spent more than a year in LEO, have already demonstrated that humans can tolerate radiation doses similar to what astronauts on Mars will experience.

The greater risk will be during the trip out and back, which emphasizes the importance of short trip times in a well-shielded transit habitat.

It is arguably inconsistent to be pathologically concerned about the radiation risks in space missions while simultaneously tolerating so many carcinogens in our air, food and water. In fact, it may even be the case that going to Mars lowers your risk of cancer due to the astronaut’s air, food and water being much cleaner and containing fewer carcinogens than what we are habitually exposed to on Earth.



What's the point?
by StikyPad

I don't mean this in a cynical, "why do anything," sort of way, but what exactly is the objective? Glory? No breathable atmosphere, no native food source, little to no natural resources, high radiation, and likely a very shortened lifespan as a consequence. Not to mention social isolation. Most explorers come back, and most migrants travel for a better life, so it seems like you are doing this wrong.

Moss: There will always be people who wish to see beyond the horizon, which is a good thing, otherwise we might all still be living in Africa; or, more accurately, most of us may never have been born at all; in fact, without adventurers we may have died out thousands of years ago. Aside from the fact that biological organisms will always expand into every niche they can, just as surely as gas will expand to fill a container, there are obvious benefits to expansion. The migration of humanity to new lands stimulates scientific discovery and innovation, which, due to communications and transportation, benefits everyone. Countless inventions are produced by people living on the frontier. Necessity is the mother of invention, as the saying goes, and the challenges of living on the frontier have stimulated all manner of innovation, as have the challenges of living in space. Mars will be the same. We don’t know what we will find there, but there’s no question that living on Mars is already leading to new technological innovation as we ramp up to make the leap. Thus, just as people living everywhere benefit from inventions developed on the frontiers in America and Australia, and those produced as a result of the space program, the people of Earth will benefit greatly from the inventions produced by humans settling Mars.

Consider how America, founded as it was on principles of freedom and self-realization, has benefited all humanity. Electricity, automobiles, air travel, the internet, and many other inventions fundamental to technological society worldwide, were developed in America primarily as a result of its culture of innovation, optimism and ballsy self-confidence. This culture is still very much alive and well today, as evidenced by the thousands of new startups pouring out of Silicon Valley, NYC, Seattle and elsewhere every year. Imagine what we can achieve on Mars by building a society incorporating the very best aspects of Earth culture, based on liberty, equality and science. Space is the new frontier, and the frontier is always a zone of tremendous creativity, driven by a feeling of true freedom, inevitable resourcefulness, and the sharpness that comes from living on the edge. Mars has the significant benefit of being extremely resource-rich, offering an abundance of metals, water and carbon with which to construct countless new settlements and technological marvels of which we can now barely conceive; inventions that can be shipped back to Earth to benefit everyone else.

Another common answer to this question is survival. Every now and then, Earth gets hit by an asteroid large enough to wipe out most life on the planet. Although this tends to happens less frequently over time, as Jupiter and the Sun mop up the leftover rocks, there are still hundreds of thousands of them in our Solar System and another large impact will almost certainly happen again sooner or later. Human expansion into space will stimulate the development of two main strategies to help us protect ourselves against this eventuality.

For starters, we will learn how to work with asteroids, including mining them as well as pushing them into new orbits. Therefore, whenever the next extinction-level rock swings into a collision course with Earth, we’ll hopefully be able to deal with it.

However, if we cannot – for example, if it is larger than what are capable of shifting or breaking apart at the time – then it will be advantageous to have settlements on other worlds. In my opinion it would be very difficult to wipe out all human life on Earth, because humans are so resourceful and tenacious. Even if the sky is blacked out by dust and ash from the impact and most plant life dies off due to lack of sunlight, humans would find ways to survive. Nonetheless, having a population on Mars (and ideally many other worlds) provides a backup plan for our species; the genetic and memetic equivalent of storing your most precious files in the cloud. Mars offers more potential for creating an independent branch of humanity than any other world we know of, due to its proximity, favorable temperatures, 24-hour day, and abundance of all the elements necessary for life and technological civilization. The more Earthian organisms we can implant there, the better.

Going to Mars will affect humanity more positively than anything else we will ever do. It will inspire generations of young people to continue and broaden their education, particularly in the highly valuable STEM topics, much more than Apollo ever did. It will also bring the people of Earth together psychologically, as humanity begins to perceive itself not as a species of many lands, but as one of many worlds. It will produce remarkable new inventions, especially related to resource utilization, life support, communications and transportation, which can be exported to Earth for everyone’s benefit, as our planet’s population grows to ten billion and beyond, and we expand into deserts and oceans, and underground. Technologies and strategies developed for terraforming can be exported to Earth to help heal the environmental damage caused by the industrial revolution. New systems developed on Mars for planetary self-governance and global resource management can be exported to Earth, transcending outmoded political and economic systems. Technologies and systems developed on Mars, and the experience gained by settling Mars, will lay the technological and cultural foundation for expanding Earthian life to countless other worlds; worlds around other stars that are capable of supporting our kind of life, which we will soon begin to discover.

Not everyone who goes to Mars will want to come back to Earth, just as many Europeans who traveled to the Americas and Australia did not want to return to Europe. They came from cities that were filthy, crowded, aggressive and classist; places where it was hard to get ahead. It was worth the significant cost and risk associated with migration. The new lands offered wide open spaces, clear skies, and new opportunities for leadership and creating fortunes and dynasties. Mars will be the same. Enough people will want to go and live on the frontier to make it worthwhile. Even if it’s not for you, it is impossible to prevent adventurers from seeking adventure.



Lunar Space Elevator
by NoImNotNineVolt

Decades ago, Jerome Pearson produced detailed plans for a lunar space elevator for NASA Institute of Advanced Concepts, seeking to enable lunar mining and lower-cost access to water in space. Since any human missions to Mars would benefit from (if not outright require) large amounts of water (either split into propellant and oxidizer, used as radiation shielding, or even just for life support), do you feel that construction of such a device would be a net benefit? Why or why not?

Moss: I do not see any reason to build a space elevator on Earth, Luna, Mars or anywhere else, because I believe (hope) we will soon see the emergence of antigravity a.k.a. gravity propulsion technology. This will be a superior means of transporting anything into space. I realize most space enthusiasts are focused firmly on rockets and are somewhat dismissive of gravity propulsion, consigning it to the same bin as UFOs, conspiracy theories and Apollo-deniers, but, frankly, if gravity propulsion is possible then we owe it to ourselves to pursue its development diligently, as it could dramatically lower the cost and difficulty of getting into space and thereby open up the space frontier just as surely as air travel opened up Earth.

Setting aside for the moment the controversial question as to whether various national governments already have this technology but keep it secret for military reasons, the work done by people such as Podkletnov, Puthoff, Brandenburg and many others suggests gravity propulsion may be possible, and that we will ultimately develop practical applications including spacecraft. The advent of this class of vehicles, which I estimate/hope will be between now and about 2050, should make both rockets and space elevators obsolete.

If I’m wrong, then space elevators are a good solution, once we work out how to economically manufacture suitable materials. However, there are enough researchers interested in gravity propulsion that I believe it’s more likely to be developed sooner. In my opinion more funding should be made available to develop this technology as a priority, as its advent would offer many benefits to society.



Teraforming
by Charliemopps

I believe the most likely way we'll actually have any impact on Mars is via genetically engineered microbes, as we've recently seen Darpa has mentioned. This, at first blush, seems harmless, Mars is already dead. But given the increasing evidence that Mars and likely many other celestial bodies have in the past and maybe even at the present microbial life on them, and that it's extremely likely all of the planets in the solar system routinely trade biological materials via asteroid impacts. It seems that logical to assume that Biological Tera-forming of Mars is also Biological Tera-forming of Earth.

In short, the Bugs we design here, and send there, will eventually come back to haunt us. Do you have opinion on this? I love science, and want us to use it to our benefit. But I'm not ignorant to the fact that nature has the uncanny knack of turning our best intentions to ashes in our mouths.

Moss: It’s by no means certain that Mars does not harbor any LAWKI. Life can be found everywhere on Earth where there is liquid water and all the necessary elements; thus, because Mars does have all the necessary elements for life, if liquid water was present on the Martian surface there would be a strong likelihood that biological (as in, water and carbon-based) life would develop. Conditions at the surface of Mars can sometimes support liquid water, but only rarely. However, there’s quite a lot of water on Mars, and underground, where temperatures and pressures are higher, there could well be aquifers harboring chemotrophic microorganisms.

If life exists on Mars, then it may have already reached Earth via panspermia, as you say. If so, has it taken root here, and, if so, has the effect been positive, negative, or nothing? Earth is covered in life, which means the answer must logically be either positive or nothing. If any genetically engineered microbes migrate from Mars to Earth, the risk of them traveling by impact debris, landing on Earth, and flourishing in a way that has a devastating effect on Earth’s biosphere, is minimal. For starters, most species would not be able to survive such a trip due to the extremes of temperature and radiation; although, to be fair, this is exactly the type of organism we would engineer to survive on the surface of Mars. Any organisms hitching an interplanetary ride on the surface of a rock would most likely die, although perhaps they could survive if encased within the rock; or, they would simply die of old age, as the trip time by this route would be on the order of millions of years, a period most likely be longer than the life of the organism unless it was somehow able to cryogenically hibernate.

Panspermia by this means is not the real risk. The real risk is that organisms will travel by spacecraft, in protected conditions, with trip times of just a few months, reducing, over time, to days.

Just as all kinds of plants, animals, fungus and bacteria migrated between continents on human-operated boats (and now, planes), such will also be the case between Earth and Mars. On Earth we have customs controls to restrict species migration, but this is hardly water-tight and almost completely unenforceable across land borders. It will be the same between Earth and Mars in the future, with the frequency of species migration events increasing with interplanetary travel and trade. While measures may be taken to prevent the unauthorized transportation of macroorganisms between planets, any number of microbes will be able to hitch a ride in exported goods, food, on boot soles, or on or inside human bodies.

We already have innumerable case studies of what happens when foreign species enter new ecosystems. Sometimes the effect is nothing; the organisms cannot find a niche, cannot reproduce, and die out. In Australia, however, we have several well-known cases of catastrophic effects. The introduction of the influenza virus, for example, was disastrous for the indigenous inhabitants. Cane toads, brought into the country to control cane beetles, with no natural predators have become an ugly pest. Similarly, rabbits, brought into Australia for sport hunting, are now in plague proportions in some parts of the country. Domestic cats gone feral have wiped out many species of marsupial, lizard and frog. (But none of these come anywhere close to the most destructive invasive species in Australia – can you guess which it is?)

The data suggests, however, that introduction of new species to an ecosystem, while the results may be unpredictable, are never absolutely catastrophic, which is to say, the ecosystem as a whole survives. Populations of various member species may ebb and flow, but the biosphere itself persists. I very much doubt that anything we will engineer for Mars could have truly calamitous effects on Earth. Perhaps one possible scenario would be something like what is happening now with soybeans, corn and other GMO crops, with more resilient engineered variants displacing the originals as they spread into new areas. However, even this is unlikely. Regardless of the mode of transport, organisms from Mars will have either evolved or been created for Martian conditions, which are very different to Earth’s, and hence they will be at an evolutionary disadvantage compared with native Earthian species. It seems unlikely they would flourish to the point of displacing native species to any great degree.

There is one species far more devastating to ecosystems and responsible for more extinction than any other, and I think you can guess which one it is. It’s precisely the same one we are planning to spread to Mars and beyond. This could be a problem for extant Martian life, if present.



How much infrastructure needs to be there first?
by Dr. Spork

Some people think that we should send someone to Mars as soon as possible, even if they can't do much before they return home. Simply leaving a human bootprint would be worth it. Others think that unmanned missions should first build up enough Martian infrastructure to support human "colonists" with a reasonable level of comfort. Only then should people be sent. Where would you put yourself on this continuum? What sort of activities should Martian astronauts be able to do before you would think the expensive trip there was worth it?

Moss: I am surely of the latter camp. Mars is not going anywhere. We shouldn’t delay, but we also shouldn’t rush in where angels fear to tread. We should send humans to Mars as soon as possible, but within the boundaries of safety and well-considered strategy. A series of unmanned missions to build up infrastructure on the surface and in Mars orbit such that a human crew can spend 1.5 years on the surface, perhaps not with a reasonable level of “comfort” but at least a reasonable level of safety, is essential.

Short missions to Mars do not make sense. If it was in any way practical to visit Mars for just a few days, such a mission would be comparatively simple and light, and could be sent fairly soon, without too much infrastructure installed in advance. However, due to Mars’ orbit, mission durations totaling 2.5 years, including a 1.5-year surface stay, are more practical. To sustain a human crew on the surface of Mars for this period of time requires significant investment in infrastructure, including satellites to provide 100% communications uptime with Earth, reliable ISRU systems capable of producing sufficient water, air, electricity, and rocket propellant for the mission, and surface habitats and vehicles. Everything they need for the mission needs to be set up and tested before the crew even leave Earth, including a fully-fueled return vehicle.

As for what activities Martian astronauts should be able to do, the main thing is that they should be able to work outside as much as they want. Considering they are going to Mars as explorers, field scientists, and representatives of humanity’s adventurous spirit, they need to be working outside a lot. Therefore they need very robust, lightweight and maneuverable suits, long-range pressurized surface vehicles, and good cameras, tools and instruments.

You may be surprised to hear that I do not think we should go to Mars next. Despite being a passionate Mars settlement advocate, it’s my considered view that we should first conduct a new series of lunar missions, far surpassing what was achieved with Apollo. The intention would be the addition of some basic infrastructure elements to the lunar surface including habitat modules and pressurized surface vehicles analogous to what we will need on Mars.

The positive benefits of this strategy will be include development of the public and private space sectors, technological innovation, improved confidence in human missions beyond LEO, more capital being made available for space projects, and practice missions similar to the human Mars missions.

While it’s true that Earth provides useful Mars analogs, these pale in comparison to the Moon in terms of value, as the Moon offers real danger, real science and exploration, and real issues of space and surface transportation, communications, life support, dust, radiation, human factors and so on. The great advantages of the Moon over Mars is that we can go any time, trip times are short, there’s virtually zero communications lag, and missions can be of any duration. We should be planning, right now, a series of lunar missions ranging in duration from weeks to months, to be conducted over the next decade by an international consortium of space agencies, as preparation for the considerably more ambitious human Mars missions. Doing this will be significantly more valuable than continuing to operate the ISS because of the degree to which it will inspire everybody, particularly students, scientists, engineers and entrepreneurs. We’ve seen LEO, people! Let’s go somewhere new. If Mars is still too far, the Moon is right there.

The immense benefit of practicing for Mars missions on the Moon is that you get the Moon. The Moon is greatly undervalued; it’s an absolute goldmine to the visionary space entrepreneur. Mars may have more potential for supporting life, but from a business perspective the Moon is currently a much better proposition. It can be done sooner, for less money, with higher return. In the current entrepreneurial climate I think it will not take many publicly-funded missions to inspire a slew of private lunar ventures, which will open up the Moon, expand the space industry and economy, and significantly improve the state of the art in space technology. This will effectively set the stage for human exploration and settlement of Mars.



How long till boot on surface of Mars?
by painandgreed

Given Apollo level funding and political will (from the US and other involved nations), what do you think the major steps to getting to Mars will be and how long do you think it would take to actually put a man on Mars?

Moss: It is difficult to estimate a time frame as we are currently going through a period of major global change which may significantly affect funding available for space. Exponential growth in world population combined with increasingly intense weather events will place pressure on food and water supplies, diverting attention away from “luxury” topics such as space and towards more immediate survival concerns. Therefore, I suspect the amount of both funding and political support available for Mars will decrease in the near future, although I could be, and I hope I am, completely wrong. It will rebound eventually, however, because of people like us, and because, despite whatever else changes, technologically consistently improves, which means getting into space will inevitably get easier and cheaper.

However, I realize this is not your question. The main area of technological development necessary is transportation, as this represents the most expensive aspect of the mission; hence why almost everyone in the Mars community hopes that SpaceX will be successful in developing reusable rockets, which will reduce the cost of space travel by 1-2 orders of magnitude, and why I hope gravity propulsion vehicles will be developed soon. Another important area of research is in the suits. The new generation of space suits, which are mechanical counter-pressure (i.e. skin-tight, like SCUBA suits) are much more comfortable and flexible and can be worn for longer periods than the current gas pressurized suits. However, some considerable investment is needed in this tech to make it ready for Mars.

Development in materials science is also important, particularly 3d-printed nanostructured materials, which will make it possible to manufacture space hardware stronger than steel but with a fraction of the mass, thus lowering launch costs. Items of ISRU hardware that can make breathable air, potable water and methalox propellant from indigenous Martian resources need to be developed and tested on Mars. We also ideally need to place communications satellites around Mars and possibly also the Sun in order to provide 100% connectivity with Earth.

Thus, if we are truly intent on sending humans to Mars, in my view we need to shift the focus of Mars missions away from science and towards engineering. At the moment the engineering is serving the science; we need to reverse this, using what we now know about Mars to develop and test the technologies needed for survival. We need a series of technology demonstration missions that prove each piece of equipment in the critical path of the mission, including transportation, communications and ISRU. To achieve all of these things will require significant investment in terms of time, money and human resources; however, it will greatly contribute to our success. Apollo missions 11-17 would not have been the successes they were without Apollos 1-10.

For 25 years people have been saying Mars is only 10 years away. In my book I set a more realistic timeline of about 20 years before boots on Mars; 10 years for building the consortium and developing the technology on Earth, plus 10 years for uncrewed precursor missions. If I had my druthers, as mentioned, a lunar program would precede the Mars program, however, this does not necessarily mean pushing the timeline for Mars further out, as the technological evolution and general enthusiasm for space stimulated by a lunar program would significantly amplify interest in, and funding for, Mars.

In reality, with the global environmental, geopolitical, economic and moral situations being what they are, it’s really anyone’s guess how the next few decades will unfold. Having said that, we should not wait; we should try our guts out to get there as soon as we can. The benefits of settling Mars are truly immense. Really, it’s up to us. We cannot wait for anyone else to do it for us. We are the space generation. The more we think and talk about it, and develop our plans and designs, the sooner it will happen. So, let’s keep talking, thinking, drawing, calculating, sharing and dreaming.



Why Mars instead of building in space?
by SoftwareArtist

Why colonize Mars instead of just building colonies in space? It seems to have many disadvantages and hardly any advantages. It's incredibly far away. You still have to deal with a large gravity well every time you want to come or go. You can't create artificial gravity on Mars, so you're stuck with 38% Earth gravity. We don't even know if humans can be healthy long term living in such low gravity. Colonies in space seem as good or better in nearly every respect. About the only advantage Mars has is access to raw materials, but space colonies could mine those from asteroids or the moon.

Moss: Mars has several distinct advantages over colonies in space.

As you say, the main one is its abundance of raw materials, including all the elements necessary for life and technological civilization, including metals, carbon, water, nitrogen and more, which you cannot say about the Moon or asteroids. This is not a minor advantage, it is a HUGE advantage. Space colonies could, and indeed, will, mine asteroids and the Moon for materials, but this is orders of magnitude more difficult than just digging up as much iron and silicon as you want from the back yard. Besides, some essential elements, for example, nitrogen, may not be available from these places, and would thus always need to be imported from Earth, Mars or elsewhere.

The raw materials available from asteroids and the Moon will mainly be of use to people living there.

Mars provides a land area equivalent to the land area of Earth, which is a huge platform on which to build. In free space you have to build the platform first, using resources that need to come from somewhere else. Until we have mining facilities on the Moon and asteroids, this place will be Earth, which is a much deeper gravity well. Due to the massive cost, there would be severe limits on how much “land” can be created in this way, constraining the possible population and scope of activities.

To compare Mars and space stations is really comparing apples and oranges, as Mars has orders of magnitude greater potential. Mars is a world with the potential to become home to millions of people. It may even be possible to engineer its environment such that it can host an uncontained biosphere, which cannot realistically be claimed for any world in our Solar System, at least with our current scientific understanding. The value of such a thing would be inestimable. A large city in space may potentially contain perhaps thousands of people, and one or several ecosystems, but these would all rely on complex life support technology requiring constant maintenance. An uncontained biosphere, however, thrives on water, sunlight and dirt; no human effort required.

Living on Mars may be challenging, but much will be familiar – land, horizon, Sun, moons, wind, clouds, dirt, and so on. Eventually, with a little warming, rain, snow, lakes and rivers will appear. People can explore the surface in buggies and trucks, or fly over it in balloons. It has fascinating geomorphology – caves, valleys, mountains, craters, dunes and more – all with their own character and history. Mars speaks adventure! It’s the frontier, where we will experiment with new ways of living together. Surely this cannot compare to living in an extremely expensive technological container floating above Earth, most likely subject to Earth’s laws and antiquated systems.

Mars is really not far away; a quick look at a map of the Solar System shows how close it really is. It’s only far away compared to how far we currently travel. But this will change.

It’s true that we don’t know if living in 38% gravity long term is healthful, but since we know living in microgravity is certainly not fatal, it’s reasonable to imagine that people will adapt. There should be more than enough gravity for the body to be able to orient itself, and to maintain sufficient muscle and bone to remain functional within that environment.

We will probably build cities in space, because enough people want to. However, it may be very expensive to live there. Elysium had it right; space stations will probably be a home for the super-rich.



Surfacism - why Mars and not Venus?
by Luminary Crush

There are actually some compelling reasons to go to Venus first including cost and transit time but also more human-favorable gravity, greater protection from radiation and possibly the only other place in the solar system which currently offers temperatures and atmospheric pressures close Earth norm - albeit only at a 30-mile altitude. So, why not cloud cities on Venus?

Moss: A cloud city on Venus would be even more difficult to build than a space station in Earth orbit, so the previous question’s answer applies even more here. You cannot get the raw materials to build such a city from Venus, because mining operations on the surface would be extremely difficult due to the high temperature and pressure. Therefore, the materials would need to come from Earth, the Moon or asteroids, and the cities would need to be constructed in space, which would limit their size. Note, too, these cities cannot have any exposed metal, which would be corroded by the sulphuric acid in Venus’ atmosphere; neither would any visiting ships, for example, supply ships. This would present an engineering challenge.

These cities would need to be shipped out to Venus and lowered into the atmosphere at the right altitude. Due to the difficulty of engineering, and cost of fabrication and shipping, if such a thing was ever created it would most likely be home to a few planetary scientists who wanted to study Venus. The population could not expand without adding more cities at great expense. In any case, not as many people will be excited about living in sulphuric acid clouds.

Mars, on the other hand, has the potential to host millions of people and a planetary biosphere.



Revolution?
by wbr1

One of the more interesting aspects of Robinson's books to me are the socio-political ones. Specifically, the fact tha Mars was a new place, with initially a very intelligent population, it came to be a place to rethink society and economics, in often painful ways. Also, there were attempts due to resource pressures on earth, of using it as an escape valve for human populations, which it could never completely be.

Assuming we ever make it to Mars, do you see it as a likely spot to foment revolution? Do you see a presence there as being able to relieve or change issues here on earth? How so?

What do you see as the primary reason we should go to Mars? I agree we should and have my own reasoning, but I want to know yours.

Moss: The primary benefit of settling Mars will be its effects on humanity as a whole. It’s an historic, evolutionary-level venture, which will do much to bring humanity together. There will be a sense of “we achieved something truly great”, which is why I am so strongly I favor of an international mission; so the “we” will not refer to the US or China or whoever, but humanity as a whole. Either way, it will herald a new frontier, and a new age of human exploration and scientific and technological achievement. It will induce strong feelings of optimism and inspiration in a world that greatly needs them.

Perhaps the most compelling reasons for going to Mars will not become fully apparent until decades or even centuries have passed. Every time humans have expanded into new territory it has presented opportunities to review our values. Mars will cause us to re-examine our ideas about economics, politics, morality, sex, health, education, food, resources and more; i.e. virtually every aspect of society. Geography has a profound influence on culture, as any traveler can tell you. Thus, Mars, because of its extremely different geography, living conditions, and the characteristics of its population (i.e. scientific adventurers), will inevitably produce a very different culture.

This will affect Earth in a similar way that the creation of new nations (the US being the most obvious example) has affected the rest of the world, particularly if the new society embodies values that the rest of the world generally agrees with, or that prove themselves over time by producing happier, healthier, more prosperous people. We may imagine that the Martian society will be formed from the very best elements of Earth’s political and social systems, incorporating values of equality, tolerance, rationality, freedom, fairness, compassion, universal health care, sustainability, free education and communications, and so forth.

As an example, consider that Martians may be highly reliant on genetic engineering for optimized food production, planetary engineering (terraforming), and possibly reproduction (self-directed evolution). Thus we can expect to see great advancements from Mars in this field, not only with regard to the science and technology, but also policy and regulation, which is sadly lacking on Earth. The same can be said about robots (technically the first inhabitants of Mars), which will share Mars with humans and other Earthian organisms, and evolve alongside them. Mars, being basically an enormous sandpit with no wildlife to disrupt, is the perfect place to play with interesting and capable robots of every shape and size. They will mine, build, make, plant, carry, and do almost all other physical work on Mars, because, let’s be honest, it’s so frickin’ cold outside. Imagine how the evolution of robotics technology on Mars will benefit Earth.

It may be that the Martian nation evolves as a single planetary society from the beginning, and due to the ubiquity of communications, a common language, and a single planet-sized continent, never fractures into competing tribes. The formation of a planetary government on Mars, including associated systems for planetary environmental and resource management, could be highly instructive in the formation of a similar world government on Earth.

Planetary engineering of Mars for the purpose of terraforming will produce advanced computer simulations of planetary systems, and a suite of strategies for influencing and controlling atmospheric constituents and pressure, surface temperatures, climate, and thus the biosphere. On Earth, where the effects of climate change will escalate until we are forced to enter a more proactive regime of regulation and planetary repair, this effort could eventually be greatly aided by planetary engineering techniques developed on Mars.

These and other similar feedback effects can be summed up as what I call “reflective planetary evolution”, as the evolution of Mars will reflect back on to Earth and pull it forward as well. It will similarly drive evolution of societies on the Moon and elsewhere. Of course, every world will affect all the others, just as all nations affect each other on Earth now. However, Mars is unique in its immense potential, and the unfolding story of Mars will drive considerable evolution throughout the Solar System. Indeed, the historical foundation laid down during human settlement of Mars will echo throughout millennia of future human history as we expand to other worlds throughout the galaxy.

This, I believe, will be the primary benefit of settling Mars.

theodp writes: Asked by the NY Times if Silicon Valley is saving the world or just making money, Melinda Gates replied, "I can say without a doubt — because I've seen it — that some of them [SV companies] are innovating in ways that make life better for billions of people." As an example, BillG's better half suggests that a handful of Facebook engineers have solved one of education's biggest problems with their 20% time project at billionaire-backed Summit Public Schools, a small charter school operator. Gates writes, "One of the biggest problems in American education is that teachers have to teach 30 students with different learning styles at the same time. Developers at Facebook, however, have built an online system that gives teachers the information and tools they need to design individualized lessons. The result is that teachers can spend their time doing what they're best at: inspiring kids." Some people — like the late Roger Ebert — might not be quite as impressed as Melinda to see Silicon Valley trying to reinvent the 1960's personalized-learning-wheel in 2015!

theodp writes: Asked by the NY Times if Silicon Valley is saving the world or just making money, Melinda Gates replied, "I can say without a doubt — because I've seen it — that some of them [SV companies] are innovating in ways that make life better for billions of people." As an example, BillG's better half suggests that a handful of Facebook engineers have solved one of education's biggest problems with their 20% time project at billionaire-backed Summit Public Schools, a small charter school operator. Gates writes, "One of the biggest problems in American education is that teachers have to teach 30 students with different learning styles at the same time. Developers at Facebook, however, have built an online system that gives teachers the information and tools they need to design individualized lessons. The result is that teachers can spend their time doing what they're best at: inspiring kids." Some people — like the late Roger Ebert — might not be quite as impressed as Melinda to see Silicon Valley trying to reinvent the 1960's personalized-learning-wheel in 2015!

He Who Has No Name writes: It may have been one of Slashdot's most memorable front-page gaffes, but apparently there's no harm and no foul — because the Lone Gunmen are set to ride again in the X-Files return. Comicbook.com reports, "The Lone Gunmen, the X-Files' trio of conspiracy theorists, are set to appear in Fox's six-episode event. The three characters were played by Tom Braidwood, Dean Haglund, and Bruce Harwood. Haglund, who played the gunman 'Ringo,' confirmed his and his compatriots' return on Twitter today." We'll see how see how series creator Chris Carter handles their apparently greatly-exaggerated demise, and whether the explanation used in the print comics comes into play.

Last week you had a chance to ask the head of development at Giant Spacekat Brianna Wu about Gamergate, starting a company, and women-in-tech issues. Below you'll find her answers to your questions. Penalties and Online Harrassment
by Anonymous Coward

I read all the time about the experiences of online harassment victims. As pointed out in your Patreon, most all of this is obviously criminal activity, and it takes lots of time to document it for police. Why have I virtually never read about someone getting arrested? I've even looked around. I was sure at the height of Gamergate, a flood of news about arrests was coming, and now it seems like that's never coming.

I can only think of two cases: One was in Canada, where a very mentally ill young man, no older than 20 I think, was arrested for SWATting people repeatedly, among other things. The other was in the UK where again a very young man was arrested for threatening a politician over twitter. Just googling "twitter arrest" brings up lots of cases where people who pulled various stunts had their anonymity removed and were arrested, but none of them for the kinds of harassment you've discussed reporting to the police. The first hit is several Huffington Post articles about it. Is it not reported in the media? Do the police just not care, or not know how to investigate it? Are the people doing the harassment just that crafty? Do you believe increased enforcement will reduce harassment online, and particularly if so, what needs to happen between then and now?

Brianna: So, starting this conversation - I should say that the FBI has asked me not to comment on the specifics of ongoing cases. But, I can talk about the situation in general terms.

Working with law enforcement has been one of the most exasperating experiences of my life. The amount of media attention to my case has been extreme. There was a Law and Order episode based on my experiences and those of other victims of harassment. I’ve been in most major media around the world. I’ve been on Nightline and John Oliver, and there still have not been any prosecutions in my case.

As bad as it’s been for me, the women I worry about are ones that don’t get media attention. The truth is, if you are a woman, and someone threatens to murder you online, it's overwhelmingly likely that no help is coming, and you're on your own.

I don’t think the people working on my case don’t care. I think most people go into law enforcement because they want to help people like me. It does seem like a question of training and resources, particularly with local police, that the need has far outpaced the tools.

It greatly troubled me when, after sending the FBI leads for months, they asked me to mail them a hard drive with my evidence. They said, because of their systems, they were unable to read email attachments or access shared Dropbox folders. It’s hard to imagine how any law enforcement agency can operate in 2015 with those constraints.

The FBI employs over 15,000 people. As best as I can tell, none of them are specifically tasked with prosecuting cases like mine. In June, Representative Katherine Clark submitted a proposal to congress that would allocate 10 operatives and an attorney to prosecute online threats. I hope we can make that happen.



Questions:
by juanfgs

I never heard much about game developers, but it seems like GamerGate has put many of them in the spotlight, specially women. Has the Gamergate movement somehow boosted your popularity and of other game developers and benefited you in any way? Do you regret that a big part your popularity didn't stem from the work you've made all these years in your professional life and rather from a political counter-movement?

Brianna: One of the biggest misconceptions about me is that, professionally, I was unknown before Gamergate. I had more conference invites than I could accept before Gamergate. I had a show on 5by5 before Gamergate, which was a very prestigious network. I had been speaking up on women in tech for years before Gamergate. In fact, the month before I was dragged into the mess, I had a two-hour talk with my team about their need for me to be in the office more. It's been a struggle for years, balancing my role as head of development with the responsibility of being an increasingly public figure for the company.

I do think it’s accurate that Gamergate has made me better known to the general public, rather than just industry insiders. It frustrates me to no end that the public doesn’t recognize my work as an entrepreneur, as a software engineer, or as a leader of an ambitious company - but rather as a feminist figure and a victim of Gamergate.

My career goal has never been to be a feminist media critic like Anita Sarkeesian. To be honest, the thought of my career still being about this five years from now is incredibly depressing.

I want to make games, and I want to provide jobs to the many talented women I know in the industry. I don’t want to be known as a victim. I want to be known as someone solving engineering problems about emotion the rest of the industry isn’t interested in.

One the key parts of my personality is I am extremely pragmatic. Maybe it’s the developer part of my brain - but I work with the system I have and not the system I want. And, if standing up to the horrific abuse of Gamergate has opened doors for me? Yeah, you'd better believe I’m going to walk through them.



Capital
by HellYeahAutomaton

How did you secure the capital to start Giant Spacekat? How did you do it in 3 months, and what obstacles did you face?

Brianna: So, I can’t talk specifically about all of our funding. But I can say how we started Giant Spacekat and made our "minimal viable product." I quit my job when I married my husband, and followed him to Boston. I was trying to figure out what to do with my life. I wasn’t sure if I wanted to pursue a graduate degree or start my own company.

A family relative offered us the chance to live in Frank’s grandmother’s house for free if we renovated it. That would free up capital for us, so I jumped at the chance. I spent half a year renovating the house. Then, we moved in - took our rent money, and used it to hire our first employee.

The part of this story that’s key is, I saw an opportunity - and I went all in. Renovating this house was disgusting and backbreaking. My husband and I spent hundreds of hours removing this horrible wallpaper from the 40s. I had to wear a hazmat suit and a respirator to encapsulate asbestos in the basement. We had to redo the entire electrical system of the house. But I sucked it up, got to work - and I launched my company.

As for obstacles faced, something that a lot of people don’t know about are the criminal efforts to harm our company financially. We’ve had multiple attempts to hack into our company’s dev account, to the point where we have had to work with Apple to put additional safeguards into place. We’ve also had to deal with repeated identity theft and credit card fraud.



egalitarian?
by johncandale

Why are you a feminist instead of a egalitarian?

Brianna: Egalitarianism is about equal rights for all people, but this is assuming that everyone starts in an equal situation, which is not the case.Feminism is advocating equal social, political, legal, and economic rights for women - and we are at a huge deficit with those rights.

I think this question is really telling about the incredible amount of unconscious privilege men have in technology. Anyone outside the industry can see it - this is a place built by men for men. It’s so built to serve them that women can’t even have a movement to address our systematic exclusion without some men insisting it should be about them too.

I am a feminist because my focus is, correctly, on making technology more equal for women.

The absence of privilege is not oppression. But, I think it often seems like that to some men. It distresses me greatly that when I talk about problems like exclusionary hiring practices - just how quickly men turn the conversation to what is fairest for them. You’re essentially asking for your privilege to be baked into the language of our fight for equality.



Game Design
by deltatype0

I am a "neutral" in the Gamergate debacle, preferring to observe more than directly interact, but in one case I watched the somewhat-infamous interview between Wu and Reddit KotakuInAction mod TheHat2. In it, they discussed the points of her iOS game "Revolution 60" and game design in general. One of the questions asked there was why she decided to work with iOS first versus the popular PC platform Steam. I don't remember the exact answer, but I think it revolved around developing for a platform that more women were likely to use, being the mobile market, and maybe some development-specific answers.

My question is this: Given what you've learned about programming in iOS, would you have developed for a PC platform like Steam first and ported to mobile later? Given female trends towards mobile platforms like the Nintendo DS/3DS, would it make more sense for your studio to explore developing games there? Or was your goal all along to produce a more 3D-visual action title for mobile phones?

For context, my wife is not as big of a gamer as myself, but I find she enjoys playing a lot of mobile puzzle games. I think the mobile market has a lot of potential for bigger things, and I think having the input of the majority player base on that platform makes sense, but I often don't understand why, as a mobile developer, you would be overly concerned with "the core gamer" demographic in the console platform. It seems to me that they aren't likely to crossover into the mobile market often, so there is little reason to "attack" that demographic as we've seen a few people, including Brianna, do through the last year.

Brianna: First of all, if you are “neutral” on the horrific abuse many women have suffered at the hands of Gamergate, you are a part of the problem. Being able to lean back in a chair and talk about Gamergate as if it’s a fun controversy isn’t a privilege I have, and it’s not a privilege women in the game industry have. This is about being able to continue working in the field I love.

Being neutral about threats to murder, rape and intimidate women with opinions is a character defect.

As far as your question - we’ve certainly thought about working with Nintendo. I have good connections with Nintendo of America - but Unreal is barely supported on Wii-U and 3DS. Often, these versions of Unreal are custom variants that are not supported by Epic. It’s a shame, because I think the touch interfaces would make us a natural fit for both - though the vert decimation it would take to get our skeletal meshes to work on 3DS makes me cringe to think about.

My proudest accomplishment with Revolution 60 is that anyone can pick it up and play it, regardless if they are a gamer or not. I don’t think that you should have to be a hardcore gamer to enjoy a story. That didn’t happen serendipitously, it happened through game design constraints and a lot of playtesting. I think that design philosophy is extremely compatible with Nintendo.



Are custom engines dead for 'normal' developers?
by MBCook

More and more developers seem to be using the existing engines (i know you used Unreal 3 for Rev 60, Unity, UbiArt, etc) which makes sense given the huge number of features they provide with little initial development cost and common tool sets/plugins used by other developers. Do you think there is much future in developers using custom engines for games (both indie and non-AAA) or do you think it will continue to become more uncommon for common genre games as you start at a larger and larger feature 'deficit' by having to redevelop the features on your custom engine, let alone porting issues, leaving only vert large/profitable houses (Naughty Dog, Insomniac, EA, etc) to be able to bear the time/$ costs?

Brianna: When you are an indie studio, you have to be absolutely ruthless about what you spend resources on. To me, getting into OpenGL and coding custom engines is a suicide mission for small teams. It’s worth noting that Apple’s 3D frameworks just don’t measure up to Unity or Unreal.

If someone has solved an engineering problem already, I see no point in reinventing the wheel.

I think indie teams get a little bit of a break - but you still have to do one or two things better than anyone else, including AAA. For us, we concentrated on characterization and animation. I would put the quality of Revolution 60s animation against anything on any platform. We wouldn’t have been able to do that if we’d wasted resources writing a custom engine.



"Developer" or "Journalist"?
by Rick in China

I'm interested in what development languages you excel in and how you mastered them - as head of development for a gaming company, I think that's my first question. Follow-up side-points would be when you transitioned from journalist to game developer, and why game development? Was it related to some of the 'sparks' and 'movements' by some other females 'in the gaming community' - and seen as an easy way to jump on a bandwagon that was clearly going to make waves? Journalist to developer just seems like a very strange transition to me, so I'm curious about the particulars. Do you have a github account where you publish some of your code?

Brianna: I’ve had many jobs over the course of my life. I’ve worked in politics and well as media. Both have been very helpful backgrounds for me in running a studio, which is a very political job. One of my greatest frustrations as a developer is that I don’t get to spend as much time doing gamedev as I used to. The truth is, I can hire another engineer - but I can’t hire someone to replace me.

I feel like my entire life has prepared me for this moment. There’s very little I would change about the choices that brought me to this point.

I can’t help but read your question and feel like you might not have the best of intentions. I read it as you are feel that I need to prove to you that I’m a legit developer. I think my record as someone whose first game won several game of the year awards speaks for itself. I think my two popular shows on Relay.FM where I am an industry analyst on technical issues speaks for itself.

I do have code up on Github, but like many women developers - it’s under a gender-neutral pseudonym, because I know it will be torn to pieces if it’s not. I once wrote a joke on Twitter with pseudocode, written to be readable for non-developers - and received a litany of sexist accusations and code critique.

There is an unconscious bias that men are assumed competent until proven otherwise, and women are assumed incompetent until proven otherwise. My track record of success speaks for itself.



Customization / Modification of Unreal Engine
by Anonymous Coward

Hi Brianna. No idea if this will bubble near enough to the surface for you to see it, but I'm curious how much, if any, work you and your team had to do in the "guts" of the Unreal Engine to get your game out the door, or if all of your work was done at the Unreal Script / editor level.

Brianna: One of the great things about Unreal is that there are certain game types that are coded into the engine already. If you want a top-down Diablo game, they’ve done that work already. If you want to make an FPS, they’ve done that work already. But it doesn't cover everything so we ended up having to do a lot more work than other game types.

It’s hard to stress just how much work we had to do to get Revolution 60 to run on older Apple devices. You start out with 512 megs of RAM, and a good chunk of that is taken up with Springboard. Then, iOS 7 came out midway through development and we found ourself suddenly with 134 megs less RAM to work with. We lost over four months solving that problem.

Revolution 60 got a lot of critique for our textures - which has always felt unfair to me. Low resolution textures were a deliberate tradeoff. Infinity Blade looks amazing, but they only have 2 characters on screen at a time. Cyrus has 22 mesh influencing bones, with a level 2 joint influence. Holiday has over 75 mesh influencing bones - requiring a second draw call with level 3 joint influence. We have up to five characters on screen at once, all with a 2k diffuse and a 2k normal. On top of that, there is a ton of custom animsets and sound that isn't hardware decoded. This is very ambitious to ask all of this to run on the iPhone 4S.

I would guess that about 1/4th of our development was spent working around these hardware limitations in Unreal. Holiday doesn’t run because we are loading and unloading every section you walk through from memory. I was handed sections to texture, and I had four 1k maps for many of them. Given those constraints, the game looks AMAZING. I could write a textbook on extremely efficient texture stacking.

A lot of people think beautiful textures are the test of a good materials artist, and it's true. But - I think working under memory constraints is an even greater challenge.

There are a lot of gamers out there that like to play armchair developer because they don’t understand these engineering tradeoffs. None of them could have made a game as ambitious as Revolution 60. I made the choice to emphasize characters over graphics, and I’d absolutely do it again.



Virtual Reality?
by Anonymous Coward

You hinted a bit in an episode of Rocket that you're playing with the idea of making a game for VR. Can you go into any detail on that, or talk about the future of VR gaming (if there is one)?

Brianna: As much as I would love to, I am unable to comment on that right now. I will say, if you thought I shook up the industry last year? Trust me, our best is yet to come.

An anonymous reader writes: As each day passes and researchers find more and more source code in the huge Hacking Team data dump, it becomes more clear what the company's customers could do with the spyware. After having revealed one of the ways that the company used to deliver its spyware on Android devices, Trend Micro researchers have analyzed the code of the actual spyware: RCS Android (Remote Control System Android). Unsurprisingly, it can do so many things and spy on so many levels that they consider it the most sophisticated Android malware ever exposed. The software can, among other things, gather device information, capture screenshots and photos, record speech by using the devices' microphone, capture voice calls, record location, capture Wi-Fi and online account passwords, collect contacts and decode messages from IM accounts, as well as collect SMS, MMS, and Gmail messages. Hacking Team says it sold its surveillance and intrusion software strictly within the law.

An anonymous reader writes: As each day passes and researchers find more and more source code in the huge Hacking Team data dump, it becomes more clear what the company's customers could do with the spyware. After having revealed one of the ways that the company used to deliver its spyware on Android devices, Trend Micro researchers have analyzed the code of the actual spyware: RCS Android (Remote Control System Android). Unsurprisingly, it can do so many things and spy on so many levels that they consider it the most sophisticated Android malware ever exposed. The software can, among other things, gather device information, capture screenshots and photos, record speech by using the devices' microphone, capture voice calls, record location, capture Wi-Fi and online account passwords, collect contacts and decode messages from IM accounts, as well as collect SMS, MMS, and Gmail messages. Hacking Team says it sold its surveillance and intrusion software strictly within the law.

An anonymous reader sends news that Eddie Tipton, a man who worked for the Multi-State Lottery Association, has been convicted of rigging a computerized lottery game so he could win the $14 million jackpot. Tipton wrote a computer program that would ensure certain numbers were picked in the lottery game, and ran it on lottery system machines. He then deleted it and bought a ticket from a convenience store. Lottery employees are forbidden to play, so he tried to get acquaintances to cash the winning ticket for him. Unfortunately for him, Iowa law requires the original ticket buyer's name to be divulged before any money can be paid out.

Mr.Intel sends a followup to last week's news of an 18-year-old man getting a lot of attention for posting a video of a handgun being fired from a drone. Despite calls to arrest the man, police say they can't find any reason to charge him. "It appears to be a case of technology surpassing current legislation," they said. Todd Lawrie, the chief of police where it happened, said, "We are attempting to determine if any laws have been violated at this point. It would seem to the average person, there should be something prohibiting a person from attaching a weapon to a drone. At this point, we can't find anything that's been violated. The legislature in Connecticut (recently) addressed a number of questions with drones, mostly around how law enforcement was going to use drones. It is a gray area, and it's caught the legislature flatfooted." The FAA and other federal agencies are still investigating and trying to figure out if any criminal statutes were violated.

An anonymous reader writes: You may remember LifeLock — it's the identity protection company whose CEO published his social security number and dared people to steal his identity. Predictably, 13 different people succeeded. LifeLock was later sued for deceptive marketing practices, and eventually settled with the U.S. Federal Trade Commission to the tune of $12 million. Part of that settlement, of course, required that they refrain from misrepresenting their services in the future. Now, the FTC is taking action against them again, saying they failed to live up to that promise. The FTC claims (PDF) LifeLock falsely advertised that it "protected consumers' sensitive data with the same high-level safeguards as financial institutions" and also failed build systems to protect the data they held.

An anonymous reader writes: The FBI hacks computers. Specifics are scarce, and only a trickle of news has emerged from court filings and FOIA responses. But we know it happens. In a new law review article, a Stanford Ph.D. candidate and privacy expert pulls together what's been disclosed, and then matches it against established law. The results sure aren't pretty. FBI agents deceive judges, ignore time limits, don't tell computer owners after they've been hacked, and don't get 'super-warrants' for webcam snooping. Whatever you think of law enforcement hacking, it probably shouldn't be this lawless.

itwbennett writes: Sometimes it's a matter of 'if it ain't broke, don't fix it,' sometimes corporate inertia is to blame, but perhaps even more often what keeps old technology plugging away in businesses large and small is the sense that it does a single, specific job the way that someone wants it done. George R.R. Martin's preference for using a DOS computer running WordStar 4 to write his Song of Ice and Fire series is one such example, but so is the hospital computer whose sole job was to search and print medical images, however badly or slowly it may have done the job. We all have such stories of obsolete tech we've had to use at one point or another. What's yours?

When the first Ubuntu phone came out, reviews were quick to criticize it for its lackluster hardware and unusual take on common mobile software interactions. It's been out for a while, now, and Alastair Stevenson has written about his experiences using it for an entire month. While he doesn't recommend it for phone users who aren't tech savvy, he does say that he began to like it better than Android after adjusting to how Ubuntu does things. From the article: [T]he Ubuntu OS has a completely reworked user interface that replaces the traditional home screen with a new system of "scopes." The scope system does away with the traditional mobile interface where applications are stored and accessed from a central series of homescreens. ... Adding to Ubuntu’s otherworldly, unique feel, the OS is also significantly more touch- and gesture-focused than iOS and Android. We found nearly all the key features and menus on the Meizu MX4 are accessed using gesture controls, not with screen shortcuts. ... Finally, there's my biggest criticism – Ubuntu phone is not smart enough yet. While the app selection is impressive for a prototype, in its infancy Ubuntu phone doesn't have enough data feeding into it, as key services are missing."

An anonymous reader writes: Now that Google Photos exists separately from Google+, the company is shutting down the Google+ version of Photos starting on August 1. The Android version will be the first to go, followed shortly thereafter by the iOS and web versions. Fortune calls the old Photos app "a relic of the times when the search giant thought its social network Google Plus could become a huge hit."

theodp writes: GeekWire reports on a group of students from Nepal who will be competing for the $50K top prize in Microsoft's Imagine Cup student tech contest with a first-person shooter in which players track down and kill poachers. "Until and unless the player kills all the poachers," reads the description for Defend Your Territory, "he/she cannot progress to next level. To make the game more interesting, there will be lots of weapons and vehicles unlock." So, is this the inspiration Google needs to take their anti-poaching drone program to the next level?

An anonymous reader writes: The U.S. won the International Mathematical Olympiad for the first time in 21 years. Gender diversity is brought up in this NPR article because the eight team members on the U.S. team were all male, but they made a point to mention that of the top 12 people participating in the U.S. Math Olympiad, 2 are female, which is better than last year when there were no females in the top 12. "I will say that it's not really a super-great spectator sport, in the sense that if you are watching them, it will look like they are thinking," Po-Shen Loh, a professor at Carnegie Mellon University and head coach for Team USA says. "Although I will assure you that inside their heads, if you could spectate, that would be quite a sport."

An anonymous reader writes: As major tech companies come under increased scrutiny over the diversity of their workforces, many of them are focusing solely on the "pipeline" of workers educated in a computer-related field. They're pouring resources into getting kids to code, setting up internships, and even establishing mentoring programs for underrepresented groups. But experts say they're still failing to root out their own internal biases when making hiring decisions. "That bias shows up in recruiting, with companies drawing from the same top universities, where black and Hispanic graduates are still lagging behind other groups. ... The problem is particularly acute at start-ups, where black founders are just 1 percent of venture-invested firms, according to a 2011 survey by CB Insights." The tech companies are under mounting pressure to solve this problem, and the solutions they're pursuing won't show results quickly.

dcblogs writes: A top White House official told House lawmakers this week that the replacement of U.S. workers by H-1B visa holders is 'troubling' and not supposed to happen. That answer came in response to a question from U.S. Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.) that referenced Disney workers who had to train their temporary visa holding replacements (the layoffs were later canceled. Jeh Johnson, the secretary of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, said if H-1B workers are being used to replace U.S. workers, then "it's a very serious failing of the H-1B program." But Johnson also told lawmakers that they may not be able to stop it, based on current law. Ron Hira, an associate professor of public policy at Howard University who has testified before Congress multiple times on H-1B visa use, sees that as a "bizarre interpretation" of the law.

dcblogs writes: A top White House official told House lawmakers this week that the replacement of U.S. workers by H-1B visa holders is 'troubling' and not supposed to happen. That answer came in response to a question from U.S. Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.) that referenced Disney workers who had to train their temporary visa holding replacements (the layoffs were later canceled. Jeh Johnson, the secretary of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, said if H-1B workers are being used to replace U.S. workers, then "it's a very serious failing of the H-1B program." But Johnson also told lawmakers that they may not be able to stop it, based on current law. Ron Hira, an associate professor of public policy at Howard University who has testified before Congress multiple times on H-1B visa use, sees that as a "bizarre interpretation" of the law.

An anonymous reader writes: Planetary Resources, the company trying to jumpstart an asteroid-mining industry, has launched its first spacecraft. Its 90-day mission is to boldly... test avionics, control systems, and software. The Arkyd 3 Reflight craft was launched from the International Space Station after being delivered there in April. (They had intended to test earlier, but their first craft was lost in the Antares rocket explosion last October.) "The spacecraft is small, but mighty: At just 12 by 4 by 4 inches (30 by 10 by 10 centimeters), it will test key systems and control schemes that will allow later craft to land on asteroids to extract water and minerals. Eric Anderson, co-founder and co-chairman of Planetary Resources, said in the statement that the mining technologies could also help monitor and manage Earth's valuable resources. Later this year, once the satellite completes its 90-day mission, Planetary Resources will send up another satellite: the Arkyd-6, which will be twice as large and will test even more systems needed for the asteroid-mining process, representatives said."

jones_supa writes: Now that Renderman has been available for free for non-commercial use for a while, there has been many requests for integration with Blender. An initiative spearheaded by Pixar now presents the first Blender to Renderman plugin. With the release of PRMan 20, a small group of developers headed by Brian Savery of Pixar have been working on support for using Renderman and Blender together. The plugin is still in early alpha but has had many great developments in the last few weeks. The source code is available in GitHub.

Being listed in the "Time 100" of the most influential people in the world in the "Heroes" category, is just one of the many awards received by Temple Grandin. Diagnosed with autism at the age of two, Temple overcame many obstacles and earned a doctoral degree in animal science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and is a professor at Colorado State University. Dr, Grandin is recognized as an expert in animal behavior and one of the leading advocates for the rights of autistic persons. She lectures, and has written numerous books on animals and autism, and was the subject of the award-winning, biographical film, Temple Grandin . Dr. Grandin has agreed to take some time out of her schedule to answer any questions you may have. As usual, ask as many as you'd like, but please, one per post.

msm1267 writes: Hardware hacker Samy Kamkar has picked up where anonymity device ProxyHam left off. After a DEF CON talk on ProxyHam was mysteriously called off, Kamkar went to work on developing ProxyGambit, a similar device that allows a user to access the Internet without revealing their physical location.

A description on Kamkar's site says ProxyGambit fractures traffic from the Internet through long distance radio links or reverse-tunneled GSM bridges that connect and exit the Internet through wireless networks far from the user's physical location. ProxyHam did not put as much distance between the user and device as ProxyGambit, and routed its signal over Wi-Fi and radio connections. Kamkar said his approach makes it several times more difficult to determine where the original traffic is coming from.

New submitter Ramze writes: Several outlets are reporting on Intel's confirmation that it will make three generations of 14nm processors, delaying the switch to 10nm. The planned 14nm Kaby Lake processor marks the first time Intel has skipped the "tick" of a die shrink on its regular "tick/tock" cycle. Production of Cannonlake processors on 10nm has been pushed back to the second half of 2017 — likely due to manufacturing difficulties. Intel reported earlier this year that it may have to switch away from silicon to exotic materials such as indium gallium arsenide to make the next shrink to 7nm.

An anonymous reader writes: Google's autonomous car project, as of June, hadn't been in any accidents that involved an injury. That changed on July 1st, though it wasn't the technology's fault. A Lexus SUV that was self-driving while carrying three Google employees was rear-ended while stopped at a traffic light in Mountain View, California. All three employees had minor cases of whiplash, and were quickly checked out and released from the hospital. The other driver had minor neck and back pain as well. Chris Umson, head of the autonomous car project, said, "Other drivers have hit us 14 times since the start of our project in 2009 (including 11 rear-enders), and not once has the self-driving car been the cause of the collision. Instead, the clear theme is human error and inattention. We'll take all this as a signal that we're starting to compare favorably with human drivers." He also posted a short video of how the self-driving car was tracking other vehicles at the time of the crash — including the one that hit it.

An anonymous reader writes: The Solar Impulse 2 has been grounded in Hawaii for at least nine months because of battery damage sustained during its record 118-hour trans-Pacific flight from Japan. The project team says the aircraft is not expected to take off on the next leg of its journey until late April or early May 2016. The BBC reports: "...[the] plane experienced damaging overheating in its lithium-ion battery system. Although the battery units performed as expected, they had too much insulation around them, making temperature management very difficult. Engineers on the project have not been able to make the quick repairs that might allow Solar Impulse to have a crack at completing the round-the-world journey this year."

MarkWhittington writes: Forget about Apollo moon landing hoax theories. That is so 20th Century. Gizmodo reported that the "Pluto Truthers" have followed the astonishing images being sent back by NASA's New Horizons probe and have come to the conclusion that they are faked. After all, if the space agency could fake the entire moon landing, it would be child's play to fake a robotic probe to the edge of the Solar System.

An anonymous reader writes: Following Trend Micro's disclosure of Russian hacking group Pawn Storm's 7-year campaign against military-industrial targets in and related to the United States, the security company has today announced that one of the IP addresses it owns has been 'designated' by the hackers as a C&C server for their spear-phishing scenario. The intent of the DNS record redirection, according to the company, is likely to be to convince others that it has been hacked (which it hasn't), or else to push one of its IP addresses into administrative blacklists.

I bumped into Jesse Vincent and his keyboard project called Keyboardio at last year's Solid conference. Then, it was a developing project with a lot of literally rough edges, but since I'm a bit of a keyboard enthusiast, it grabbed my attention. In the time since, his plan to bring a truly hackable keyboard to the world has gained momentum, and the dozens of layouts and material combinations that he and partner in design Kaia Dekker have considered have been boiled down into one nearly-ready final version. The result is a compact split keyboard housed in an "heirloom quality" wooden case. It has some features you might consider overwrought -- like an RGB LED beneath each key, a precision mouse feature via WASD keys, and the ability, theoretically, to put more than a dozen feet between each half of the board. But if you're designing a keyboard from scratch, why not?

Vincent and Dekker put their project onto Kickstarter, then spent weeks on a road trip showing it at hacker and maker spaces around the U.S.; the project updates make a nice travelogue about just how widespread and varied is the world of DIY culture. I caught up with him in Colorado Springs, Colorado, on the road between some of those demo gigs, to talk about the long path from idea to (hopefully) shipping a product to backers. By the time we had this conversation, the project was well past fully funded, andI was impressed enough to order one myself; hopefully, the clicky keys will be worth the cost of a middlin' Chromebook, though Vincent admits they're not going to fool anyone looking for a buckling spring action. On the other hand, at least at the Kickstarter price, it beats some of the Maltron keyboards I've been eyeing for years. Plus, it comes with a screwdriver.

Geoffrey.landis writes: Last week a news story suggested that a new model of sunspot activity predicted a dramatic drop in solar activity coming up, possibly resulting in coming a mini-ice age. Take that prediction with a bit of skepticism, though-- later news analysis suggests that the story may be more media hype than science. Valentina Zharkova, the scientist whose research is being quoted, made no mention of a "mini Ice age"-- her work was only on modelling the solar dynamo. And, in any case, the solar minimum predicted was estimated to last only three solar cycles-- far less than the 17th century Maunder Minimum.

Phil Plait, known for his "bad astronomy" column, does a more detailed analysis of the claims, pointing out that the effect, if it even exists at all, is weak-- and the much discussed "Little Ice Age" is currently believed to most likely have been triggered by volcanic action, not sunspots. And, in any case, any predicted cooling is small compared to already-present global warming. So, probably no need to stock up on firewood, dried food, and ammunition quite yet-- the mini ice age isn't likely to be coming quite yet.

hypnosec writes: Yesterday we discussed news that over 65,000 Range Rovers were being recalled over a software issue. Not to be outdone, Japanese car manufacturer Toyota on Wednesday recalled 625,000 hybrid vehicles globally to fix a different software defect. The automaker said the defect in question might lead to shut down of the hybrid system while the car is being driven. The recall was due to software settings that could result in "higher thermal stress" in parts of a power converter, potentially causing it to become damaged. Toyota dealers will update the software for both the motor/generator control ECU and hybrid control ECU in the involved vehicles.

An anonymous reader writes: After analyzing the leaked data from last week's attack on Hacking Team, Vectra researchers discovered a previously unknown high severity vulnerability in Internet Explorer 11, which impacts the browser on both Windows 7 and Windows 8.1. The vulnerability is an exploitable use-after-free (UAF) vulnerability that occurs within a custom heap in JSCRIPT9. Since it exists within a custom heap, it can allow an attacker to bypass protections found in standard memory. Microsoft has published a patch for this vulnerability, and also patched another one pulled from the Hacking Team files by different security researchers.

New submitter RavenLrD20k writes: I am a programmer by trade with a significant amount of training as a Network Administrator (AAS in Computer Networking). I have no problem with how to build three or four separate networks in each location and make them route over the internet. My weakness is in trying to setup a VPN for a secured two-way connection between location A and location B, both mixed OS environments, with the requirement that all of the internet traffic on B gets routed through A first. I've already looked at some boxed solutions, such as LogMeIn Hamachi, but there hasn't been much in the way of mixed environment support. This is a complicated one, so keep reading for more on what RavenLrD20k is trying to accomplish.

Some background: Due to recent events it's become necessary for me to have remote access to all of my Parents' computers which are about 4 hours away(location B) from my home location(location A). This is to facilitate me being able to log in and apply patches and security updates without requiring someone on the other end sending me Desktop Sharing invites (I'm already going to be upgrading their 2 systems to Windows 7 Ultimate on my dime for this purpose). The ISP for Location B also seems to be blocking the Desktop Sharing ports as this method has completely stopped working for us without notice, and router configs have been verified as forwarding the necessary ports. Location B also has 2 grandchildren that will have a Windows 7 Home Edition Laptop (for MS Office based classwork), a Linux Mint Machine (to start, he has full reign to do whatever he wants to this machine after initial setup with the understanding that if he "breaks" it, he fixes it), and several BeagleBone or R-Pi machines for my Son's experiments while he's visiting for the summer.

Location A has two networks. First is the one with the public IP that I run my Linux servers and physically connected Desktop on. This network also has a wireless interface that allows gaming machines and phones on the North side of the house to connect to. Network two is behind the NAT and runs a dual-band wireless connection for devices on the south side. I would rather not have this second network get internet access through the VPN but through the traditional means.

Location A has a 150/30 cable connection with a 2TB cap. Location B has a 20Mb/s symmetrical uncapped Fiber connection. I also have a VPS "in the cloud" running CentOS which has a 1Gbps Inbound 20Mbps(1Gbps burstable) Outbound connection which may be repurposed for this if necessary. I figure this to be common sense but I would prefer that the the connection between the locations be routed as opposed to bridged as to avoid the issues that come with sending broadcast packets over the internet.

As I said, I primarily want this to be able to remote into my parents' systems to provide maintenance and support instead of having to budget an emergency trip when things go awry. On top of this I'd also like some way to be able to monitor/control my son's online activities while he's away (hence my desire to route at least his traffic, if not all Location B internet traffic, through Location A). Also note: I'm not a helicopter parent by any means and only monitor once in a while to get a general idea of what his online trend is; and the extent of "control" is if grandpa and grandma say he needs time off the computer for x days for bad behavior or whatever, I want to be able to enforce that rule where he won't be able to sneak around while they're in bed. This connection will not have any firewalling or blocking enabled by default. I want everyone to have complete open access to the full internet (this too is to help educate my son in smart browsing/chatting and encourage "you break it, you fix it").

Have a question for Slashdot's readers? Take a look at other recent questions first to see if someone else has had a similar question. And if not, ask away! The more details and context you include, the more likely your question will be selected.

New submitter RavenLrD20k writes: I am a programmer by trade with a significant amount of training as a Network Administrator (AAS in Computer Networking). I have no problem with how to build three or four separate networks in each location and make them route over the internet. My weakness is in trying to setup a VPN for a secured two-way connection between location A and location B, both mixed OS environments, with the requirement that all of the internet traffic on B gets routed through A first. I've already looked at some boxed solutions, such as LogMeIn Hamachi, but there hasn't been much in the way of mixed environment support. This is a complicated one, so keep reading for more on what RavenLrD20k is trying to accomplish.

Some background: Due to recent events it's become necessary for me to have remote access to all of my Parents' computers which are about 4 hours away(location B) from my home location(location A). This is to facilitate me being able to log in and apply patches and security updates without requiring someone on the other end sending me Desktop Sharing invites (I'm already going to be upgrading their 2 systems to Windows 7 Ultimate on my dime for this purpose). The ISP for Location B also seems to be blocking the Desktop Sharing ports as this method has completely stopped working for us without notice, and router configs have been verified as forwarding the necessary ports. Location B also has 2 grandchildren that will have a Windows 7 Home Edition Laptop (for MS Office based classwork), a Linux Mint Machine (to start, he has full reign to do whatever he wants to this machine after initial setup with the understanding that if he "breaks" it, he fixes it), and several BeagleBone or R-Pi machines for my Son's experiments while he's visiting for the summer.

Location A has two networks. First is the one with the public IP that I run my Linux servers and physically connected Desktop on. This network also has a wireless interface that allows gaming machines and phones on the North side of the house to connect to. Network two is behind the NAT and runs a dual-band wireless connection for devices on the south side. I would rather not have this second network get internet access through the VPN but through the traditional means.

Location A has a 150/30 cable connection with a 2TB cap. Location B has a 20Mb/s symmetrical uncapped Fiber connection. I also have a VPS "in the cloud" running CentOS which has a 1Gbps Inbound 20Mbps(1Gbps burstable) Outbound connection which may be repurposed for this if necessary. I figure this to be common sense but I would prefer that the the connection between the locations be routed as opposed to bridged as to avoid the issues that come with sending broadcast packets over the internet.

As I said, I primarily want this to be able to remote into my parents' systems to provide maintenance and support instead of having to budget an emergency trip when things go awry. On top of this I'd also like some way to be able to monitor/control my son's online activities while he's away (hence my desire to route at least his traffic, if not all Location B internet traffic, through Location A). Also note: I'm not a helicopter parent by any means and only monitor once in a while to get a general idea of what his online trend is; and the extent of "control" is if grandpa and grandma say he needs time off the computer for x days for bad behavior or whatever, I want to be able to enforce that rule where he won't be able to sneak around while they're in bed. This connection will not have any firewalling or blocking enabled by default. I want everyone to have complete open access to the full internet (this too is to help educate my son in smart browsing/chatting and encourage "you break it, you fix it").

Have a question for Slashdot's readers? Take a look at other recent questions first to see if someone else has had a similar question. And if not, ask away! The more details and context you include, the more likely your question will be selected.

Brianna Wu is the head of development at Giant Spacekat, a company specializing in cinematic experiences using the Unreal engine. She’s also a frequent speaker on women-in-tech issues and was one of several women subjected to a campaign of attacks in Gamergate. Wu has worked as a journalist and politico. She currently has a patreon campaign which helps to offset the costs of doing speaking engagements and work to further the goals of feminism and women in tech. Brianna has agreed to give us some of her time and answer any questions you may have. As usual, ask as many as you'd like, but please, one per post.

Trailrunner7 writes with news that "Mozilla has taken the unusual step of disabling by default all versions of Flash in Firefox." Two flaws that came to light from the recent document dump from Hacking Team could be used by an attacker to gain remote code execution. From Threatpost's article: One of the flaws is in Action Script 3 while the other is in the BitMapData component of Flash. Exploits for these vulnerabilities were found in the data taken from HackingTeam in the attack disclosed last week. An exploit for one of the Flash vulnerabilities, the one in ActionScript 3, has been integrated into the Angler exploit kit already and there's a module for it in the Metasploit Framework, as well. Reader Mickeycaskill adds a link to TechWeek Europe's article, which says these are the 37th and 38th flaws found in Flash so far this month, and that the development "is a blow for Flash after Alex Stamos, Facebook's new chief security officer, urged Adobe to set an 'end of life' date for the much-maligned software."

theodp writes: "We're investing $10 million in organizations that are upgrading the world," Microsoft announced on in its new Upgrade Your World website, which was created in conjunction with the Windows 10 launch. "We've identified nine global nonprofits, and we'd like your help choosing the 10th." The missions of the selected nonprofits include fighting global poverty, preventing children living with HIV from needlessly dying, increasing access to quality education for children in the developing world, conserving the lands and waters on which all life depends, and ensuring that all kindergartners learn 'computer science.' To paraphrase Sesame Street, can you guess which cause is not like the others? If you guessed Code.org, which wants CS made a "core" K-12 subject in U.S. schools, you're right! Coincidentally, Code.org's biggest donors include Microsoft ($3M+), Ballmer Family Giving ($3M+), and Bill Gates ($1M+). And Code.org CEO Hadi Partovi, who once reported to Satya Nadella, is coincidentally a sometimes jogging partner of Steve Ballmer, as well as the next-door neighbor of Microsoft General Counsel and Code.org Board member Brad Smith, whose FWD.us bio notes is responsible for Microsoft's philanthropic work. Code.org emerged on the scene shortly after Smith suggested that action on Microsoft's 'two-pronged' National Talent Strategy to increase K-12 CS education and the number of H-1B visas could be galvanized by 'producing a crisis'.

theodp writes: "We're investing $10 million in organizations that are upgrading the world," Microsoft announced on in its new Upgrade Your World website, which was created in conjunction with the Windows 10 launch. "We've identified nine global nonprofits, and we'd like your help choosing the 10th." The missions of the selected nonprofits include fighting global poverty, preventing children living with HIV from needlessly dying, increasing access to quality education for children in the developing world, conserving the lands and waters on which all life depends, and ensuring that all kindergartners learn 'computer science.' To paraphrase Sesame Street, can you guess which cause is not like the others? If you guessed Code.org, which wants CS made a "core" K-12 subject in U.S. schools, you're right! Coincidentally, Code.org's biggest donors include Microsoft ($3M+), Ballmer Family Giving ($3M+), and Bill Gates ($1M+). And Code.org CEO Hadi Partovi, who once reported to Satya Nadella, is coincidentally a sometimes jogging partner of Steve Ballmer, as well as the next-door neighbor of Microsoft General Counsel and Code.org Board member Brad Smith, whose FWD.us bio notes is responsible for Microsoft's philanthropic work. Code.org emerged on the scene shortly after Smith suggested that action on Microsoft's 'two-pronged' National Talent Strategy to increase K-12 CS education and the number of H-1B visas could be galvanized by 'producing a crisis'.

benrothke writes: Far too many technology books take a Hamburger Helper approach, where the first quarter or so of the book is about an introduction to the topic, and filler at the end with numerous appendices of publicly available information. These books end up being well over 800 pages without a lot of original information, even though they are written an advanced audience. In software engineering, a design pattern is a general repeatable solution to a commonly occurring problem in software design. A design pattern isn't a finished design that can be transformed directly into code. It is a description or template for how to solve a problem that can be used in many different situations. Using that approach for the cloud, in Cloud Computing Design Patterns, authors Thomas Erl, Robert Cope and Amin Naserpour have written a superb book that has no filler and fully stocked with excellent and invaluable content. Keep reading for the rest of Ben's review. Cloud Computing Design Patterns author Thomas Erl, Robert Cope, Amin Naserpour pages 592 publisher Prentice Hall rating 9/10 reviewer Ben Rothke ISBN 0133858561 summary Provides well-explained vendor-agnostic patterns to the challenges of providing or using cloud solutions from PaaS to SaaS. The authors use design patterns to refer to different aspects of cloud architectures and its design requirements. In the cloud, just as in software, design patterns can speed up the development process by providing tested, proven development paradigms. The book contains over 100 different design pattern scenario templates that are common to a standard enterprise cloud roll-out. Each scenario uses a common template which starts with a question or specific requirement. It then details the problem, solution, application and the mechanisms used to solve the problem.

The authors build on the notion that for anyone who wants to architect a large cloud solution, they need to have a broad understanding of the many factors involved with the real-world usage of cloud services. Because cloud services are so easy to deploy, they are often incorrectly misconfigured during roll-out and deployment. The authors write that its crucial have a strong background in cloud services before doing any sort of a rollout. Because it's often so easy to deploy cloud services, this results in far too many failed cloud projects. And when the project is poorly implemented, it can actually cause the business to be in a far worse point from where it was before the cloud rollout.

The authors deserve credit for writing a completely vendor agnostic reference, even though there are many times you would appreciate it if they could suggest a vendor for a specific solution. Some of the more interesting patterns detailed in the book are:

• Hypervisor clustering – how can a virtual server survive the failure of its hosting hypervisor or physical server?
• Stateless hypervisor – how can a hypervisor be deployed with a minimal amount of downtime, while allowing for quick updating and upgrading?
• Trusted platform BIOS – how can the BIOS on a cloud-based environment be protected from malicious code?
• Trusted cloud resource pools – how can cloud-based resource pools be secured and become trusted?
• Detecting and mitigating user-installed VMs – how can user installed VMs from non-authorized templates be detected and secured?

The book is replete with these scenarios, and each scenario includes downloadable figures that effectively illustrate the mechanisms used to solve the problem.

Chapter 3 provides a number of first-rate architectural ideas on how to design a highly resilient cloud solution. Much of the promise of the cloud is built on scalability, elasticity and overall optimization. These chapters show how to take those possibilities from conceptual to a working implementation.

Cloud failures are inevitable and chapter 4 details how to build failover, redundancy and recovery of IT resources for the cloud environment.

Chapter 9 is particularly important, as far too many designers think that since the underlying cloud abstraction layer is highly secure, everything they build on top of that will have the same level of security. The book details a number of design patterns that are crucial to ensuring the cloud design is securing that data at rest and is resistant against specific cloud attacks.

With a list price of $49.99, the book is a bargain considering the amount of useful information it provides. For anyone involved with cloud computing design and architecture, Cloud Computing Design Patterns, is an absolute must read.

Reviewed by Ben Rothke.

You can purchase Cloud Computing Design Patterns from amazon.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews (sci-fi included) -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page. If you'd like to see what books we have available from our review library please let us know.

benrothke writes: Far too many technology books take a Hamburger Helper approach, where the first quarter or so of the book is about an introduction to the topic, and filler at the end with numerous appendices of publicly available information. These books end up being well over 800 pages without a lot of original information, even though they are written an advanced audience. In software engineering, a design pattern is a general repeatable solution to a commonly occurring problem in software design. A design pattern isn't a finished design that can be transformed directly into code. It is a description or template for how to solve a problem that can be used in many different situations. Using that approach for the cloud, in Cloud Computing Design Patterns, authors Thomas Erl, Robert Cope and Amin Naserpour have written a superb book that has no filler and fully stocked with excellent and invaluable content. Keep reading for the rest of Ben's review. Cloud Computing Design Patterns author Thomas Erl, Robert Cope, Amin Naserpour pages 592 publisher Prentice Hall rating 9/10 reviewer Ben Rothke ISBN 0133858561 summary Provides well-explained vendor-agnostic patterns to the challenges of providing or using cloud solutions from PaaS to SaaS. The authors use design patterns to refer to different aspects of cloud architectures and its design requirements. In the cloud, just as in software, design patterns can speed up the development process by providing tested, proven development paradigms. The book contains over 100 different design pattern scenario templates that are common to a standard enterprise cloud roll-out. Each scenario uses a common template which starts with a question or specific requirement. It then details the problem, solution, application and the mechanisms used to solve the problem.

The authors build on the notion that for anyone who wants to architect a large cloud solution, they need to have a broad understanding of the many factors involved with the real-world usage of cloud services. Because cloud services are so easy to deploy, they are often incorrectly misconfigured during roll-out and deployment. The authors write that its crucial have a strong background in cloud services before doing any sort of a rollout. Because it's often so easy to deploy cloud services, this results in far too many failed cloud projects. And when the project is poorly implemented, it can actually cause the business to be in a far worse point from where it was before the cloud rollout.

The authors deserve credit for writing a completely vendor agnostic reference, even though there are many times you would appreciate it if they could suggest a vendor for a specific solution. Some of the more interesting patterns detailed in the book are:

• Hypervisor clustering – how can a virtual server survive the failure of its hosting hypervisor or physical server?
• Stateless hypervisor – how can a hypervisor be deployed with a minimal amount of downtime, while allowing for quick updating and upgrading?
• Trusted platform BIOS – how can the BIOS on a cloud-based environment be protected from malicious code?
• Trusted cloud resource pools – how can cloud-based resource pools be secured and become trusted?
• Detecting and mitigating user-installed VMs – how can user installed VMs from non-authorized templates be detected and secured?

The book is replete with these scenarios, and each scenario includes downloadable figures that effectively illustrate the mechanisms used to solve the problem.

Chapter 3 provides a number of first-rate architectural ideas on how to design a highly resilient cloud solution. Much of the promise of the cloud is built on scalability, elasticity and overall optimization. These chapters show how to take those possibilities from conceptual to a working implementation.

Cloud failures are inevitable and chapter 4 details how to build failover, redundancy and recovery of IT resources for the cloud environment.

Chapter 9 is particularly important, as far too many designers think that since the underlying cloud abstraction layer is highly secure, everything they build on top of that will have the same level of security. The book details a number of design patterns that are crucial to ensuring the cloud design is securing that data at rest and is resistant against specific cloud attacks.

With a list price of $49.99, the book is a bargain considering the amount of useful information it provides. For anyone involved with cloud computing design and architecture, Cloud Computing Design Patterns, is an absolute must read.

Reviewed by Ben Rothke.

You can purchase Cloud Computing Design Patterns from amazon.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews (sci-fi included) -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page. If you'd like to see what books we have available from our review library please let us know.

The University of Toronto recently undertook an investigation of one of its courses, a bachelor-level health class that taught both anti-vaccination materials and the "science" of homeopathy. The investigation was undertaken because of complaints from professors and other scientific and medical experts. Surprisingly, the university concluded that the class was just fine. "Students taking (the course) ... are in their final year of study and are expected to approach controversial topics with a critical lens. The instructor reports that she provides these readings as the students have already seen the other side in previous courses." The course's syllabus is available for reading. It contains quotes like this: "There are broad concepts that bind various 'alternative' medical modalities together. Among these is the assertion that the human organism, which developed as an integrated unit in its formation, also functions as an integrated unit; that mind, body, and spirit are inextricably linked. Disorder or disturbance in any one of these areas can cause disease in another area."
Update: 07/13 14:14 GMT by S : Reader Gallenod points out that the University has now decided that the course will not be taught during the 2015-2016 academic year, or over the summer.

The University of Toronto recently undertook an investigation of one of its courses, a bachelor-level health class that taught both anti-vaccination materials and the "science" of homeopathy. The investigation was undertaken because of complaints from professors and other scientific and medical experts. Surprisingly, the university concluded that the class was just fine. "Students taking (the course) ... are in their final year of study and are expected to approach controversial topics with a critical lens. The instructor reports that she provides these readings as the students have already seen the other side in previous courses." The course's syllabus is available for reading. It contains quotes like this: "There are broad concepts that bind various 'alternative' medical modalities together. Among these is the assertion that the human organism, which developed as an integrated unit in its formation, also functions as an integrated unit; that mind, body, and spirit are inextricably linked. Disorder or disturbance in any one of these areas can cause disease in another area."
Update: 07/13 14:14 GMT by S : Reader Gallenod points out that the University has now decided that the course will not be taught during the 2015-2016 academic year, or over the summer.

theodp writes: According to a Computer Science Teachers Association tweet, Google is reportedly asking educators to assess the unconscious bias of students and their parents for the search giant. "We are in the early stages of learning how unconscious bias plays out in schools, and who would benefit most from bias busting materials," begins the linked-to 5-page Google Form, which sports a ub-edu@google.com email address, but lists no contact name. "This survey should take 15 minutes to complete, and your responses are confidential, meaning that your feedback will not be attributed to you and the data will only be used in aggregate form." The form asks educators to "list the names of organizations, tools, and resources that you have used to combat unconscious bias," which is defined as "the attitudes or stereotypes that affect our understanding, actions, and decisions in an unconscious manner." A sample question: "Who do you think would benefit most from unconscious bias training at your school (or program)? Rank the following people in order (1=would most benefit to 5=would benefit least) training: Student, Parent (or guardian), Teacher (or educator), Guidance counselor, Principal." Google deflected criticism for its lack of women techies in the past by blaming parents' unconscious biases for not steering their girls to study computer science, suggesting an intervention was needed. "Outreach programs," advised Google, "should include a parent education component, so that parents learn how to actively encourage their daughters."

In 2007, we mentioned the eBay sale of an Enigma machine; now, The Guardian reports that another one is to be auctioned off next week, with an expected selling price of about £70,000 (at this writing, that's about $108,000). According to the article, "The machine being offered for sale, which dates from 1943 and currently belongs to a European museum, will go under the hammer at Sotheby's in London on Tuesday." The new owner may have need of a restoration manual and some reproduction batteries.

mikejuk writes: Google may have been wowing the web with its trippy images from neural networks but meanwhile it has just revealed that it has applied for at least six patents on fundamental neural network and AI [concepts]. This isn't good for academic research or for the development of AI by companies. The patents are on very specific things invented by Geoffrey Hinton's team like using drop out during training, or modifying data to provide additional training cases, but also include very general ideas such as classification itself. If Google was granted a patent on classification it would cover just about every method used for pattern recognition! You might make the charitable assumption that Google has just patented the ideas so that it can protect them — i.e. to stop other more evil companies from patenting them and extracting fees from open source implementations of machine learning libraries. Google has just started an AI arms race, and you can expect others to follow.

New submitter shanemccarthy writes with a story at Forbes that lays out a non-intuitive factor in the ongoing class-action suit over alleged labor law violations filed in the name of Uber drivers. Namely: how Uber drivers see themselves in relation to the company. While some drivers consider themselves, or would like to be considered, employees, and accrue the conventional benefits of employee status at a large company (and Uber, for all its crowd-sourcing, disintermediating origin story, is large enough to garner a valuation in the billions), a considerable number of the drivers do not want to give up their status as independent contractors. The rules of class action lawsuits, though, mean that if Uber's drivers are classed as employees, those who would like to remain independent won't have that option -- so the company is lining up examples of drivers who would seem by no one's definition to be employees, and who want to keep it that way. See also this earlier story about workplace classification for these drivers and others in non-traditional work arrangements.

Apple may have a bigger business problem than displeasing Taylor Swift with its new Apple Music service; According to Reuters, U.S. regulators are said (by anonymous sources) to be looking into Apple's treatment of music-streaming rivals, now that the company has gone from selling only downloadable music to competing directly with alternatives like Spotify and Pandora. A slice: While $9.99 has emerged as the going monthly rate for music subscriptions, including Apple's, some streaming companies complain that Apple's cut forces them to either charge more in the App Store than they do on other platforms or erode their profit margins. The Federal Trade Commission is looking at the issue but has not begun a formal investigation, said the three industry sources, who requested anonymity. The agency has had meetings with multiple concerned parties, one source said. The agency meets with companies routinely, and a formal investigation may not materialize.

There are lots of small but interesting news bits to take from the data dump made available by Wikileaks of internal documents from the Italian security firm Hacking Team, such as that a police unit investigating major crimes in Florida, according to some of the leaked emails, was interested in purchasing some of the company's surveillance technology. The Guardian has taken a longer look at the company's business and tactics, and outlines many of their actual and potential clients, in particular their government customers, and skewers Hacking Team's claims "that it does not sell to repressive regimes."

Shades of Blue Coat.

There are lots of small but interesting news bits to take from the data dump made available by Wikileaks of internal documents from the Italian security firm Hacking Team, such as that a police unit investigating major crimes in Florida, according to some of the leaked emails, was interested in purchasing some of the company's surveillance technology. The Guardian has taken a longer look at the company's business and tactics, and outlines many of their actual and potential clients, in particular their government customers, and skewers Hacking Team's claims "that it does not sell to repressive regimes."

Shades of Blue Coat.