>Pot and Hemp are the same plant, they aren't "brothers." Only in the same way that mustard, cabbage, and broccoli are all "the same plant". Technically they are - they aren't different species yet, but they're not "the same plant" for any human usage scenario.
Why wireless charging? That's the beauty of USB 3/C: one plug that can carry all the power and data you need. Over efficient wires, instead of a wireless interface that throws away 20-30% of the power.
I'm not quite sure how exactly licensing is handled, but TVs pretty much already all include HDMI, and often DisplayPort, as well as USB ports, so most of the licensing is probably already paid. All they really need to do is incorporate a USB hub that can break out the video signal and they'd be set.
Meanwhile USB shows no sign of going anywhere - even USB 1.0 still occasionally crops up in new devices.
Yeah. Kind of a shame to basically throw away the "Smart" part of the TV that way, but so long as the manufacturers continue to prove themselves both untrustworthy and incompetent, what else can you responsibly do?
And then there are all the people who happily pay to install an Amazon or Google home surveillance system in order to play music and do web searches by voice. It's hardly surprising that sleazy manufacturer behavior is rampant.
Two points: A large percentage of people are single. A large percentage of people with families own more than one television. A lot of people with a TV don't actually watch a lot of TV.
In any case having a TV that can double as a computer monitor can be really enjoyable, and a dramatic increase in the value of your purchase. I've been happily using a TV as my primary monitor for over a decade now - connected to my desktop, consoles, and chromecast, as well as docking my laptop when I want more screen space on it.
What I don't understand is why you'd want to introduce all the lag-inducing, performance killing properties of a remote desktop into the equation. The ability to go fully wireless would doubtless be nice for office applications, but I just don't see it working well for any sort of reflex-based gaming.
What I'm really waiting for is a TV that acts as a docking station - just plug in single a USB-C cable (with embedded HDMI/displayport) to your laptop, phone, etc. to recharge and get a big screen, good speakers, keyboard, mouse, etc. You can already get the basic functionality without too much trouble, but integrating a docking hub directly into the TV seems like the most elegant way to accomplish it, and at minimal cost
I don't dispute that Capitalism has been good for generating wealth - which is what you're describing the effects of. It's specifically *distribution* which is the problem - particularly because wealth is power.
If you start out with the top 10% owning 40% of the wealth, then double the wealth, but give 80% of the new wealth to the top 10%, then yeah, the poor and middle class may be 20% richer than they were, which makes an especially big difference for the poor. The rich though are 80% richer than they were, and own 60% of the wealth - which gives them even more power in setting the rules, which lets them tip the game even further in their favor, so that when wealth grows more, they get an even bigger piece of the spoils, and even more outsized power.
So, the average poor guy may be getting steadily richer, but he's also getting steadily weaker politically. And even the wealth increase only continues so long as the rate of wealth production exceeds the rate of wealth concentration - which is no longer the case in the U.S. - wide sections of the population are actually getting less wealthy, especially in the middle class - we're seeing the first inter-generation income decline since the Great Depression.
Are you in Oregon? Seriously - I like blackberries, but when they fill all sunlit areas to a thorn-filled depth of 5-10 feet, and much more when they can bury isolated trees, that's something else altogether.
> "It didn't work last time, or the time before that Sounds like capitalism.
Oh, it works great if GDP is your only measure, but it does a piss-poor job of distributing the wealth generated to the people actually generating it. Everyplace we see it on its own we see soaring inequality and eventual collapse. As you would expect of a social system that enshrines the pre-existing possession of wealth as the greatest virtue. (it's called CAPITAL-ism for a reason)
Kudzu Russian thistle Salt-cedar A few of the invasive plants that are causing increasing environmental damage in the U.S. Heck - try to go hiking in Oregon. Blackberries have taken over practically every unshaded, untended spot in the state to the aggravation of all. The man who introduced them is cursed regularly.
Any species introduced into an area where it can thrive, and where there are no effective predators to keep it in check, will be invasive. They displace the native species, thereby also harming every other species that relied on them for food or shelter. The knock-on effects from that can be ecologically devastating.
Not so - there are numerous island species that self-regulate their populations. There's an island, near New Zealand if I recall correctly, populated by many species of birds, and no predators - at least until we introduced rats. The birds mostly all respond to environmental stresses by not breeding as much, so that they self-regulate their population to remain within the carrying capacity of the island. Rats are really throwing them for a loop, since they've introduced a stressor unrelated to carrying capacity - eggs are being eaten, and the birds are responding by reproducing less. Not a promising cycle.
We also can't control the weather, or even predict it over the course of an entire growing season. And it's looking like for at least the next few generations that weather is probably going to be getting steadily more extreme and unpredictable. Which is going to make choosing what to plant where increasingly difficult, and likely hurt yields badly.
Yes, but they can easily go through several to dozens of generations in a single day, which compensates for the much slower speed of evolution per generation.
They're also mostly not asexual - they just *reproduce* asexually. Bacteria in particular regularly get together with their companions for a little gene-on-gene action, swapping useful adaptations - so that a particularly useful mutation can (potentially - though its unlikely) spread throughout a population in the same generation it first appears. They're not even limited to only swapping genes with the same species.
Keep in mind - our most powerful gene-editing tools were all stolen from bacteria. They're the technological leaders when it comes to gene-editing, they just lack intelligent guidance for applying it. But, they have us outnumbered by about 600 million trillion to one (~100 trillion bacteria live in a single healthy human alone), and that amount of massively parallel trial-and-error may well be even more effective than intelligence.
Hey, it takes a lot of courage to blatantly fck over your customer base while you tell them they like it. Even if you're Apple and have most of your customers brainwashed that everything you do is The Next Great Thing. The reality distortion field hasn't been quite as strong since Jobs died, and a nakedly exploitative move of that magnitude seems to have woken up at least a slight percentage of the fanboys to their predicament.
The lifetime educational records of a bunch of up-and-coming suckers^H^H^H^H^H consumers, mostly with practically no experience in making financial decisions on their own? Nope, can't think of anyway that could be monetized.
Nothing like a show of across-the-aisle holiday unity on a straightforward public interest bill right? And we've got a whole bunch of non-traditional new congressfolk incoming, maybe not as loyal to the existing power structures, and looking like they intend to try to shake things up.
If I'm being cynical, the biggest poison pill that springs to mind, without even looking at the bill, is the straightforward (un?)intended consequences when this bill hits bureaucratic inertia.
It seems to me like a great way to make the day-to-day bureaucracy encourage secrecy, with no ill-will by anyone making the choice. If you've got a report that needs to be either stamped sensitive and filed away, or published online through the appropriate bureaucratic channels, how much more tempting will it be to just reach for/recommend the stamp? What's the penalty for "accidentally" stamping something that shouldn't have been? For publishing something sensitive? What are the odds of getting caught in either case? It's probably better just to use the stamp, if there's the slightest hint of a doubt.
And just like that, a vast swath of inconveniently useful data is kept out of the public's hands, firmly beyond the reach of a straightforward FOIA request. All in the name of government transparency.
Worse, how do you fight that in the court of public opinion? You seriously want to try to get people united behind promoting open government, by repealing the open government act? Think of the soundbites just waiting to be harvested from any representative trying to arguing for that.
Just because the pilot is probably a robot, doesn't mean there's no use for a human captain.
Even if it's only an abort switch under the control of human judgement, that's still a potentially big improvement over full autonomy, since even the best-programmed/trained AI won't have the same understanding of abort-worthy situations as a human.
And in reality, it's quite likely that other things benefit from human judgement as well. For example, landing on unfamiliar territory where additional information is becoming available with every passing moment. Maybe best to let the computer do the flying, but quite likely an advantage to have a trained human at a real-time landing-target adjustment screen e.g. displaying the rapidly improving terrain map of the potential landing zone overlayed with the rapidly shrinking potential landing zone and current target, along with both AI and human-flagged hazards to avoid and most-promising landing points.
It will be interesting to see just how much the landing experience gained here will actually help elsewhere. I'm strongly hopeful, I mean it *should* be a lot easier to land on Mars, the moon, etc. where atmospheric variability isn't a confounding factor. Whether it actually *is* or not? We shall see - reality has a way of laying bare unsuspected assumptions and oversights. I'm sure the experience will translate to a much better starting point - but I still wouldn't want to be on board the first BFR to try landing on the moon. But hey, sign me up for the companion BFR in lunar orbit, serving as a micro-lag orbital "ground control".
It may, by I don't really see any reason it should in most cases. Since a GPS receiver is basically just a radio receiver + computerized signal analysis, it makes multi-network compatibility really easy - all you need is a receiver that can receive signals across all the frequencies used (probably not an incredibly expensive upgrade), and somewhat more complicated software that can calculate your position from any of the networks (which has no inherent per-unit cost at all).
You are quite right, and I see no reason to stop calling them out loudly and regularly over that fact. At worst it keeps a reminder in the face of those all those fellow voters able to overlook that fact. Journalism has pretty much died in the U.S., and those wearing its garments deserve to be publicly spat on with regularity, for the good of everyone. With a lot of luck maybe it will even inspire real journalism again, if only as a fresh new competitor in the attention market.
Except professional journalism is supposed to involve research and verification. Without investigation and verification it's not news, it's just broadcast entertainment repeating social-media content. Any "news" outlet that does that kind of "reporting" deserves to be called out for their professional malfeasance.
It's a matter of terminology. The actual question is "is/was there *liquid* water on Mars" - but water is relatively special in that there are common names for its gaseuos and solid phases, so that "water" often implies "liquid". We've known for a long time that there's water-ice on Mars - the polar icecaps clearly contain both water and CO2. Now we're mapping and characterizing particular deposits that might be of interest to future researchers and colonists.
Quite so. The triple-point of water is at about 273K (0C, 32F) and 612 Pa(0.006atm), Below roughly that temperature water is solid except at even lower pressures.
Meanwhile, Mars' atmospheric pressure at the surface hovers around 600Pa, and noontime temperatures on a tropical summer day on Mars only gets up to ~293K (20C, 68F), meaning most of the time, across most of the surface, Martian water will tend to be solid, though it may sublimate on a warm day, especially in direct sunlight. But it won't take much of a localized cold spot to keep it firmly solid.
With warm Martian days hovering so close to the triple point, it's also interesting to consider that local weather conditions could easily allow liquid water to exist temporarily.
No, it really isn't. You don't even need relativity - plain old Newtonian mechanics is quite sufficient for navigation within the solar system by anything yet built by Man. You'll get some discrepancies if you pay close enough attention, but nothing that wouldn't be corrected by dead reckoning, if not lost in the noise of other imperfections in your rocket.
You need orbital mechanics to hit what you're aiming for, but that's still simple stuff, and it'd be a real stretch to call that "cosmological maths" (what exactly do you mean by that phrase?) - neither dark matter, dark energy, nor any other cosmological-scale factor manifest noticeably in something as tiny as a solar system. And very little in cosmology cares about things that happen on human timescales, other than the explosions.
Well, that's also pretty enormous reservoir of easily worked raw materials for construction (ice is pretty strong stuff, whether you're building "igloos" or melting ice-tunnels. Or both - if you're mining water you may as well make a useful hole, and vice-versa), and feed-stock for growing a sustainable ecology (along with CO2 from the atmosphere) for food, air scrubbing, oxygen production, and various wood and cellulose-based raw materials.
I'm curious as to how well graphene filters would do for removing Martian contaminants from water. There's a lot of pretty nasty stuff blowing around Mars, but graphene seems to be pretty good at blocking almost everything except water.
Even more interesting might be to take core samples first. How long has that crater been gradually filling with ice to become a mile thick? You've got an incredible record of Martian atmospheric conditions just sitting there waiting to be studied. Probably some great information about the solar wind to be found as well, without a substantial magnetosphere to deflect it. There might even be traces of life lingering within it, just waiting to be found.
>No, I realized instead that distance is not a factor for landing success.
Actually it is - in two big ways: - The lander is subjected to much longer thermal and radiation stresses during the long slow flight to Mars (since for whatever reason we haven't landed on the moon much), which means more probability of hardware failures.
- Since we've abandoned MAnned spaceflight beyond orbit, the lander must be pretty much fully autonomous - since any human interaction is subjected to light-speed delay - 2.6 seconds round-trip to the moon, which is difficult to deal with for any but the most minor of problems, and 6-45 light-minutes to Mars, which makes any intervention during the landing routine completely impossible.
It's also a major factor in the cost and frequency of the attempts, and well as the demand for them. There've been a grand total of 48 launches to Mars spread across 56 years (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exploration_of_Mars), several governments, and multiple generations of scientists, engineers, and administrators. Not all of those launches even included a lander, and of those that did, they couldn't learn anything from the previous several landers launched, since those hadn't yet reached Mars by the time the current one departed.
Contrast that to the 46 Falcon 9 booster landings SpaceX has attempted in just the last six years, all under the guidance of one man, by one mostly-coherent team. All completed sequentially, so that any lessons learned from one landing attempt could be immediately applied to the next.
>The point of a university is (should be?) to teach people how to learn
Hell, that should start with your first year of grade school and be built on every year thereafter - in fact that should be one of the primary goals. Knowing how to learn makes an *incredible* difference in the effectiveness of all the years of schooling to follow, the sooner you start teaching it, the greater the benefit.
You even have the advantage that young children already instinctively know how to learn experimentally at near-optimal rates, the trick is teaching them to do so consciously, so that they can apply the skills to less hands-on fields, rather than training it out of them through rote memorization.
Slashdot Mirror
>Pot and Hemp are the same plant, they aren't "brothers."
Only in the same way that mustard, cabbage, and broccoli are all "the same plant". Technically they are - they aren't different species yet, but they're not "the same plant" for any human usage scenario.
Why wireless charging? That's the beauty of USB 3/C: one plug that can carry all the power and data you need. Over efficient wires, instead of a wireless interface that throws away 20-30% of the power.
I'm not quite sure how exactly licensing is handled, but TVs pretty much already all include HDMI, and often DisplayPort, as well as USB ports, so most of the licensing is probably already paid. All they really need to do is incorporate a USB hub that can break out the video signal and they'd be set.
Meanwhile USB shows no sign of going anywhere - even USB 1.0 still occasionally crops up in new devices.
Yeah. Kind of a shame to basically throw away the "Smart" part of the TV that way, but so long as the manufacturers continue to prove themselves both untrustworthy and incompetent, what else can you responsibly do?
And then there are all the people who happily pay to install an Amazon or Google home surveillance system in order to play music and do web searches by voice. It's hardly surprising that sleazy manufacturer behavior is rampant.
Two points:
A large percentage of people are single.
A large percentage of people with families own more than one television.
A lot of people with a TV don't actually watch a lot of TV.
In any case having a TV that can double as a computer monitor can be really enjoyable, and a dramatic increase in the value of your purchase. I've been happily using a TV as my primary monitor for over a decade now - connected to my desktop, consoles, and chromecast, as well as docking my laptop when I want more screen space on it.
What I don't understand is why you'd want to introduce all the lag-inducing, performance killing properties of a remote desktop into the equation. The ability to go fully wireless would doubtless be nice for office applications, but I just don't see it working well for any sort of reflex-based gaming.
What I'm really waiting for is a TV that acts as a docking station - just plug in single a USB-C cable (with embedded HDMI/displayport) to your laptop, phone, etc. to recharge and get a big screen, good speakers, keyboard, mouse, etc. You can already get the basic functionality without too much trouble, but integrating a docking hub directly into the TV seems like the most elegant way to accomplish it, and at minimal cost
I don't dispute that Capitalism has been good for generating wealth - which is what you're describing the effects of. It's specifically *distribution* which is the problem - particularly because wealth is power.
If you start out with the top 10% owning 40% of the wealth, then double the wealth, but give 80% of the new wealth to the top 10%, then yeah, the poor and middle class may be 20% richer than they were, which makes an especially big difference for the poor. The rich though are 80% richer than they were, and own 60% of the wealth - which gives them even more power in setting the rules, which lets them tip the game even further in their favor, so that when wealth grows more, they get an even bigger piece of the spoils, and even more outsized power.
So, the average poor guy may be getting steadily richer, but he's also getting steadily weaker politically. And even the wealth increase only continues so long as the rate of wealth production exceeds the rate of wealth concentration - which is no longer the case in the U.S. - wide sections of the population are actually getting less wealthy, especially in the middle class - we're seeing the first inter-generation income decline since the Great Depression.
Are you in Oregon? Seriously - I like blackberries, but when they fill all sunlit areas to a thorn-filled depth of 5-10 feet, and much more when they can bury isolated trees, that's something else altogether.
> "It didn't work last time, or the time before that
Sounds like capitalism.
Oh, it works great if GDP is your only measure, but it does a piss-poor job of distributing the wealth generated to the people actually generating it. Everyplace we see it on its own we see soaring inequality and eventual collapse. As you would expect of a social system that enshrines the pre-existing possession of wealth as the greatest virtue. (it's called CAPITAL-ism for a reason)
Kudzu
Russian thistle
Salt-cedar
A few of the invasive plants that are causing increasing environmental damage in the U.S.
Heck - try to go hiking in Oregon. Blackberries have taken over practically every unshaded, untended spot in the state to the aggravation of all. The man who introduced them is cursed regularly.
Any species introduced into an area where it can thrive, and where there are no effective predators to keep it in check, will be invasive. They displace the native species, thereby also harming every other species that relied on them for food or shelter. The knock-on effects from that can be ecologically devastating.
Not so - there are numerous island species that self-regulate their populations. There's an island, near New Zealand if I recall correctly, populated by many species of birds, and no predators - at least until we introduced rats. The birds mostly all respond to environmental stresses by not breeding as much, so that they self-regulate their population to remain within the carrying capacity of the island. Rats are really throwing them for a loop, since they've introduced a stressor unrelated to carrying capacity - eggs are being eaten, and the birds are responding by reproducing less. Not a promising cycle.
We also can't control the weather, or even predict it over the course of an entire growing season. And it's looking like for at least the next few generations that weather is probably going to be getting steadily more extreme and unpredictable. Which is going to make choosing what to plant where increasingly difficult, and likely hurt yields badly.
Yes, but they can easily go through several to dozens of generations in a single day, which compensates for the much slower speed of evolution per generation.
They're also mostly not asexual - they just *reproduce* asexually. Bacteria in particular regularly get together with their companions for a little gene-on-gene action, swapping useful adaptations - so that a particularly useful mutation can (potentially - though its unlikely) spread throughout a population in the same generation it first appears. They're not even limited to only swapping genes with the same species.
Keep in mind - our most powerful gene-editing tools were all stolen from bacteria. They're the technological leaders when it comes to gene-editing, they just lack intelligent guidance for applying it. But, they have us outnumbered by about 600 million trillion to one (~100 trillion bacteria live in a single healthy human alone), and that amount of massively parallel trial-and-error may well be even more effective than intelligence.
Hey, it takes a lot of courage to blatantly fck over your customer base while you tell them they like it. Even if you're Apple and have most of your customers brainwashed that everything you do is The Next Great Thing. The reality distortion field hasn't been quite as strong since Jobs died, and a nakedly exploitative move of that magnitude seems to have woken up at least a slight percentage of the fanboys to their predicament.
The lifetime educational records of a bunch of up-and-coming suckers^H^H^H^H^H consumers, mostly with practically no experience in making financial decisions on their own? Nope, can't think of anyway that could be monetized.
Nothing like a show of across-the-aisle holiday unity on a straightforward public interest bill right? And we've got a whole bunch of non-traditional new congressfolk incoming, maybe not as loyal to the existing power structures, and looking like they intend to try to shake things up.
If I'm being cynical, the biggest poison pill that springs to mind, without even looking at the bill, is the straightforward (un?)intended consequences when this bill hits bureaucratic inertia.
It seems to me like a great way to make the day-to-day bureaucracy encourage secrecy, with no ill-will by anyone making the choice. If you've got a report that needs to be either stamped sensitive and filed away, or published online through the appropriate bureaucratic channels, how much more tempting will it be to just reach for/recommend the stamp? What's the penalty for "accidentally" stamping something that shouldn't have been? For publishing something sensitive? What are the odds of getting caught in either case? It's probably better just to use the stamp, if there's the slightest hint of a doubt.
And just like that, a vast swath of inconveniently useful data is kept out of the public's hands, firmly beyond the reach of a straightforward FOIA request. All in the name of government transparency.
Worse, how do you fight that in the court of public opinion? You seriously want to try to get people united behind promoting open government, by repealing the open government act? Think of the soundbites just waiting to be harvested from any representative trying to arguing for that.
I hope I'm just being too cynical.
Just because the pilot is probably a robot, doesn't mean there's no use for a human captain.
Even if it's only an abort switch under the control of human judgement, that's still a potentially big improvement over full autonomy, since even the best-programmed/trained AI won't have the same understanding of abort-worthy situations as a human.
And in reality, it's quite likely that other things benefit from human judgement as well. For example, landing on unfamiliar territory where additional information is becoming available with every passing moment. Maybe best to let the computer do the flying, but quite likely an advantage to have a trained human at a real-time landing-target adjustment screen e.g. displaying the rapidly improving terrain map of the potential landing zone overlayed with the rapidly shrinking potential landing zone and current target, along with both AI and human-flagged hazards to avoid and most-promising landing points.
It will be interesting to see just how much the landing experience gained here will actually help elsewhere. I'm strongly hopeful, I mean it *should* be a lot easier to land on Mars, the moon, etc. where atmospheric variability isn't a confounding factor. Whether it actually *is* or not? We shall see - reality has a way of laying bare unsuspected assumptions and oversights. I'm sure the experience will translate to a much better starting point - but I still wouldn't want to be on board the first BFR to try landing on the moon. But hey, sign me up for the companion BFR in lunar orbit, serving as a micro-lag orbital "ground control".
> This may mean fragmentation in certain markets
It may, by I don't really see any reason it should in most cases. Since a GPS receiver is basically just a radio receiver + computerized signal analysis, it makes multi-network compatibility really easy - all you need is a receiver that can receive signals across all the frequencies used (probably not an incredibly expensive upgrade), and somewhat more complicated software that can calculate your position from any of the networks (which has no inherent per-unit cost at all).
You are quite right, and I see no reason to stop calling them out loudly and regularly over that fact. At worst it keeps a reminder in the face of those all those fellow voters able to overlook that fact. Journalism has pretty much died in the U.S., and those wearing its garments deserve to be publicly spat on with regularity, for the good of everyone. With a lot of luck maybe it will even inspire real journalism again, if only as a fresh new competitor in the attention market.
Or you know, just "If you want to do business in the U.S., you must comply with U.S. laws and regulations."
You really think any other country would let them continue to operate without comment if they flagrantly violated their laws?
Except professional journalism is supposed to involve research and verification. Without investigation and verification it's not news, it's just broadcast entertainment repeating social-media content. Any "news" outlet that does that kind of "reporting" deserves to be called out for their professional malfeasance.
It's a matter of terminology. The actual question is "is/was there *liquid* water on Mars" - but water is relatively special in that there are common names for its gaseuos and solid phases, so that "water" often implies "liquid". We've known for a long time that there's water-ice on Mars - the polar icecaps clearly contain both water and CO2. Now we're mapping and characterizing particular deposits that might be of interest to future researchers and colonists.
Quite so. The triple-point of water is at about 273K (0C, 32F) and 612 Pa(0.006atm), Below roughly that temperature water is solid except at even lower pressures.
Meanwhile, Mars' atmospheric pressure at the surface hovers around 600Pa, and noontime temperatures on a tropical summer day on Mars only gets up to ~293K (20C, 68F), meaning most of the time, across most of the surface, Martian water will tend to be solid, though it may sublimate on a warm day, especially in direct sunlight. But it won't take much of a localized cold spot to keep it firmly solid.
With warm Martian days hovering so close to the triple point, it's also interesting to consider that local weather conditions could easily allow liquid water to exist temporarily.
No, it really isn't. You don't even need relativity - plain old Newtonian mechanics is quite sufficient for navigation within the solar system by anything yet built by Man. You'll get some discrepancies if you pay close enough attention, but nothing that wouldn't be corrected by dead reckoning, if not lost in the noise of other imperfections in your rocket.
You need orbital mechanics to hit what you're aiming for, but that's still simple stuff, and it'd be a real stretch to call that "cosmological maths" (what exactly do you mean by that phrase?) - neither dark matter, dark energy, nor any other cosmological-scale factor manifest noticeably in something as tiny as a solar system. And very little in cosmology cares about things that happen on human timescales, other than the explosions.
Well, that's also pretty enormous reservoir of easily worked raw materials for construction (ice is pretty strong stuff, whether you're building "igloos" or melting ice-tunnels. Or both - if you're mining water you may as well make a useful hole, and vice-versa), and feed-stock for growing a sustainable ecology (along with CO2 from the atmosphere) for food, air scrubbing, oxygen production, and various wood and cellulose-based raw materials.
I'm curious as to how well graphene filters would do for removing Martian contaminants from water. There's a lot of pretty nasty stuff blowing around Mars, but graphene seems to be pretty good at blocking almost everything except water.
Even more interesting might be to take core samples first. How long has that crater been gradually filling with ice to become a mile thick? You've got an incredible record of Martian atmospheric conditions just sitting there waiting to be studied. Probably some great information about the solar wind to be found as well, without a substantial magnetosphere to deflect it. There might even be traces of life lingering within it, just waiting to be found.
>No, I realized instead that distance is not a factor for landing success.
Actually it is - in two big ways:
- The lander is subjected to much longer thermal and radiation stresses during the long slow flight to Mars (since for whatever reason we haven't landed on the moon much), which means more probability of hardware failures.
- Since we've abandoned MAnned spaceflight beyond orbit, the lander must be pretty much fully autonomous - since any human interaction is subjected to light-speed delay - 2.6 seconds round-trip to the moon, which is difficult to deal with for any but the most minor of problems, and 6-45 light-minutes to Mars, which makes any intervention during the landing routine completely impossible.
It's also a major factor in the cost and frequency of the attempts, and well as the demand for them. There've been a grand total of 48 launches to Mars spread across 56 years (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exploration_of_Mars), several governments, and multiple generations of scientists, engineers, and administrators. Not all of those launches even included a lander, and of those that did, they couldn't learn anything from the previous several landers launched, since those hadn't yet reached Mars by the time the current one departed.
Contrast that to the 46 Falcon 9 booster landings SpaceX has attempted in just the last six years, all under the guidance of one man, by one mostly-coherent team. All completed sequentially, so that any lessons learned from one landing attempt could be immediately applied to the next.
>The point of a university is (should be?) to teach people how to learn
Hell, that should start with your first year of grade school and be built on every year thereafter - in fact that should be one of the primary goals. Knowing how to learn makes an *incredible* difference in the effectiveness of all the years of schooling to follow, the sooner you start teaching it, the greater the benefit.
You even have the advantage that young children already instinctively know how to learn experimentally at near-optimal rates, the trick is teaching them to do so consciously, so that they can apply the skills to less hands-on fields, rather than training it out of them through rote memorization.