They didn't expose the rats to anything similar to the radiation an astronaut would be subjected to in their travel to Mars: they fried the rats with a short, intense radiation dose, while the astronauts would be exposed to a low dose long term. In fact, in the study they don't even claim that this radiation is anything similar to what one would find in space, they just say it is "space relevant". So what they found out is only that if you fry rats with radiation it impairs their cognition, and this impairment is long-lasting.
Also, TFS says that Scientific Reports is a Nature journal. This is true, Nature the company (or more precisely Holtzbrinck Publishing Group) does own this journal, but it has nothing to do with the Nature journal, editorially or scientifically. This is just a lame attempt to bestow Nature's reputation on Scientific Reports, which is in fact a pretty crappy journal, that does not even try to select papers based on quality, but claims to check only for correctness.
I also live in the EU. And when I walk on the streets the electric cars I see are the Nissan Leaf, the Tesla Model S, and the BMW i3. In this order of popularity.
Clearly the Model S has been important and popular, but let's not pretend there are no other companies producing serious electric cars that people actually want to buy. Or that it was even the first model to become mainstream. That honour clearly belongs to the Nissan Leaf.
Wow. Are you just trolling? Or do you really think Tesla is the sole (or even major) responsible for this symbolic law in Germany? Wake up. The world is bigger than the US.
Stop anthropomorphizing Nature. She hates it. But seriously, there is no intention in evolution, even if it were advantageous to the species as a whole to die young (which I doubt), it doesn't imply that humans would evolve this "mortality" trait. You need a clear mechanism, that works through inheritance and mutation.
I find it much more plausible that some particular mutations are advantageous before breeding age but deleterious after breeding age, like for example some improvement in memory that leads to brain damage in the long term. Any such mutation would be selected for, with a small counter-effect from older people looking after children and thus improving the chances their genes remain in the gene pool.
I'm interested in the fruit fly experiment, though. Could you please provide a citation? Maybe instead of doing selective breeding on humans we could just find out which gene makes them live longer and then hack it into our DNA =)
You are confused about their goals. They don't want to establish a self-sustaining colony on Mars for some economic benefit to Earth. No, they want to establish a self-sustaining colony on Mars as an end in itself.
I think you're right. Not only they need enough fuel to survive until the landing in Mars, they also need to fuel it there and launch it back to Earth. There's no way they'll be able to do that without active cooling. I'd be curious to know the details.
But the most incredible aspect of the video for me was that it shows the spaceship aerobraking directly from solar orbit to landing on Mars. Like braking from interplanetary speed to zero. Nobody has ever managed to do this. Maybe what they are actually planning to do is first aerobrake into a highly elliptic orbit on Mars, and then slowly aerobrake it into a circular orbit every time they pass through the periapsis, until the spaceship is slow enough that they can land it without it blowing up.
Hum, I never said that it is evil to have children on Mars, and I definetely don't think so. The children don't ask to be put on Earth either, and lots of them are born in warzones, fucked up countries like Saudi Arabia, or lame countries like Belgium. As bad as Mars is, I would still be born there rather than these places.
They are not planning to take weeks to fuel the spaceship. The plan is to do it in a matter of hours.
But getting people back to Earth is not really a problem; the spaceship is going to land on Mars, refuel there, and go back to Earth anyway. So the question is only if it is coming back empty or with regretful colonists.
Not that I expect many people to want to come back. These are people who have paid hundreds of thousands of dollars for the privilege of doing hard and potentially fatal work. They may lack in good sense, but I don't think they lack in determination.
I find the idea of being indebted in Mars rather exotic. It's not as if you're sending the police there to collect the money if the person defaults. I'm pretty sure Musk will accepted payment for the tickets in cash only.
That's a bad idea for genetic diversity. If you want to maximize organic growth you should send an all-female crew and a huge sperm bank that they can choose from.
I find this idea rather distasteful, however. It is unfair to the men who want to go to Mars, and is using women just as baby factories instead of qualified workers.
But besides moral problems, it is also very inefficient. There is no point in sending a crew to Mars that will be busy taking care of newborns in a very hostile environment. Much better is to make the babies on Earth and send them after they are grown up and educated.
Parachutes are shit for precision landing. But the reason they can get away with using mostly rocket power to land is that the first stage is mostly empty by that time, and rather light. So a little bit of firing is enough to brake it completely, requiring little fuel. In fact, the first stage is so light that they only use one of the nine engines to propulsively land it.
While Mars is not exactly friendly, living off the land there is actually possible. This is why people even think about colonizing it. It has water, it has sun, it has CO2. Grow plants there and so on.
But of course no one is going to colonize it with a single 100 ton ship. The idea is to send a lot of them. 10,000 was the number Musk quoted, to get to a self-sustaining industrial civilization.
No, this is not your point exactly, it is exactly the opposite. If the BIOS was set to RAID Windows would simply fail to load. It wouldn't search through the BIOS to see whether there existed a AHCI setting and then flip it. Making the setting inaccessible only fucks the user, it doesn't change anything else.
This doesn't make any sense. This was a BIOS setting, Windows wouldn't be able to change it even it if wanted to.
And AHCI causing battery life issues, really? This standard is old, and widely used. It is extremely unlikely that the chipset would be made just to work with RAID and AHCI remain untested. Most likely they just took some chipset that had been working with AHCI for years and added RAID support. I'll believe your claims about battery life if I see a benchmark.
If the issue was only that Linux lacked drivers for their SSD configuration that wouldn't be a problem (even though a bit of a dick move from their side). The problem is that there was BIOS setting to change the configuration from RAID to AHCI, but this setting was locked down. The person had to go through some pretty heroic lengths to unlock it.
Not having a Linux driver? That's explainable by stupidity. Not having a legacy compatibility mode? Could have been explained by stupidity if it were the case. Having a legacy compatibility mode, but making it inaccessible without a soldering iron? That's just malice.
And frankly, if the company is even considering locking down the BIOS like this, it shows that they have a very weird idea about who owns the damn laptop, and they're never getting my money.
Thanks for the detailed answer. Could you provide a citation about this research on ballutes? A quick google didn't reveal me anything, and I find really surprising your claim that one can simply use one as an aeroshell.
I'm not really concerned about the mass of the propellant for the return rocket; once we can do complex one-way robotic missions as we do in Mars it is time to worry about that. While I find the idea of a research station floating in the Venusian atmosphere really cool, I care most about what we can do now. Which brings to another question: we managed to put a 21 kg balloon in Venus in the 80s. Well, 21 kg is chump change as mass budgets go. We could fill Venus with balloons right now if we wanted to, and I bet the sensors we have would me orders of magnitude better than anything we put there in the 80s. Why aren't we doing that?
If I were China, for example, this is exactly what I would do. Easy, cheap, cool, new. What's there not to like?
I'm a bit skeptical of this landing in the atmosphere thing. You have to aerocapture the probe, let it slow down to a manageable speed, and then INFLATE A BALLOON? Balloons here on Earth are rather sensitive even to moderate winds. I guess during reentry you would have a much more unstable/violent environment. Do we really have anything that could withstand that, and carry a nontrivial amount of cargo?
Surprising as it may sound, the EU doesn't give a single fuck about what laws municipalities and states in the US follow.
According to EU law, it is illegal to give a tax break to a company and not the others. You disagree? Well, I guess you understand EU law much better than the European Comission, so I should follow your wisdom.
Come on, are you even trying to make a proper argument? If you want to be taken seriously, you could try writing without all this ALL CAPS and *starts* and this weird structure >> you just sound like a raving lunatic.
Slashdot Mirror
You clearly haven't read either my comment or TFA itself. If you have a substantive criticism of my position I'll be happy to respond.
They didn't expose the rats to anything similar to the radiation an astronaut would be subjected to in their travel to Mars: they fried the rats with a short, intense radiation dose, while the astronauts would be exposed to a low dose long term. In fact, in the study they don't even claim that this radiation is anything similar to what one would find in space, they just say it is "space relevant". So what they found out is only that if you fry rats with radiation it impairs their cognition, and this impairment is long-lasting.
Also, TFS says that Scientific Reports is a Nature journal. This is true, Nature the company (or more precisely Holtzbrinck Publishing Group) does own this journal, but it has nothing to do with the Nature journal, editorially or scientifically. This is just a lame attempt to bestow Nature's reputation on Scientific Reports, which is in fact a pretty crappy journal, that does not even try to select papers based on quality, but claims to check only for correctness.
I also live in the EU. And when I walk on the streets the electric cars I see are the Nissan Leaf, the Tesla Model S, and the BMW i3. In this order of popularity.
Clearly the Model S has been important and popular, but let's not pretend there are no other companies producing serious electric cars that people actually want to buy. Or that it was even the first model to become mainstream. That honour clearly belongs to the Nissan Leaf.
And how do you use electricity to fuel an ICE?
Wow. Are you just trolling? Or do you really think Tesla is the sole (or even major) responsible for this symbolic law in Germany? Wake up. The world is bigger than the US.
What is an emission neutral ICE? I don't think I have ever seen one.
Stop anthropomorphizing Nature. She hates it. But seriously, there is no intention in evolution, even if it were advantageous to the species as a whole to die young (which I doubt), it doesn't imply that humans would evolve this "mortality" trait. You need a clear mechanism, that works through inheritance and mutation.
I find it much more plausible that some particular mutations are advantageous before breeding age but deleterious after breeding age, like for example some improvement in memory that leads to brain damage in the long term. Any such mutation would be selected for, with a small counter-effect from older people looking after children and thus improving the chances their genes remain in the gene pool.
I'm interested in the fruit fly experiment, though. Could you please provide a citation? Maybe instead of doing selective breeding on humans we could just find out which gene makes them live longer and then hack it into our DNA =)
You are confused about their goals. They don't want to establish a self-sustaining colony on Mars for some economic benefit to Earth. No, they want to establish a self-sustaining colony on Mars as an end in itself.
I think you're right. Not only they need enough fuel to survive until the landing in Mars, they also need to fuel it there and launch it back to Earth. There's no way they'll be able to do that without active cooling. I'd be curious to know the details.
But the most incredible aspect of the video for me was that it shows the spaceship aerobraking directly from solar orbit to landing on Mars. Like braking from interplanetary speed to zero. Nobody has ever managed to do this. Maybe what they are actually planning to do is first aerobrake into a highly elliptic orbit on Mars, and then slowly aerobrake it into a circular orbit every time they pass through the periapsis, until the spaceship is slow enough that they can land it without it blowing up.
Hum, I never said that it is evil to have children on Mars, and I definetely don't think so. The children don't ask to be put on Earth either, and lots of them are born in warzones, fucked up countries like Saudi Arabia, or lame countries like Belgium. As bad as Mars is, I would still be born there rather than these places.
They are not planning to take weeks to fuel the spaceship. The plan is to do it in a matter of hours.
But getting people back to Earth is not really a problem; the spaceship is going to land on Mars, refuel there, and go back to Earth anyway. So the question is only if it is coming back empty or with regretful colonists.
Not that I expect many people to want to come back. These are people who have paid hundreds of thousands of dollars for the privilege of doing hard and potentially fatal work. They may lack in good sense, but I don't think they lack in determination.
I find the idea of being indebted in Mars rather exotic. It's not as if you're sending the police there to collect the money if the person defaults. I'm pretty sure Musk will accepted payment for the tickets in cash only.
That's a bad idea for genetic diversity. If you want to maximize organic growth you should send an all-female crew and a huge sperm bank that they can choose from.
I find this idea rather distasteful, however. It is unfair to the men who want to go to Mars, and is using women just as baby factories instead of qualified workers.
But besides moral problems, it is also very inefficient. There is no point in sending a crew to Mars that will be busy taking care of newborns in a very hostile environment. Much better is to make the babies on Earth and send them after they are grown up and educated.
Parachutes are shit for precision landing. But the reason they can get away with using mostly rocket power to land is that the first stage is mostly empty by that time, and rather light. So a little bit of firing is enough to brake it completely, requiring little fuel. In fact, the first stage is so light that they only use one of the nine engines to propulsively land it.
The tanker cannot really wait indefinitely, as the fuel it is holding is cryogenic (liquid methane/liquid oxygen), and boil-off is a problem.
But yeah, they are probably going to do as you say. No point in keeping people waiting in orbit.
While Mars is not exactly friendly, living off the land there is actually possible. This is why people even think about colonizing it. It has water, it has sun, it has CO2. Grow plants there and so on.
But of course no one is going to colonize it with a single 100 ton ship. The idea is to send a lot of them. 10,000 was the number Musk quoted, to get to a self-sustaining industrial civilization.
-1, Pedantic.
No, this is not your point exactly, it is exactly the opposite. If the BIOS was set to RAID Windows would simply fail to load. It wouldn't search through the BIOS to see whether there existed a AHCI setting and then flip it. Making the setting inaccessible only fucks the user, it doesn't change anything else.
And when it comes to milking every possible cent out of their control of the DNS system, the US does a really good job.
This doesn't make any sense. This was a BIOS setting, Windows wouldn't be able to change it even it if wanted to.
And AHCI causing battery life issues, really? This standard is old, and widely used. It is extremely unlikely that the chipset would be made just to work with RAID and AHCI remain untested. Most likely they just took some chipset that had been working with AHCI for years and added RAID support. I'll believe your claims about battery life if I see a benchmark.
If the issue was only that Linux lacked drivers for their SSD configuration that wouldn't be a problem (even though a bit of a dick move from their side). The problem is that there was BIOS setting to change the configuration from RAID to AHCI, but this setting was locked down. The person had to go through some pretty heroic lengths to unlock it.
Not having a Linux driver? That's explainable by stupidity.
Not having a legacy compatibility mode? Could have been explained by stupidity if it were the case.
Having a legacy compatibility mode, but making it inaccessible without a soldering iron? That's just malice.
And frankly, if the company is even considering locking down the BIOS like this, it shows that they have a very weird idea about who owns the damn laptop, and they're never getting my money.
Thanks for the detailed answer. Could you provide a citation about this research on ballutes? A quick google didn't reveal me anything, and I find really surprising your claim that one can simply use one as an aeroshell.
I'm not really concerned about the mass of the propellant for the return rocket; once we can do complex one-way robotic missions as we do in Mars it is time to worry about that. While I find the idea of a research station floating in the Venusian atmosphere really cool, I care most about what we can do now. Which brings to another question: we managed to put a 21 kg balloon in Venus in the 80s. Well, 21 kg is chump change as mass budgets go. We could fill Venus with balloons right now if we wanted to, and I bet the sensors we have would me orders of magnitude better than anything we put there in the 80s. Why aren't we doing that?
If I were China, for example, this is exactly what I would do. Easy, cheap, cool, new. What's there not to like?
I'm a bit skeptical of this landing in the atmosphere thing. You have to aerocapture the probe, let it slow down to a manageable speed, and then INFLATE A BALLOON? Balloons here on Earth are rather sensitive even to moderate winds. I guess during reentry you would have a much more unstable/violent environment. Do we really have anything that could withstand that, and carry a nontrivial amount of cargo?
Surprising as it may sound, the EU doesn't give a single fuck about what laws municipalities and states in the US follow.
According to EU law, it is illegal to give a tax break to a company and not the others. You disagree? Well, I guess you understand EU law much better than the European Comission, so I should follow your wisdom.
Come on, are you even trying to make a proper argument? If you want to be taken seriously, you could try writing without all this ALL CAPS and *starts* and this weird structure >> you just sound like a raving lunatic.