Your skin is pretty resilient to pressure, so you can survive (briefly) in a vacuum if necessary. The scene in Titan A.E. where the protagonist busts out the cockpit window and uses a fire extinguisher for propulsion to flying through space without a spacesuit is at least somewhat realistic and could in theory actually happen... assuming you could get into an air lock under a minute or so and get it to quick repressurize so you could catch a breath of air. You would be in pain, but still be alive.
Basically, on the surface of Mars, you could in theory run between two different buildings a few dozen meters apart without a space suit using the same principle. In an emergency, there at least would be a high probability of survival even if it isn't something recommended. It would be sort of like swimming a few dozen meters underwater and holding your breath the whole time.
BTW, the surface pressure on Mars is 6 millibar, not 600. In Hellas Basin (the lowest point on Mars) that goes up to 12 millibars of pressure. By comparison, the air pressure at the top of Mount Everest is about 300 millibar, and the typical air pressure at sea level on the Earth is about 1000 millibar. The 600 figure is likely in Pascals (another pressure unit), because 100 kiloPascals is the same as 1 bar or 1000 millibar. Yeah, it is pretty close to a vacuum no matter what way you cut it.
The Kim Stanley Robinson books covering Mars has a couple of chapters devoted to the idea that the residents of Mars were able to escape from a bunch of terrorists by putting on what amounted to be a bunch of arctic clothing (Heavy Parkas, a few layers of socks, and other cold weather gear) along with an oxygen mask. An important distinction is that KSR also had at that point in the books a significant terraforming project on Mars which had put approximately 200-300 millibars of pressure into the Martian atmosphere. It wasn't perfect, but it was survivable. It was enough air pressure that lichens and a few genetically engineered plants could survive on the surface of Mars exposed directly to the global environment. In that chapter the residents of a major city migrated a couple hundred miles across the surface by foot before they got to their refuge area. It was a fun part of the story to read though.
Which is why the Space Shuttle used an 80/20 Nitrogen-Oxygen mix. The Apollo Guidance Computer was simple enough that it didn't need such of an atmosphere.
My point is that it isn't because of human needs but rather other engineering problems where the Nitrogen is a nice addition. In this case, it is being used as a conductive heat sink for things like electronics. The main Shuttle guidance computers don't need the mix nor do most of the other really critical systems in the Shuttle (those are all milspec components), but there are a whole bunch of other computers used in places like the SpaceLab module or used in the ISS for monitoring science experiments, laptops for sending reports to Mission Control, or for other various housekeeping tasks that didn't exist in the Apollo era that it became an issue.
While perhaps blunt, this AC post is 100% spot on. Apollo 13 was caused due to a LOX tank failure and not due to the 100% oxygen atmosphere inside of the spaceship.
I will note that the Apollo spacecraft, on the launch pad at KSC, had an 80/20 mixture for the cabin pressure as a way to prevent fire.... they just pumped in air from Florida with a fan while the astronauts waited on the launch pad. The reason why the Apollo 1 spacecraft had the 100% oxygen @ sea level pressure was because they knew that they would need to pressurize the cabin. After the Apollo spacecraft was launched into space, that Nitrogen atmosphere is eventually vented away with the partial pressure and 100% Oxygen atmosphere.
That is also the reason why you see Apollo astronauts getting into the command capsule already wearing space suits with helmets, as they were adjusting to breathing in an atmosphere without Nitrogen even before the launch happened. It was also an air conditioning unit attached to the suits, but they were also trying to get the Nitrogen out of their blood. Shuttle astronauts didn't need to go through that step (although they still wore spacesuits during launch for other reasons).
The advanced technology I need to preserve atmosphere at any reasonable depth is called a "cup".
Or so people used to think, including John Roebling when he was building the Brooklyn Bridge in New York City. Unfortunately the workers on that bridge developed something called Caisson Disease, named after the affliction first significantly noticed by the workers who died building that bridge in NYC. In fact Roebling himself died from complications of decompression sickness as he entered the cassion regularly to check on the progress of the workers.
There are numerous health problems with using a cup like you are mentioning, and "reasonable depths" are only a hundred meters or so before it stops being effective. That is hardly living on the bottom of the ocean, where you need other kinds of technology simply to survive going to those depths. Even trying to live on the deeper parts of a continental shelf require some interesting technologies that really haven't been built out too much. It isn't nearly as romantic as it seems at first glance, and you need something more than a simple cup.
Nice try though. At least you are thinking about the idea.
Surface seasteading, on the other hand, seems to be very promising in spite of the fact that nobody has really been successful at doing that with 21st Century technology.
They've been successfully doing it since ancient times. The current very successful model is seasteading by ship with occasional stops in specialized structures called docks and harbors.
While a few people do seem to live their lives almost permanently aboard ship, they really are transportation devices to get you from one place to another and not a place where civilizations form and act independently.
There really is a difference between a ship and an island or city. There is also the difference between a spaceship and a settlement in space as well, even though you can build a city in the middle of the ocean just as much as you can build a city in some random spot in space.
I think it could be argued that if you are going to try and build the L-5 colony, why not at least at first try to build a "colony" in the Sargasso Sea? Unlike claims about people trying to "settle" Antarctica before trying Mars (or in the above discussion Ceres), there really aren't any significant international treaties that are stopping a group of folks building a whole bunch of barges and other relatively stable vessels and building a city in what could arguably be a pretty nice place to live (as temperate as the Bahamas, plenty of access to food and even fresh water (if you collect rain), and far enough away from other locations on the Earth that you can in theory flip the bird to other governments and start your own if you care. Unlike a micronation like Sealand, there is also room to expand and grow so in theory you could have a large enough population for a viable community as well.
There are limited locations where such a sea community could legitimately be established, but many of the same issues that will eventually need to be addressed for space colonization certainly could be applied from efforts at such "seasteading" efforts.
The only real ancient example of seasteading is with the people who lived on Lake Titicaca, where a society exists with children being born "at sea" is normal instead of a very rare exception, and for those children along with hundreds of other children to spend their lives on floating platforms as a way of life where they reasonably expect to have their own children also live that way. It does require some technology in order to make that happen even in the case of the , but it doesn't need to be very sophisticated.
If you can show a similar kind of group existing today to the Uru people but using cruise ships or something like that, I love to know about it. There is a group at seasteading.org which has a bunch of dreamers hoping some day to do a thing like this. It is worth looking at, but there certainly are challenges to the idea.
That mostly depends on the submitter. Next time you submit a story like this, make sure you follow your own advise on this matter. Perhaps eventually it will catch on too.
The part about the IAU definition that I can't get over is the strongly heliocentric definition, as the only bodies that can be legitimately called a planet according to the definition can only be orbiting the Sun. Ditto on the "clearing vicinity of its orbit" debate as that sort of presumes a 2-4 billion year minimum age of the planetary body in question as well which none of the current planets in the Solar System would have qualified under during an earlier era of even the Solar System.
That also sort of precludes that anything being discovered by the Kepler spacecraft even being called legitimately a planet, especially since there is no reason to believe that "clearing the vicinity of its orbit" can even be determined at all other than to say smaller Earth-sized planets aren't necessarily in the same rough orbit as a gas giant like Jupiter... perhaps. Some weird stuff has been discovered by Kepler, so even that might be something to look for.
As much as the notion of aquatic habitats may seem romantic, the engineering requirements for sustained deep sea habitation are in some ways much more extreme than even going to Mars or the Moon. Keep in mind that the pressure going underwater doubles after just a few feet. Going from sea level to the Kármán line in altitude only has a drop of about 1 bar of pressure. Since that is practically zero, it can't get any worse. If you go diving just a few feet deeper, depending on where you are at, it can get a whole lot worse going down.
I'm not saying that it shouldn't be attempted either, but the engineering requirements for seabed habitation in some ways make Mars look very hospitable for human civilizations. The plus side of seabed habitation is that logistical supply lines are much easier to maintain than going to Mars, so there are compromises either way.
Surface seasteading, on the other hand, seems to be very promising in spite of the fact that nobody has really been successful at doing that with 21st Century technology. It has been done on some lakes in South America by indigenous people, so in theory it should be possible to sustain a culture in that manner.
There is no extra fire danger in a 100% Oxygen environment as long as the partial pressure of Oxygen is identical to typical seal level pressure or slightly less. The extra fire danger (as in what happened with the Apollo 1 fire) comes from a 100% oxygen atmosphere at standard sea level pressure. That is a fire just begging to happen with almost any material.
BTW, the Apollo spacecraft used a 100% Oxygen atmosphere because it was less mass to haul up to the Moon and back (thus more Moon rocks to bring back and more stuff to bring to the Moon in the first place). The Apollo astronauts seemed to have done just fine with that for a week or so in space at a time, and in fact the Skylab environment was also 100% Oxygen (with CO2 scrubbers in both cases to pull that gas out of the mixture as it was produced).
The reason the Space Shuttle went to a more normal 80/20 mixture of Nitrogen to Oxygen ratio had more to do with the electronics they were using than anything about the astronauts themselves. Since electronics are designed to operate here on the Earth, an assumption is made that other kinds of atmosphere environments won't be used by anybody using those components. Yes, milspec equipment can be made to overcome that problem, but sometimes things like test equipment and a whole bunch of stuff being used inside of the Shuttle simply can't be made economically with that strict standard.
Interestingly enough, the space suits used for EVAs still stuck with the 100% Oxygen environment. One of the reasons for that is because of the lower pressure made it easier to bend joints... something sort of important if you want a practical space suit. The downside is that it takes longer for astronauts to get in and out of the airlocks.
It may make some logical sense, but this is a mechanism that has not been previously observed and largely discounted as insignificant by experimenters in the past.
The one thing that is known to be coming from the Sun that pretty much can't be isolated from other items (by going deep underground and trying to rule out other environmental factors) would be neutrinos and neutrino flux. This was mentioned above, but there are some interesting implications if that has some significant impact.
Neutrinos are usually produced in nuclear reactions (like what happens in the Sun when Hydrogen is being changed in the Helium through fusion). While they also get produced in other nuclear reactors, the Sun is by far and away the largest nuclear reactor that would have any sort of impact upon us. Because of the much more vastly larger distances to even other stars, the neutrino flux from other stars would be relatively insignificant. The only other possible source for neutrinos that would have any sort of significance on this scale would be the super massive black hole at the center of our galaxy.... if it was in the process of "eating" several stars (thus causing fusion events just on the outside of the event horizon and emitting those neutrinos as well). A "nearby" supernova would also produce a similar kind of spike in neutrinos. All of this is something that is actively monitored right now with neutrino detectors usually found in deep mineshafts that have been taken over by scientific laboratories from abandoned mines.
It may be possible (I think it would be highly unlikely) that some other kind of nuclear process happening in the Sun or perhaps some other unobserved phenomena could be causing this to happen, but extraordinary theories require extraordinary evidence. Wishing for leprechaun and unicorns to explain your experiments doesn't seem like a logical tactic for a real scientist to be making.
There is enough to this concept of radioactivity variation that it certainly should be investigated further... if only to bury this idea for once and all or to confirm the issue. The Sun has been a source of several discoveries in the past, including the beginning of radio astronomy, the discovery of Helium, and several other phenomena. That it might be the source of discovery for additional scientific investigation is certainly possible.
The one thing you can do to a scientist to make them pay attention is to say "that is a weird result". Weird in this case being something that falls outside of current theories, which the thought that radioactivity could be influenced from outside environmental factors of any kind at all is certainly weird.
BTW, on the issues of "intellectual property" I happen to completely agree with Richard Stallman on this issue. Don't get caught up in the kool-aide of the term "intellectual property" when it really can get more confusing than it really is.
Patents can't be helped, but they can be licensed for something like this. Any patent license can also be "sent through" to any non-profit "subsidiary" set up by any company who cares, if they want to set up a non-profit that is community operated. In other words there doesn't need to be any cost and it can easily be taken care of if the original company wants to be engaged and see that it happens.
Trademarks may have some value to the original company and can even be retained. There is no reason why trademarks necessarily are even needed by an open source project and it may even be useful to create new trademarks for the derivative game that is open sourced. This wouldn't even be a problem at all. Trademarked named within the game (kind of like how "Captain Kirk" is trademarked by Paramount Pictures) could even be changed if necessary. That is a trivial issue that wouldn't have any impact at all on the game itself.
As for copyrights, I would call that an incredibly stupid company who didn't secure commercial reproducibility rights for a game including for any successive company. Artwork can be redone (for textures, skins, and background music) if necessary but could still be reassigned if necessary. Just think of what would happen if the company was purchased in a merger situation.... the same situation would apply for turning a for-profit company into a non-profit. If some specific kinds of copyright license is needed for key parts of the game engine, licenses could be granted to a non-profit company as easily and that same non-profit company could be seen as the legal heir to those rights as well.
In short, I find all of the excuses that "IP rights" wouldn't apply in this situation... assuming that the original copyright holder of the game itself is willing to at least try to pass the game off as an open soruce game under control of a non-profit foundation. Perhaps not Richard Stallman style of open source, but pretty dang close and comparable to Netscape's transition to Mozilla and the Mozilla Foundation (another example of a proprietary company who successfully switched to an open source foundation in spite of "intellectual property" concerns).
This has also been done by ID Software, where John Carmack has also turned his older games over to the community under open source licenses.
The argument about competition with future games is perhaps a bit more valid. The problem with that argument is that turning an old game that you want to shut down because it isn't profitable to run any more (the only rational reason to shut down the game in the first place) is that it also is using yesterday's technology and programming techniques. It really isn't progressing into the future and exploiting new technologies like new video rendering hardware or new kinds of user interfaces. While games like Doom have been ported to exploit some newer hardware (to give an example), it still has a dated feel and is more like walking through a museum rather than anything which realistically competes against games being developed by the current generation of programmers.
Perhaps a company like NCSoft is just a shell of a company with mainly lawyers and not many engineers. That can't be helped and if they can't improve over previous generations of software, they are a stagnant company ready to go bankrupt in the near future. I certainly don't expect to be seeing them in a decade if that is the case, so they will simply implode taking all of their games down with them into the corporate graveyard if they don't open up stuff like this. I
I would hate to think of all of the MUDs that have disappeared over the years... many of which also had tremendous communities and some impressive accomplishments.
Still, I'd have to agree with your sentiment here. My only wish for something like this happening is that the developers dump everything into an open source license and tell the community "good luck" in terms of trying to make something of it. That doesn't help the game company itself, but it at least allows the potential for the game community to continue into the future.
There ought to be at least some sort of value to opening up something like that... even if NCSoft simply tries to do something like a fundraiser to sell off the assets to some foundation in exchange for some reasonable amount of money. Blender was able to raise a bunch of money to turn that into an open source program, couldn't the same be done to a game like this?
I doubt I've ever kissed my wife in public except at the wedding ceremony itself. I haven't really seen it happen much elsewhere either, at least in the community where I live at the moment. Hand holding, yes, and some hugging between obvious family members or very good friends (often of the same gender and has nothing to do with sexual orientation).
Again, it depends on your cultural background, but if that is your standard, it seems like it is pushing boundaries beyond just ordinary public displays of affection.
I think often you see things just because you are self conscious of them.
Somebody pointed this out to me once: When you buy a new car, you suddenly notice how many people are driving the same make and model that you are driving and it seems very common (unless it really is unique like a Tesla Roadster or McLaren F1). It isn't that the number of those kind of cars has changed but rather that you've suddenly become aware that they are there.
There is something in many people who want to try and conform to the community in some way, so they notice things that others are doing... particularly if it is something that they want to do themselves as a way to rationalize behavior.
The odd thing that I did see RMS doing with his license suite at the Free Software Foundation was to provide an "escape clause" for Wikipedia and the Wikimedia Foundation to switch licenses from the GFDL to CC-BY-SA. I felt at the time it would have been better to reform the GFDL instead of switching licenses, but it was an interesting action that they took and shows RMS isn't so fanatical about his principles.
About the only really controversial feature that has been added into a FSF license is the "patent clause" which tried to address issues with software patents in GPL'd software. It was also a legal issue that needed to be addressed in some manner, and the problem facing the Free Software Foundation was no prior experience at dealing with the problem. Sometimes you have to make bold moves, even if they turn out to be wrong or that they need to be tweaked in the future.
The original Zealots weren't all that bad. It was a faction of Jewish society at the time of the Roman Empire who did tend to take things to an extreme, but there was a rationale to their actions as well. They thought that many in their society were being too lax in their observances of the various feasts and festivals, thus tried to push back by insisting upon strict observances of those events and other aspects of Jewish life. In many ways it was perhaps even more like a political party, but included religious observances and practices among those who called themselves Zealots. By political party, I am referring to the various factions that made up the Sanhedrin in Jewish society at the time.
Still, calling somebody a Zealot is more or less also calling them a Jew in a very bigoted and hateful way and dangerously approaches Godwin's Law.
And if you ask them, you'll notice that they still don't feel very comfortable engaging in the kinds of public displays of affection that straight couples take for granted.
I'm sort of curious about what kinds of "public displays of affection" you are talking about from "straight" people? Minor hand holding and a couple kissing each other before heading off to work? I think there is much more variation between people of different cultures and their attitudes towards public affection than there is between "straight" and "gay" kinds of affection, or for that matter even between different families within those cultures.
I certainly have seen embraces, hugs, and even kisses being exchanged between men or between women that was done in a non-sexual way and just accepted as a part of that culture (something that is pretty common in South America in particular, but other places too). That these people who might be gay are having a problem with public affection is something that I think is a part of their upbringing, where their families likely weren't really into any sort of public affection at all.
I've really noticed the American military in particular has some really weird ideas about public affection. I think it is a cultural thing within the military, even though I do understand some of the reasons for avoiding such signs of affection while on duty and supposedly trying to perform some critical job. Still, the off duty behavior of many in the military who seem to be against public displays of affection or even giving a hard time to civilians for their displays of affection seem to go over the top. Even in the military though, it varies quite a bit in terms of what is considered acceptable behavior by even that standard. In the case of the military, relationships tend to be under a whole lot of strain because of the long hours, often distant deployments, and the incredible stress that happens for those who may even be the root of this attitude, where those with lousy relationships simply don't want to be reminded that some people can maintain a healthy relationship with a partner/girlfriend/boyfriend/spouse. Military service used to be a whole lot more common in the past than it is now in America as well, which may be some of the root of this "no public affection" attitude.
I was aware of that. If you want to get picky, there were a few others as well, including a few astronauts who were in the Gemini program as well as one X-15 pilot who died after earning his astronaut badge.
Re-read what I said. Neil Armstrong showed a tendency of being able to get out of life threatening situations almost without a scratch. He didn't seek out those situations, but he had a calm and collected attitude about life and flying that allowed him to be able to pull out of the problems that came his way.
I don't think most of those other accidents where people died could have even been survived, with possibly the exception of the Columbia accident (which was sheer management incompetence and not anything to do with the pilots). Well, Challenger shouldn't have flown either, but that was also NASA violating their own flight safety rules too.
Agreed. But most of the training was about getting there and back again. And a you mentioned, it was a struggle to get training on the science of geology, etc. at the risk of getting flamed: engineering is not (ncessarily) a science.
It took a little convincing to the NASA brass that the astronauts needed to be trained in basic sciences, such as chemistry, physics, and geology. They thought it was a waste of money, but once they were convinced of the need they went full in and get the classes set up and gave those astronauts in depth training on basic science, not just applied science or engineering (which astronauts were heavily involved with doing as well).
Yeah, I'd agree that science is not engineering. Engineering is the ability to take knowledge gained from scientific investigations and to apply that knowledge into building stuff. Being a good engineer takes a very different mindset than you find with a scientist, sometimes to the point it become annoying to a decent engineer. An engineer doesn't care why a machine or a physical phenomena works, all they care about is that it does work and they will leave explaining why it works to scientists. To an engineer, the whole point of a scientific inquiry is to get a deeper understanding of how things work.... so you can build something either better (more efficiently or faster) or something simply completely different and get fellow engineers to say "wow, I didn't know you could do that!"
Scientists on the other hand "get in the way" of engineers because they see something that "looks weird" and don't really care if the device they were working on ever gets completed. In fact, the best way to get a scientist excited is to say that a machine doesn't work as expected, especially when it isn't a bone-headed engineering mistake (like forgetting to plug the thing in) that caused the machine to be working funny.
In fairness to the grandparent poster, those who were selected to be astronauts on Apollo were sent through a training program that was as intense as any graduate program, and I may dare say PhD program. They had some of the best and brightest scientists in the world teaching them in a small classroom setting about almost everything that they would encounter while not just going to the Moon but what they would be seeing once they got up there.
BTW, Harrison Schmitt was one of those who pushed to see that happen in the astronaut corps too, and I'm glad that he was able to succeed. Others were involved to get that to happen, but I would dare say that these folks who went to the Moon could have certainly qualified for graduate degrees in several scientific disciplines by the time they actually got to the Moon.
Schmitt instead had a crash course in how to be a test pilot, which he seemed to do rather well at himself. Schmitt was an accomplished pilot in his own right, which is how he got the job of being an astronaut in the first place.
The balls that it took for Neil Armstrong to abort the original landing zone and instead look for another place to land is a judgement call that was nothing short of amazing. That he was able to land with less than 10 seconds of fuel left in the tanks shows how close he was to failure as well.
I don't know what would have happened had the Eagle crashed on the surface of the Moon, but it would have been a sad day.
Then again, I think there would have been politicians that would have figuratively put some duct tape over the mouth of Walter Mondale and made martyrs of those astronauts, and possibly redoubled the effort to get back and do it right. If anything, the string of successes sort of backfired were it made trips to the Moon seem boring and routine, even though that was hardly the case. I'm not saying that I wish one of the dozen astronauts that actually made the trip to the Moon should have died, but I don't think their death would have ended NASA. The loss of the Challenger and Columbia didn't stop the Shuttle program either.
By far and away, at least to me, the greatest accomplishment that Neil Armstrong ever made for the manned spaceflight program of America was not the landing on the Moon, but rather his survival after flying the Lunar Landing Research Vehicle, designed to test astronauts on a real flying vehicle that was supposed to behave like the Lunar Lander would do on the Moon.
It was also the closest that any astronaut got to dying but somehow survived, and it was amazing the Mr. Armstrong didn't die on the day his vehicle crashed and forced him into using the seat ejection mechanism.
Anybody who flew in that vehicle was simply nuts, but it did provide the engineers working for Grumman enough information to be able to safely get those folks to the Moon and back. I also don't think anybody else in the NASA astronaut corps could have been successful at landing the Eagle in the Sea of Traquility during the month of July, 1969.
I thought it was grocery store checkout lines and phone booths, once they ban cell phones as dangerous terrorist devices (due to the ability to use them to trigger a bomb).
Naw, they are using "sub-space communicators" instead.
It is a reasonable thing you are pointing out, where "wireless" and "physically secure" simply can't be compatible. I have heard of missiles that spool out wire for guidance or control during flight, so I presume that is another way to secure communications. I'm sure that works out real well for commercial aircraft though. A physical data link still seems vulnerable to some kinds of attacks, so your original point is justified.
You couldn't "pay yourself" in a restaurant you own in your own kitchen because you don't have a clue how much restaurants are paying for the "privilege" of accepting the card.
Yes, there is the transaction fee.... that you as the customer are paying, but then the restaurant pays an extra fee on top of that to the bank merely to get the money. Where do you think that "5% cash back" comes from? Visa doesn't give that to you out of the generosity of their heart, they are a business. Instead, it comes from the merchant along with some extra skin from that merchant on top of the 5%. That doesn't even get into taxes you would have to pay for running a restaurant out of your own kitchen, which would turn that "profit" you think you might get into a huge loss and an amazing revenue stream for local governments.
Just don't let your local municipal council know they are missing these potential revenue streams as they may force you to pay restaurant fees in your own kitchen and turn your crazy idea into law that you are required to do.
Not really. There is the issue of the fact that a merchant needs to cover these fees somehow, so you end up paying more for products you buy from that merchant in the long run. A typical merchant treats this as "the cost of doing business" and just makes it a part of how much they charge customers.
If a merchant is losing money in various transactions, they eventually go out of business... which really helps you out how?
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Your skin is pretty resilient to pressure, so you can survive (briefly) in a vacuum if necessary. The scene in Titan A.E. where the protagonist busts out the cockpit window and uses a fire extinguisher for propulsion to flying through space without a spacesuit is at least somewhat realistic and could in theory actually happen... assuming you could get into an air lock under a minute or so and get it to quick repressurize so you could catch a breath of air. You would be in pain, but still be alive.
Basically, on the surface of Mars, you could in theory run between two different buildings a few dozen meters apart without a space suit using the same principle. In an emergency, there at least would be a high probability of survival even if it isn't something recommended. It would be sort of like swimming a few dozen meters underwater and holding your breath the whole time.
BTW, the surface pressure on Mars is 6 millibar, not 600. In Hellas Basin (the lowest point on Mars) that goes up to 12 millibars of pressure. By comparison, the air pressure at the top of Mount Everest is about 300 millibar, and the typical air pressure at sea level on the Earth is about 1000 millibar. The 600 figure is likely in Pascals (another pressure unit), because 100 kiloPascals is the same as 1 bar or 1000 millibar. Yeah, it is pretty close to a vacuum no matter what way you cut it.
The Kim Stanley Robinson books covering Mars has a couple of chapters devoted to the idea that the residents of Mars were able to escape from a bunch of terrorists by putting on what amounted to be a bunch of arctic clothing (Heavy Parkas, a few layers of socks, and other cold weather gear) along with an oxygen mask. An important distinction is that KSR also had at that point in the books a significant terraforming project on Mars which had put approximately 200-300 millibars of pressure into the Martian atmosphere. It wasn't perfect, but it was survivable. It was enough air pressure that lichens and a few genetically engineered plants could survive on the surface of Mars exposed directly to the global environment. In that chapter the residents of a major city migrated a couple hundred miles across the surface by foot before they got to their refuge area. It was a fun part of the story to read though.
Which is why the Space Shuttle used an 80/20 Nitrogen-Oxygen mix. The Apollo Guidance Computer was simple enough that it didn't need such of an atmosphere.
My point is that it isn't because of human needs but rather other engineering problems where the Nitrogen is a nice addition. In this case, it is being used as a conductive heat sink for things like electronics. The main Shuttle guidance computers don't need the mix nor do most of the other really critical systems in the Shuttle (those are all milspec components), but there are a whole bunch of other computers used in places like the SpaceLab module or used in the ISS for monitoring science experiments, laptops for sending reports to Mission Control, or for other various housekeeping tasks that didn't exist in the Apollo era that it became an issue.
While perhaps blunt, this AC post is 100% spot on. Apollo 13 was caused due to a LOX tank failure and not due to the 100% oxygen atmosphere inside of the spaceship.
I will note that the Apollo spacecraft, on the launch pad at KSC, had an 80/20 mixture for the cabin pressure as a way to prevent fire.... they just pumped in air from Florida with a fan while the astronauts waited on the launch pad. The reason why the Apollo 1 spacecraft had the 100% oxygen @ sea level pressure was because they knew that they would need to pressurize the cabin. After the Apollo spacecraft was launched into space, that Nitrogen atmosphere is eventually vented away with the partial pressure and 100% Oxygen atmosphere.
That is also the reason why you see Apollo astronauts getting into the command capsule already wearing space suits with helmets, as they were adjusting to breathing in an atmosphere without Nitrogen even before the launch happened. It was also an air conditioning unit attached to the suits, but they were also trying to get the Nitrogen out of their blood. Shuttle astronauts didn't need to go through that step (although they still wore spacesuits during launch for other reasons).
The advanced technology I need to preserve atmosphere at any reasonable depth is called a "cup".
Or so people used to think, including John Roebling when he was building the Brooklyn Bridge in New York City. Unfortunately the workers on that bridge developed something called Caisson Disease, named after the affliction first significantly noticed by the workers who died building that bridge in NYC. In fact Roebling himself died from complications of decompression sickness as he entered the cassion regularly to check on the progress of the workers.
There are numerous health problems with using a cup like you are mentioning, and "reasonable depths" are only a hundred meters or so before it stops being effective. That is hardly living on the bottom of the ocean, where you need other kinds of technology simply to survive going to those depths. Even trying to live on the deeper parts of a continental shelf require some interesting technologies that really haven't been built out too much. It isn't nearly as romantic as it seems at first glance, and you need something more than a simple cup.
Nice try though. At least you are thinking about the idea.
Surface seasteading, on the other hand, seems to be very promising in spite of the fact that nobody has really been successful at doing that with 21st Century technology.
They've been successfully doing it since ancient times. The current very successful model is seasteading by ship with occasional stops in specialized structures called docks and harbors.
While a few people do seem to live their lives almost permanently aboard ship, they really are transportation devices to get you from one place to another and not a place where civilizations form and act independently.
There really is a difference between a ship and an island or city. There is also the difference between a spaceship and a settlement in space as well, even though you can build a city in the middle of the ocean just as much as you can build a city in some random spot in space.
I think it could be argued that if you are going to try and build the L-5 colony, why not at least at first try to build a "colony" in the Sargasso Sea? Unlike claims about people trying to "settle" Antarctica before trying Mars (or in the above discussion Ceres), there really aren't any significant international treaties that are stopping a group of folks building a whole bunch of barges and other relatively stable vessels and building a city in what could arguably be a pretty nice place to live (as temperate as the Bahamas, plenty of access to food and even fresh water (if you collect rain), and far enough away from other locations on the Earth that you can in theory flip the bird to other governments and start your own if you care. Unlike a micronation like Sealand, there is also room to expand and grow so in theory you could have a large enough population for a viable community as well.
There are limited locations where such a sea community could legitimately be established, but many of the same issues that will eventually need to be addressed for space colonization certainly could be applied from efforts at such "seasteading" efforts.
The only real ancient example of seasteading is with the people who lived on Lake Titicaca, where a society exists with children being born "at sea" is normal instead of a very rare exception, and for those children along with hundreds of other children to spend their lives on floating platforms as a way of life where they reasonably expect to have their own children also live that way. It does require some technology in order to make that happen even in the case of the , but it doesn't need to be very sophisticated.
If you can show a similar kind of group existing today to the Uru people but using cruise ships or something like that, I love to know about it. There is a group at seasteading.org which has a bunch of dreamers hoping some day to do a thing like this. It is worth looking at, but there certainly are challenges to the idea.
That mostly depends on the submitter. Next time you submit a story like this, make sure you follow your own advise on this matter. Perhaps eventually it will catch on too.
The part about the IAU definition that I can't get over is the strongly heliocentric definition, as the only bodies that can be legitimately called a planet according to the definition can only be orbiting the Sun. Ditto on the "clearing vicinity of its orbit" debate as that sort of presumes a 2-4 billion year minimum age of the planetary body in question as well which none of the current planets in the Solar System would have qualified under during an earlier era of even the Solar System.
That also sort of precludes that anything being discovered by the Kepler spacecraft even being called legitimately a planet, especially since there is no reason to believe that "clearing the vicinity of its orbit" can even be determined at all other than to say smaller Earth-sized planets aren't necessarily in the same rough orbit as a gas giant like Jupiter... perhaps. Some weird stuff has been discovered by Kepler, so even that might be something to look for.
As much as the notion of aquatic habitats may seem romantic, the engineering requirements for sustained deep sea habitation are in some ways much more extreme than even going to Mars or the Moon. Keep in mind that the pressure going underwater doubles after just a few feet. Going from sea level to the Kármán line in altitude only has a drop of about 1 bar of pressure. Since that is practically zero, it can't get any worse. If you go diving just a few feet deeper, depending on where you are at, it can get a whole lot worse going down.
I'm not saying that it shouldn't be attempted either, but the engineering requirements for seabed habitation in some ways make Mars look very hospitable for human civilizations. The plus side of seabed habitation is that logistical supply lines are much easier to maintain than going to Mars, so there are compromises either way.
Surface seasteading, on the other hand, seems to be very promising in spite of the fact that nobody has really been successful at doing that with 21st Century technology. It has been done on some lakes in South America by indigenous people, so in theory it should be possible to sustain a culture in that manner.
There is no extra fire danger in a 100% Oxygen environment as long as the partial pressure of Oxygen is identical to typical seal level pressure or slightly less. The extra fire danger (as in what happened with the Apollo 1 fire) comes from a 100% oxygen atmosphere at standard sea level pressure. That is a fire just begging to happen with almost any material.
BTW, the Apollo spacecraft used a 100% Oxygen atmosphere because it was less mass to haul up to the Moon and back (thus more Moon rocks to bring back and more stuff to bring to the Moon in the first place). The Apollo astronauts seemed to have done just fine with that for a week or so in space at a time, and in fact the Skylab environment was also 100% Oxygen (with CO2 scrubbers in both cases to pull that gas out of the mixture as it was produced).
The reason the Space Shuttle went to a more normal 80/20 mixture of Nitrogen to Oxygen ratio had more to do with the electronics they were using than anything about the astronauts themselves. Since electronics are designed to operate here on the Earth, an assumption is made that other kinds of atmosphere environments won't be used by anybody using those components. Yes, milspec equipment can be made to overcome that problem, but sometimes things like test equipment and a whole bunch of stuff being used inside of the Shuttle simply can't be made economically with that strict standard.
Interestingly enough, the space suits used for EVAs still stuck with the 100% Oxygen environment. One of the reasons for that is because of the lower pressure made it easier to bend joints... something sort of important if you want a practical space suit. The downside is that it takes longer for astronauts to get in and out of the airlocks.
It may make some logical sense, but this is a mechanism that has not been previously observed and largely discounted as insignificant by experimenters in the past.
The one thing that is known to be coming from the Sun that pretty much can't be isolated from other items (by going deep underground and trying to rule out other environmental factors) would be neutrinos and neutrino flux. This was mentioned above, but there are some interesting implications if that has some significant impact.
Neutrinos are usually produced in nuclear reactions (like what happens in the Sun when Hydrogen is being changed in the Helium through fusion). While they also get produced in other nuclear reactors, the Sun is by far and away the largest nuclear reactor that would have any sort of impact upon us. Because of the much more vastly larger distances to even other stars, the neutrino flux from other stars would be relatively insignificant. The only other possible source for neutrinos that would have any sort of significance on this scale would be the super massive black hole at the center of our galaxy.... if it was in the process of "eating" several stars (thus causing fusion events just on the outside of the event horizon and emitting those neutrinos as well). A "nearby" supernova would also produce a similar kind of spike in neutrinos. All of this is something that is actively monitored right now with neutrino detectors usually found in deep mineshafts that have been taken over by scientific laboratories from abandoned mines.
It may be possible (I think it would be highly unlikely) that some other kind of nuclear process happening in the Sun or perhaps some other unobserved phenomena could be causing this to happen, but extraordinary theories require extraordinary evidence. Wishing for leprechaun and unicorns to explain your experiments doesn't seem like a logical tactic for a real scientist to be making.
There is enough to this concept of radioactivity variation that it certainly should be investigated further... if only to bury this idea for once and all or to confirm the issue. The Sun has been a source of several discoveries in the past, including the beginning of radio astronomy, the discovery of Helium, and several other phenomena. That it might be the source of discovery for additional scientific investigation is certainly possible.
The one thing you can do to a scientist to make them pay attention is to say "that is a weird result". Weird in this case being something that falls outside of current theories, which the thought that radioactivity could be influenced from outside environmental factors of any kind at all is certainly weird.
There is no "IP" or "intellectual property. There is only copyright, trademarks, and patents. Sell also: http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/not-ipr.html
BTW, on the issues of "intellectual property" I happen to completely agree with Richard Stallman on this issue. Don't get caught up in the kool-aide of the term "intellectual property" when it really can get more confusing than it really is.
Patents can't be helped, but they can be licensed for something like this. Any patent license can also be "sent through" to any non-profit "subsidiary" set up by any company who cares, if they want to set up a non-profit that is community operated. In other words there doesn't need to be any cost and it can easily be taken care of if the original company wants to be engaged and see that it happens.
Trademarks may have some value to the original company and can even be retained. There is no reason why trademarks necessarily are even needed by an open source project and it may even be useful to create new trademarks for the derivative game that is open sourced. This wouldn't even be a problem at all. Trademarked named within the game (kind of like how "Captain Kirk" is trademarked by Paramount Pictures) could even be changed if necessary. That is a trivial issue that wouldn't have any impact at all on the game itself.
As for copyrights, I would call that an incredibly stupid company who didn't secure commercial reproducibility rights for a game including for any successive company. Artwork can be redone (for textures, skins, and background music) if necessary but could still be reassigned if necessary. Just think of what would happen if the company was purchased in a merger situation.... the same situation would apply for turning a for-profit company into a non-profit. If some specific kinds of copyright license is needed for key parts of the game engine, licenses could be granted to a non-profit company as easily and that same non-profit company could be seen as the legal heir to those rights as well.
In short, I find all of the excuses that "IP rights" wouldn't apply in this situation... assuming that the original copyright holder of the game itself is willing to at least try to pass the game off as an open soruce game under control of a non-profit foundation. Perhaps not Richard Stallman style of open source, but pretty dang close and comparable to Netscape's transition to Mozilla and the Mozilla Foundation (another example of a proprietary company who successfully switched to an open source foundation in spite of "intellectual property" concerns).
This has also been done by ID Software, where John Carmack has also turned his older games over to the community under open source licenses.
The argument about competition with future games is perhaps a bit more valid. The problem with that argument is that turning an old game that you want to shut down because it isn't profitable to run any more (the only rational reason to shut down the game in the first place) is that it also is using yesterday's technology and programming techniques. It really isn't progressing into the future and exploiting new technologies like new video rendering hardware or new kinds of user interfaces. While games like Doom have been ported to exploit some newer hardware (to give an example), it still has a dated feel and is more like walking through a museum rather than anything which realistically competes against games being developed by the current generation of programmers.
Perhaps a company like NCSoft is just a shell of a company with mainly lawyers and not many engineers. That can't be helped and if they can't improve over previous generations of software, they are a stagnant company ready to go bankrupt in the near future. I certainly don't expect to be seeing them in a decade if that is the case, so they will simply implode taking all of their games down with them into the corporate graveyard if they don't open up stuff like this. I
I would hate to think of all of the MUDs that have disappeared over the years... many of which also had tremendous communities and some impressive accomplishments.
Still, I'd have to agree with your sentiment here. My only wish for something like this happening is that the developers dump everything into an open source license and tell the community "good luck" in terms of trying to make something of it. That doesn't help the game company itself, but it at least allows the potential for the game community to continue into the future.
There ought to be at least some sort of value to opening up something like that... even if NCSoft simply tries to do something like a fundraiser to sell off the assets to some foundation in exchange for some reasonable amount of money. Blender was able to raise a bunch of money to turn that into an open source program, couldn't the same be done to a game like this?
I doubt I've ever kissed my wife in public except at the wedding ceremony itself. I haven't really seen it happen much elsewhere either, at least in the community where I live at the moment. Hand holding, yes, and some hugging between obvious family members or very good friends (often of the same gender and has nothing to do with sexual orientation).
Again, it depends on your cultural background, but if that is your standard, it seems like it is pushing boundaries beyond just ordinary public displays of affection.
I think often you see things just because you are self conscious of them.
Somebody pointed this out to me once: When you buy a new car, you suddenly notice how many people are driving the same make and model that you are driving and it seems very common (unless it really is unique like a Tesla Roadster or McLaren F1). It isn't that the number of those kind of cars has changed but rather that you've suddenly become aware that they are there.
There is something in many people who want to try and conform to the community in some way, so they notice things that others are doing... particularly if it is something that they want to do themselves as a way to rationalize behavior.
The odd thing that I did see RMS doing with his license suite at the Free Software Foundation was to provide an "escape clause" for Wikipedia and the Wikimedia Foundation to switch licenses from the GFDL to CC-BY-SA. I felt at the time it would have been better to reform the GFDL instead of switching licenses, but it was an interesting action that they took and shows RMS isn't so fanatical about his principles.
About the only really controversial feature that has been added into a FSF license is the "patent clause" which tried to address issues with software patents in GPL'd software. It was also a legal issue that needed to be addressed in some manner, and the problem facing the Free Software Foundation was no prior experience at dealing with the problem. Sometimes you have to make bold moves, even if they turn out to be wrong or that they need to be tweaked in the future.
The original Zealots weren't all that bad. It was a faction of Jewish society at the time of the Roman Empire who did tend to take things to an extreme, but there was a rationale to their actions as well. They thought that many in their society were being too lax in their observances of the various feasts and festivals, thus tried to push back by insisting upon strict observances of those events and other aspects of Jewish life. In many ways it was perhaps even more like a political party, but included religious observances and practices among those who called themselves Zealots. By political party, I am referring to the various factions that made up the Sanhedrin in Jewish society at the time.
Still, calling somebody a Zealot is more or less also calling them a Jew in a very bigoted and hateful way and dangerously approaches Godwin's Law.
And if you ask them, you'll notice that they still don't feel very comfortable engaging in the kinds of public displays of affection that straight couples take for granted.
I'm sort of curious about what kinds of "public displays of affection" you are talking about from "straight" people? Minor hand holding and a couple kissing each other before heading off to work? I think there is much more variation between people of different cultures and their attitudes towards public affection than there is between "straight" and "gay" kinds of affection, or for that matter even between different families within those cultures.
I certainly have seen embraces, hugs, and even kisses being exchanged between men or between women that was done in a non-sexual way and just accepted as a part of that culture (something that is pretty common in South America in particular, but other places too). That these people who might be gay are having a problem with public affection is something that I think is a part of their upbringing, where their families likely weren't really into any sort of public affection at all.
I've really noticed the American military in particular has some really weird ideas about public affection. I think it is a cultural thing within the military, even though I do understand some of the reasons for avoiding such signs of affection while on duty and supposedly trying to perform some critical job. Still, the off duty behavior of many in the military who seem to be against public displays of affection or even giving a hard time to civilians for their displays of affection seem to go over the top. Even in the military though, it varies quite a bit in terms of what is considered acceptable behavior by even that standard. In the case of the military, relationships tend to be under a whole lot of strain because of the long hours, often distant deployments, and the incredible stress that happens for those who may even be the root of this attitude, where those with lousy relationships simply don't want to be reminded that some people can maintain a healthy relationship with a partner/girlfriend/boyfriend/spouse. Military service used to be a whole lot more common in the past than it is now in America as well, which may be some of the root of this "no public affection" attitude.
I was aware of that. If you want to get picky, there were a few others as well, including a few astronauts who were in the Gemini program as well as one X-15 pilot who died after earning his astronaut badge.
See also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Mirror_Memorial#Honorees
Re-read what I said. Neil Armstrong showed a tendency of being able to get out of life threatening situations almost without a scratch. He didn't seek out those situations, but he had a calm and collected attitude about life and flying that allowed him to be able to pull out of the problems that came his way.
I don't think most of those other accidents where people died could have even been survived, with possibly the exception of the Columbia accident (which was sheer management incompetence and not anything to do with the pilots). Well, Challenger shouldn't have flown either, but that was also NASA violating their own flight safety rules too.
Agreed. But most of the training was about getting there and back again. And a you mentioned, it was a struggle to get training on the science of geology, etc. at the risk of getting flamed: engineering is not (ncessarily) a science.
It took a little convincing to the NASA brass that the astronauts needed to be trained in basic sciences, such as chemistry, physics, and geology. They thought it was a waste of money, but once they were convinced of the need they went full in and get the classes set up and gave those astronauts in depth training on basic science, not just applied science or engineering (which astronauts were heavily involved with doing as well).
Yeah, I'd agree that science is not engineering. Engineering is the ability to take knowledge gained from scientific investigations and to apply that knowledge into building stuff. Being a good engineer takes a very different mindset than you find with a scientist, sometimes to the point it become annoying to a decent engineer. An engineer doesn't care why a machine or a physical phenomena works, all they care about is that it does work and they will leave explaining why it works to scientists. To an engineer, the whole point of a scientific inquiry is to get a deeper understanding of how things work.... so you can build something either better (more efficiently or faster) or something simply completely different and get fellow engineers to say "wow, I didn't know you could do that!"
Scientists on the other hand "get in the way" of engineers because they see something that "looks weird" and don't really care if the device they were working on ever gets completed. In fact, the best way to get a scientist excited is to say that a machine doesn't work as expected, especially when it isn't a bone-headed engineering mistake (like forgetting to plug the thing in) that caused the machine to be working funny.
In fairness to the grandparent poster, those who were selected to be astronauts on Apollo were sent through a training program that was as intense as any graduate program, and I may dare say PhD program. They had some of the best and brightest scientists in the world teaching them in a small classroom setting about almost everything that they would encounter while not just going to the Moon but what they would be seeing once they got up there.
BTW, Harrison Schmitt was one of those who pushed to see that happen in the astronaut corps too, and I'm glad that he was able to succeed. Others were involved to get that to happen, but I would dare say that these folks who went to the Moon could have certainly qualified for graduate degrees in several scientific disciplines by the time they actually got to the Moon.
Schmitt instead had a crash course in how to be a test pilot, which he seemed to do rather well at himself. Schmitt was an accomplished pilot in his own right, which is how he got the job of being an astronaut in the first place.
The balls that it took for Neil Armstrong to abort the original landing zone and instead look for another place to land is a judgement call that was nothing short of amazing. That he was able to land with less than 10 seconds of fuel left in the tanks shows how close he was to failure as well.
I don't know what would have happened had the Eagle crashed on the surface of the Moon, but it would have been a sad day.
Then again, I think there would have been politicians that would have figuratively put some duct tape over the mouth of Walter Mondale and made martyrs of those astronauts, and possibly redoubled the effort to get back and do it right. If anything, the string of successes sort of backfired were it made trips to the Moon seem boring and routine, even though that was hardly the case. I'm not saying that I wish one of the dozen astronauts that actually made the trip to the Moon should have died, but I don't think their death would have ended NASA. The loss of the Challenger and Columbia didn't stop the Shuttle program either.
By far and away, at least to me, the greatest accomplishment that Neil Armstrong ever made for the manned spaceflight program of America was not the landing on the Moon, but rather his survival after flying the Lunar Landing Research Vehicle, designed to test astronauts on a real flying vehicle that was supposed to behave like the Lunar Lander would do on the Moon.
It was also the closest that any astronaut got to dying but somehow survived, and it was amazing the Mr. Armstrong didn't die on the day his vehicle crashed and forced him into using the seat ejection mechanism.
Anybody who flew in that vehicle was simply nuts, but it did provide the engineers working for Grumman enough information to be able to safely get those folks to the Moon and back. I also don't think anybody else in the NASA astronaut corps could have been successful at landing the Eagle in the Sea of Traquility during the month of July, 1969.
I thought it was grocery store checkout lines and phone booths, once they ban cell phones as dangerous terrorist devices (due to the ability to use them to trigger a bomb).
Naw, they are using "sub-space communicators" instead.
It is a reasonable thing you are pointing out, where "wireless" and "physically secure" simply can't be compatible. I have heard of missiles that spool out wire for guidance or control during flight, so I presume that is another way to secure communications. I'm sure that works out real well for commercial aircraft though. A physical data link still seems vulnerable to some kinds of attacks, so your original point is justified.
You couldn't "pay yourself" in a restaurant you own in your own kitchen because you don't have a clue how much restaurants are paying for the "privilege" of accepting the card.
Yes, there is the transaction fee.... that you as the customer are paying, but then the restaurant pays an extra fee on top of that to the bank merely to get the money. Where do you think that "5% cash back" comes from? Visa doesn't give that to you out of the generosity of their heart, they are a business. Instead, it comes from the merchant along with some extra skin from that merchant on top of the 5%. That doesn't even get into taxes you would have to pay for running a restaurant out of your own kitchen, which would turn that "profit" you think you might get into a huge loss and an amazing revenue stream for local governments.
Just don't let your local municipal council know they are missing these potential revenue streams as they may force you to pay restaurant fees in your own kitchen and turn your crazy idea into law that you are required to do.
Not really. There is the issue of the fact that a merchant needs to cover these fees somehow, so you end up paying more for products you buy from that merchant in the long run. A typical merchant treats this as "the cost of doing business" and just makes it a part of how much they charge customers.
If a merchant is losing money in various transactions, they eventually go out of business... which really helps you out how?