As soon as it starts spreading it rapidly becomes indistinguishable from background noise, especially over insterstellar distances. And all of that's assuming the laser isn't occluded by whatever it's targeting, which it probably would be 99% of the time. No, I fear the chances that random stray communications of whatever sort might hit us would probably be vanishingly unlikely, especially over the short period we've been listening.
Or just as likely, highly directional communications. They're the only type that would be of much use over interstellar distances anyway, and unless they happen to be pointed straight at our little blue marble they may as well not exist.
It isn't "totally known" until someone has done it. Bottom line, we've never subjected a human to artificial gravity in space in any appreciable way. We've got much more experience with microgravity (and arguably lunar gravity) than artificial.
However we do know that the long term effects of low gravity on humans are catastrophic, a problem for which there is no solution on Mars, theoretical or otherwise. I'll take my chances on a space station with the science if it's all the same.
It is simple technology, with reliable, working prototypes *today*. The heaviest supplies can be generated on-site, which dramatically simplifies the mission architecture. On the other hand, mining asteroids is totally unproven - we haven't even landed on one. Mining and refining solids is not automated on Earth - why do you think we could do that so easily in space, where maintenance is much more difficult, and microgravity makes simple things like transporting material enormously more complex?
What's to prove, we know the materials needed are there, we know we have all the energy we need to extract them for free, the rest is simply a question of engineering. Obviously if human supervision is needed telepresence is a very old technology, you know, remote control. Also you appear to imagine that the only thing a Mars colony would need would be a few CO2 filters hanging off the side of a tent, then farmers can plough the red soil, divert glaciers to water the Martian cattle while mighty Martian miners swing picks to dig all the raw materials needed to forge a new nation from Martian rocks.
You're dreaming. The long tail of new technology and long term support needed to set up a self sufficient colony on Mars would likely dwarf that needed to set up a space station, I mean we already have one of those. And that's assuming it's even possible without major advances in genetic engineering to deal with the detrimental effects of low gravity.
We have NO current technology that can protect humans from cosmic radiation that doesn't involve insane amounts of mass
If by insane amounts of mass you mean it would be insane to try to move that much mass to orbit, you'd be right, but you're talking out both sides of your mouth here - if refined ore can be moved back to a space station from elsewhere in the system, it's much easier to simply move mass for shielding. Again, this isn't difficult.
Anyway you appear to have well and truly nailed your flag to the mast when it comes to Mars and there's no reasoning somone out of a position they didn't reason themselves into, so best of luck with that.
And how will people handle the coriolis effect? This is totally unknown.
It's "totally known" that the coriolis effect becomes negligible once you get far enough out from the hub. Seriously, this is not new, the calculations have been done many, many times. Hit google for more information, I'm really surprised at the number of people who don't know this, and that they'd comment without understanding whereof they speak in the first place.
This is just wrong. The greatest short-term advantage of Mars is the atmosphere full of CO2. That means a limitless supply of oxygen, and that we can bring a tiny amount of Hydrogen by mass which can then be turned into far greater amount of water and methane (rocket fuel). Atmospheric ISRU is easy, your car does it every day. Processing solids, as would be required for mining an asteroid or the lunar regolith, is something that has not yet been automated on Earth, much less in space.
In space you have effectively limitless energy in the form of the sun and limitless resources in the form of asteroids, many of which could individually supply a giant space station with raw materials for hundreds if not thousands of years to come. You don't need to worry about pollution and once your supply lines are set up deliveries arrive as regular as the post. Plus, extracting CO2 from the atmosphere of Mars would be the very least of the technical challenges facing a colony. A colony incidentally that would probably suffer from bone weakness due to the lower gravity on Mars, a problem for which there would be no solution.
What if you don't want a base at the pole? Probably the most promising place on the moon from a science perspective is the side facing away from Earth, which would be shielded from terrestrial EM pollution and would hence be an absolutely perfect place for a massive radio telescope, or any kind of telescope for that matter.
And one big objection that wasn't raised - moon dust seems to be far more abrasive than Mars dust, since there is essentially no erosion. The gravity problem you mention with Mars is worse on the moon. And there is very little of scientific interest on the moon aside from the aforementioned telescope - Mars, on the other hand, is far more interesting geologically and biologically.
Are you the same AC I responded to? Nobody here is seriously talking about a base on the moon, so you wrote up that whole paragraph answering an argment nobody was making.
Or, it just may be that "free markets" don't exist, have never existed and cannot exist, and this is just a snapshot of what late-stage capitalism looks like.
Eh you say this as if it were new information, even Adam Smith emphasised the importance of regulation. What you're trying to weasel-word advocate for here is the abolition of capiltalism in its entirety, which not only betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of the economic nature of capitalism, it's never going to happen, mostly because no better alternative exists. "Late stage" capitalism as you call it is mostly doing fine, continuing to improve standards of living, make technology cheaper, and put out of season fresh fruit on the shelves. China's a splendid example of a nation that was foundering until it embraced capitalism, albeit a Japanese-style form of it.
As for healthcare, the Dutch have a competitive system in place which is a passable imitation of semi-free markets in healthcare, hospitals are given a rating by patients and the results are published. That mightn't work everywhere due to their geography, but to say it's impossible is pretty ignorant, and further they show that capitalistic principles can work hand in hand with socialist safety nets (note I say socialist as opposed to Marxist). Their healthcare was rated the best and the best value for money in Europe until relatively recently too.
It wants its bottleneck back. From what I can see it's plugins, scripts and adverts loading from fifty different sites that clog web pages, not large file sizes or what have you. Yes I get that compression is vital for an outfit like Google and they want to showcase what they've been doing but most websites don't have their traffic volume.
Not at all, at least not in the mid to long term, especially if you need the enormous amounts of water that a space station or any kind of space-based industry would swallow.
You realize that spin won't generate a centrally directed gravitational field, right?
That's rather the point, you need to think in terms of space, not terrestrial mining. The actual mining and melting apparatus would be floating above the surface collecting material as it melts with the exception of the "scoop" which would be just behind the hotspot.
And that focusing light on the same spot of a rotating target (else goodbye efficiency) is much more difficult?
Again you're missing it, the rotation would be the means by which the surface moves rather than trying to move your mining apparatus around the surface. It would take a lot of energy to melt material in a timely fashion but it's not as though the sun has any shortage of energy to feed into solar concentrators, which could be arbitrarily large without being heavy.
Imagine a round ball of ice cream spinning on a top. Now imagine holding up a large magnifying glass in sunlight to focus on the equator while a small scoop runs right behind the bright area collecting the ice cream as it melts and funneling it off down a tube for separation into useful and non-useful stuff.
Because (at least some) gravity is a really useful thing to have.
It's much easier to get full earth gravity on a space station than on Mars. It's not even possible on Mars as far as I know.
Because Mars is one of few places with a reasonable day/night cycle.
Also trivial to simulate on a space station.
Because even a thin atmosphere beats hard vacuum by dampening the thermal swings during day/night cycle.
Nobody's suggesting a space station with the corridors exposed to vacuum.
Because Mars has a lot of useful materials available. Water, for example, which is kinda "must have" for any permanent settlement.
It's far easier to get to these things in space.
Moon really really sucks due to the whole "lunar night is really really really really cold and long" bit. Okay, you can work around that by building a base at the pole where there are peaks that are in permanent sunlight (and crater bottoms that are permanently dark).
He wasn't suggesting building moon bases.
The only major downside to Mars is "it is kinda far away" and it really isn't a huge deal if you do a major colonization effort.
Low gravity you can't increase, almost nonexistent atmosphere by earth standards, where it's warm enough to walk outside there is no water, where there's water it's lethally cold, and so on.
In-space construction on a large scale has the problem of every gram having to be shipped in from somewhere. Mars needs a lot of stuff imported early on, but a lot of the bulk stuff can be built on-site once you have a reasonable colony going. It really is the most habitable place we have besides Earth. It is one of the few places where you could (with time and a lot of effort) get a self-sufficient colony going.
You can do the exact same thing for space stations, ship up the material harvesting and refinement technology, have it harvest and refine while you're shipping up manufacturing plant. And again, these materials are readily available in space, unlike on Mars.
Today's rocket tech is not good enough to ship all the things needed to get to that point (too expensive, mostly) but there are people working to try to fix that bit.
I've often wondered whether enclosing the mining location in an envelope of some sort was really the most effective way to collect material in space. Surely either giving the target a spin or taking advantage of its existing spin while melting a spot, followed by an "ice cream scoop" collector might be more efficient? Afterwards it might end up looking a little like Vesta.
My point was that you can have a social safety net without buying into the dualistic us versus them, good and bad, black and white worldview that leftism - defined as that family of ideologies descended from and related to Marx's work - demands. It's not helpful, and in fact is counterproductive.
You'll never scientifically be able to detect lies as long as the symptoms of lying are indistinguishable from those of a variety of other psychological states. It's just not possible. On the other hand intelligent interrogation techniques are proving more and more effective.
Publishing information with intent to threaten or cause distress is illegal in most places as far as I'm aware. It's a bit like carrying a big honking hunting knife in public, you won't get arrested if you have a good reason for carrying it but there aren't many good reasons.
As for the jobs for life mentality, too many people who think their job is on the line are afraid to buck the system, stand up for what's right, and talk about problems.
Funny how it seems that it cuts both ways, isn't it?
Even funnier is the way it works out the exact opposite to what you seem to imagine. The jobs for life brigade are the most likely to keep their heads down because they're both aiming for a career and scared of being shunted off into a dead end paper shuffling position if they step on the wrong toes - you have to live with that job for life. Office politics in government bureaucracies are far more vicious than in the private sector.
Meh, it's just a question of management and accountability, this project clearly had very little of either. Projects farmed out to the private sector with stiff penalties for delays and failures (with insurance to cover the costs in case of bankruptcies) can quite often be an adequate way to get the most out of public funds. And/or ditch the jobs for life mentality that many government workers seem to have.
"Never trust anyone over thirty" is the mantra of the radical left, and among the many reasons the left has put so much effort into politicising third level education since the 70s. Don't take my word for it, go look up the Harvey Silverglate interview, the co-founder of FIRE. And he identifies as a leftist.
The reason for this shibboleth is another old adage - nothing takes an impression like youth and white paper. By the time you get into your thirties you've had a chance to experience the world and understand history and culture, you can see for yourself how destructive leftist policies can be - and I'd differentiate between leftism and the ostensible social goods they champion, for example a complete welfare state existed back in the Roman empire long before Marx put pen to paper.
Many of these "millenials", much as I dislike the term, are simply products of what they were taught in college. They'll learn in time but by then another wave of indoctrinates will be stamping around the place telling us how older people are evil and should die.
This isn't the whole picture of course but it's a substantial slice.
Interestingly that sort of bodycount is nothing new for China, at least according to this. Fall of the Ming Dynasty, 25 million, 17C. Taiping Rebellion, 20 million, 19C. An Lushan Revolt, 13 million, 8C. Xin Dynasty, 10 million, 1C. Fall of the Yuan Dynasty, 7½ million, 14C. Chinese Civil Wars, 7 million, 20C. Mao Zedong (mostly famine), 40 million 20C.
Just as Chinese "communism" is nothing of the sort but rather a return to its centuries-old beurocratic-Imperial tradition, complete with caste system, Mao's excesses were pretty much business as usual for the Middle Kingdom. Chinese culture and China in general can most certaily ill afford to start throwing stones in their particular glass house.
Also tangentially Genghis Khan managed to do away with twice as many people as Stalin, using only arrows and swords.
Slashdot Mirror
As soon as it starts spreading it rapidly becomes indistinguishable from background noise, especially over insterstellar distances. And all of that's assuming the laser isn't occluded by whatever it's targeting, which it probably would be 99% of the time. No, I fear the chances that random stray communications of whatever sort might hit us would probably be vanishingly unlikely, especially over the short period we've been listening.
Or just as likely, highly directional communications. They're the only type that would be of much use over interstellar distances anyway, and unless they happen to be pointed straight at our little blue marble they may as well not exist.
Hands up if you never watched the show and only ever read the books, which by the way were brilliant.
Is there anywhere I could get a look at a list of such little-known hacks?
It isn't "totally known" until someone has done it. Bottom line, we've never subjected a human to artificial gravity in space in any appreciable way. We've got much more experience with microgravity (and arguably lunar gravity) than artificial.
However we do know that the long term effects of low gravity on humans are catastrophic, a problem for which there is no solution on Mars, theoretical or otherwise. I'll take my chances on a space station with the science if it's all the same.
It is simple technology, with reliable, working prototypes *today*. The heaviest supplies can be generated on-site, which dramatically simplifies the mission architecture. On the other hand, mining asteroids is totally unproven - we haven't even landed on one. Mining and refining solids is not automated on Earth - why do you think we could do that so easily in space, where maintenance is much more difficult, and microgravity makes simple things like transporting material enormously more complex?
What's to prove, we know the materials needed are there, we know we have all the energy we need to extract them for free, the rest is simply a question of engineering. Obviously if human supervision is needed telepresence is a very old technology, you know, remote control. Also you appear to imagine that the only thing a Mars colony would need would be a few CO2 filters hanging off the side of a tent, then farmers can plough the red soil, divert glaciers to water the Martian cattle while mighty Martian miners swing picks to dig all the raw materials needed to forge a new nation from Martian rocks.
You're dreaming. The long tail of new technology and long term support needed to set up a self sufficient colony on Mars would likely dwarf that needed to set up a space station, I mean we already have one of those. And that's assuming it's even possible without major advances in genetic engineering to deal with the detrimental effects of low gravity.
We have NO current technology that can protect humans from cosmic radiation that doesn't involve insane amounts of mass
If by insane amounts of mass you mean it would be insane to try to move that much mass to orbit, you'd be right, but you're talking out both sides of your mouth here - if refined ore can be moved back to a space station from elsewhere in the system, it's much easier to simply move mass for shielding. Again, this isn't difficult.
Anyway you appear to have well and truly nailed your flag to the mast when it comes to Mars and there's no reasoning somone out of a position they didn't reason themselves into, so best of luck with that.
And how will people handle the coriolis effect? This is totally unknown.
It's "totally known" that the coriolis effect becomes negligible once you get far enough out from the hub. Seriously, this is not new, the calculations have been done many, many times. Hit google for more information, I'm really surprised at the number of people who don't know this, and that they'd comment without understanding whereof they speak in the first place.
This is just wrong. The greatest short-term advantage of Mars is the atmosphere full of CO2. That means a limitless supply of oxygen, and that we can bring a tiny amount of Hydrogen by mass which can then be turned into far greater amount of water and methane (rocket fuel). Atmospheric ISRU is easy, your car does it every day. Processing solids, as would be required for mining an asteroid or the lunar regolith, is something that has not yet been automated on Earth, much less in space.
In space you have effectively limitless energy in the form of the sun and limitless resources in the form of asteroids, many of which could individually supply a giant space station with raw materials for hundreds if not thousands of years to come. You don't need to worry about pollution and once your supply lines are set up deliveries arrive as regular as the post. Plus, extracting CO2 from the atmosphere of Mars would be the very least of the technical challenges facing a colony. A colony incidentally that would probably suffer from bone weakness due to the lower gravity on Mars, a problem for which there would be no solution.
What if you don't want a base at the pole? Probably the most promising place on the moon from a science perspective is the side facing away from Earth, which would be shielded from terrestrial EM pollution and would hence be an absolutely perfect place for a massive radio telescope, or any kind of telescope for that matter.
And one big objection that wasn't raised - moon dust seems to be far more abrasive than Mars dust, since there is essentially no erosion. The gravity problem you mention with Mars is worse on the moon. And there is very little of scientific interest on the moon aside from the aforementioned telescope - Mars, on the other hand, is far more interesting geologically and biologically.
Are you the same AC I responded to? Nobody here is seriously talking about a base on the moon, so you wrote up that whole paragraph answering an argment nobody was making.
Or, it just may be that "free markets" don't exist, have never existed and cannot exist, and this is just a snapshot of what late-stage capitalism looks like.
Eh you say this as if it were new information, even Adam Smith emphasised the importance of regulation. What you're trying to weasel-word advocate for here is the abolition of capiltalism in its entirety, which not only betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of the economic nature of capitalism, it's never going to happen, mostly because no better alternative exists. "Late stage" capitalism as you call it is mostly doing fine, continuing to improve standards of living, make technology cheaper, and put out of season fresh fruit on the shelves. China's a splendid example of a nation that was foundering until it embraced capitalism, albeit a Japanese-style form of it.
As for healthcare, the Dutch have a competitive system in place which is a passable imitation of semi-free markets in healthcare, hospitals are given a rating by patients and the results are published. That mightn't work everywhere due to their geography, but to say it's impossible is pretty ignorant, and further they show that capitalistic principles can work hand in hand with socialist safety nets (note I say socialist as opposed to Marxist). Their healthcare was rated the best and the best value for money in Europe until relatively recently too.
How did they ever excuse the restrictions in the first place, quality control?
It wants its bottleneck back. From what I can see it's plugins, scripts and adverts loading from fifty different sites that clog web pages, not large file sizes or what have you. Yes I get that compression is vital for an outfit like Google and they want to showcase what they've been doing but most websites don't have their traffic volume.
My guess is you'd have to destroy it.
Not at all, at least not in the mid to long term, especially if you need the enormous amounts of water that a space station or any kind of space-based industry would swallow.
You realize that spin won't generate a centrally directed gravitational field, right?
That's rather the point, you need to think in terms of space, not terrestrial mining. The actual mining and melting apparatus would be floating above the surface collecting material as it melts with the exception of the "scoop" which would be just behind the hotspot.
And that focusing light on the same spot of a rotating target (else goodbye efficiency) is much more difficult?
Again you're missing it, the rotation would be the means by which the surface moves rather than trying to move your mining apparatus around the surface. It would take a lot of energy to melt material in a timely fashion but it's not as though the sun has any shortage of energy to feed into solar concentrators, which could be arbitrarily large without being heavy.
Imagine a round ball of ice cream spinning on a top. Now imagine holding up a large magnifying glass in sunlight to focus on the equator while a small scoop runs right behind the bright area collecting the ice cream as it melts and funneling it off down a tube for separation into useful and non-useful stuff.
There is no other body in our solar system that could sustain human life in any self-sustainable way, not even in the short term.
Good thing we can build our own then I guess.
Earth is our one and only hope in the long-term.
No, it really isn't.
Really easy to get by rotating your space station.
Because (at least some) gravity is a really useful thing to have.
It's much easier to get full earth gravity on a space station than on Mars. It's not even possible on Mars as far as I know.
Because Mars is one of few places with a reasonable day/night cycle.
Also trivial to simulate on a space station.
Because even a thin atmosphere beats hard vacuum by dampening the thermal swings during day/night cycle.
Nobody's suggesting a space station with the corridors exposed to vacuum.
Because Mars has a lot of useful materials available. Water, for example, which is kinda "must have" for any permanent settlement.
It's far easier to get to these things in space.
Moon really really sucks due to the whole "lunar night is really really really really cold and long" bit. Okay, you can work around that by building a base at the pole where there are peaks that are in permanent sunlight (and crater bottoms that are permanently dark).
He wasn't suggesting building moon bases.
The only major downside to Mars is "it is kinda far away" and it really isn't a huge deal if you do a major colonization effort.
Low gravity you can't increase, almost nonexistent atmosphere by earth standards, where it's warm enough to walk outside there is no water, where there's water it's lethally cold, and so on.
In-space construction on a large scale has the problem of every gram having to be shipped in from somewhere. Mars needs a lot of stuff imported early on, but a lot of the bulk stuff can be built on-site once you have a reasonable colony going. It really is the most habitable place we have besides Earth. It is one of the few places where you could (with time and a lot of effort) get a self-sufficient colony going.
You can do the exact same thing for space stations, ship up the material harvesting and refinement technology, have it harvest and refine while you're shipping up manufacturing plant. And again, these materials are readily available in space, unlike on Mars.
Today's rocket tech is not good enough to ship all the things needed to get to that point (too expensive, mostly) but there are people working to try to fix that bit.
True, but also true for Mars.
I've often wondered whether enclosing the mining location in an envelope of some sort was really the most effective way to collect material in space. Surely either giving the target a spin or taking advantage of its existing spin while melting a spot, followed by an "ice cream scoop" collector might be more efficient? Afterwards it might end up looking a little like Vesta.
My point was that you can have a social safety net without buying into the dualistic us versus them, good and bad, black and white worldview that leftism - defined as that family of ideologies descended from and related to Marx's work - demands. It's not helpful, and in fact is counterproductive.
You'll never scientifically be able to detect lies as long as the symptoms of lying are indistinguishable from those of a variety of other psychological states. It's just not possible. On the other hand intelligent interrogation techniques are proving more and more effective.
Publishing information with intent to threaten or cause distress is illegal in most places as far as I'm aware. It's a bit like carrying a big honking hunting knife in public, you won't get arrested if you have a good reason for carrying it but there aren't many good reasons.
As for the jobs for life mentality, too many people who think their job is on the line are afraid to buck the system, stand up for what's right, and talk about problems.
Funny how it seems that it cuts both ways, isn't it?
Even funnier is the way it works out the exact opposite to what you seem to imagine. The jobs for life brigade are the most likely to keep their heads down because they're both aiming for a career and scared of being shunted off into a dead end paper shuffling position if they step on the wrong toes - you have to live with that job for life. Office politics in government bureaucracies are far more vicious than in the private sector.
Meh, it's just a question of management and accountability, this project clearly had very little of either. Projects farmed out to the private sector with stiff penalties for delays and failures (with insurance to cover the costs in case of bankruptcies) can quite often be an adequate way to get the most out of public funds. And/or ditch the jobs for life mentality that many government workers seem to have.
Fairly sure my rates are beyond your ability to pay Dave, so feel free to hit Google and educate yourself.
"Never trust anyone over thirty" is the mantra of the radical left, and among the many reasons the left has put so much effort into politicising third level education since the 70s. Don't take my word for it, go look up the Harvey Silverglate interview, the co-founder of FIRE. And he identifies as a leftist.
The reason for this shibboleth is another old adage - nothing takes an impression like youth and white paper. By the time you get into your thirties you've had a chance to experience the world and understand history and culture, you can see for yourself how destructive leftist policies can be - and I'd differentiate between leftism and the ostensible social goods they champion, for example a complete welfare state existed back in the Roman empire long before Marx put pen to paper.
Many of these "millenials", much as I dislike the term, are simply products of what they were taught in college. They'll learn in time but by then another wave of indoctrinates will be stamping around the place telling us how older people are evil and should die.
This isn't the whole picture of course but it's a substantial slice.
Interestingly that sort of bodycount is nothing new for China, at least according to this. Fall of the Ming Dynasty, 25 million, 17C. Taiping Rebellion, 20 million, 19C. An Lushan Revolt, 13 million, 8C. Xin Dynasty, 10 million, 1C. Fall of the Yuan Dynasty, 7½ million, 14C. Chinese Civil Wars, 7 million, 20C. Mao Zedong (mostly famine), 40 million 20C.
Just as Chinese "communism" is nothing of the sort but rather a return to its centuries-old beurocratic-Imperial tradition, complete with caste system, Mao's excesses were pretty much business as usual for the Middle Kingdom. Chinese culture and China in general can most certaily ill afford to start throwing stones in their particular glass house.
Also tangentially Genghis Khan managed to do away with twice as many people as Stalin, using only arrows and swords.
I'd be surprised if they hadn't reinvested it somewhere, I mean they're taking a serious ongoing monetary hit if it's just sitting in a bank account.