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China lands rover on Mars

bbc.com

351–359 of 359 posts

Re: China lands rover on Mars

#351
post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are blatantly lying that a hexagon looks identical to a rectangle. Shameful.

Ah yes, all of the design similarities are just cosmetic, right? They certainly haven’t had their spies convicted of stealing American aviation technology ever?

Please don't post flamewar comments to HN. It's not what this site is for.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re: China lands rover on Mars

#352
post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah yes, all of the design similarities are just cosmetic, right? They certainly haven’t had their spies convicted of stealing American aviation technology ever?

If you ever read the slightest about aerodynamics you wouldn't make such blatantly wrong, ignorant, arrogant claims that the J-20 and F-22 are 'identical'. They are of the most fundamentally different layouts in designing a jet. Do everyone a favor and shut up.

Please don't post flamewar comments to HN. It's not what this site is for. Personal attacks are particularly not ok.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Edit: since your account has been using HN exclusively for this, I've banned it. That's not an allowed use of HN, regardless of what you're for or against.

Re: China lands rover on Mars

#353
post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's blatant slander. Think about the detergent presented as 'evidence of weapon of mass destruction' that led to the invasion of Iraq.

Here’s your fifty cents, citizen. Your social credit score just went up too.

Breaking the site guidelines this egregiously will get you banned here. Please read https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules from now on.

Edit: it unfortunately looks like you've posted flamewar comments repeatedly as well. Would you please not? We're trying for a different quality of conversation here, as you'll see if you read the link I just mentioned.

Re: China lands rover on Mars

#354

It makes me concerned thinking about what kind of biological contamination this rover might have brought to Mars that may seriously hamper the search for signs of past native life. JPL is very forthcoming about their cleanliness procedures, China not so much. And they don’t exactly have a great track record in this respect.

Odd. Sending a rover to another planet is an engineering feat. Your worry is the Chinese space agency and its staff dont know how to decontaminate? That is properly odd of not myopic.

It's a cultural and institutional problem. All you have to do is extrapolate from their general hygienic practices. Wet markets, gutter oil, the whole Covid-19 pandemic. Germ theory isn't even fully accepted in China, I'm sure someone would have suggested rubbing down the spacecraft with ginseng to align the chi or something. Couple that with the demonstrably awful spacemanship in dropping rocket stages completely at random, for no other reason than méi bàn fǎ.

Of course there's a lot of Chinese people, especially of the younger generations, who are perfectly smart and conscientious about these things, just like the whistleblowers at the start of the pandemic. But who do you think approves the budgets for things like decontamination and controlled re-entry procedures, but the feckless, corrupt and superstitious CCP uncles who were formed by Mao's cultural revolution?

Of course any criticism of communist China is going to be met with a long string of whataboutisms, so I might as well pre-empt it. Yes, shame on the Americans for incinerating 17 of their astronauts out and endangering many others with their negligence. Shame on the Russians for everything they did wrong. I don't have a horse in the space race, they are all worthy of criticism. Criticism of one does not imply that any of the other are perfect, anyone who thinks that is clearly an idiot.

Re: China lands rover on Mars

#355

It makes me concerned thinking about what kind of biological contamination this rover might have brought to Mars that may seriously hamper the search for signs of past native life. JPL is very forthcoming about their cleanliness procedures, China not so much. And they don’t exactly have a great track record in this respect.

I may have an unorthodox opinion about this, but I believe our primary goal should be to propagate life rather than to search for it. Sooner or later, we will need to expand our horizons as a species. When that time comes, we will benefit greatly from a long period of study regarding the forms of earthly life that can potentially survive elsewhere. To me, finding evidence of past life would be fascinating and groundb…

It would be an interesting experiment for sure to see if one could "terraform" Mars with some kind of life from Earth. But I don't see how it would be any more actionable than any discovery of past life. Both experiments will give greater insight into theories like abiogenesis and panspermia, but that's about it. Better to exhaust the first before trying the second, since you can't undo the second one. Also a bit more scientific rigour than just seeing what happens to piggyback on the spacecraft would probably be warranted.

Re: China lands rover on Mars

#356
post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This country is a pure, violent dictatorship that imprisons more journalists and political opponents than anywhere else on earth, that is effecting ethnical k cleansing within its borders and that is aggressively looking to expend itself (Taiwan, after just being done with suppressing the independent government of Hong Kong). I'm sorry if people think about a bit more than something that will have tiny to no effect o…

Wanna know which "pure, violent dictatorship" imprisons more people than anywhere else on Earth...?

I'm not an American, saying something else is bad doesn't excuse the first one

Re: China lands rover on Mars

#357

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, this is complete nonsense. The science behind rockets were already being worked on long before WW2 or even the first expansion of territory of the Third Reich beyond the borders set at the closing of WW1. It's like when people gave credit to Hitler for infrastructure projects such as the Autobahns which were already in progress before he took office.

I didn't say that only Germans had this technology. They have been doing a heavy research though and they didn't have to worry about human rights abuse and so on. It was valuable enough so that it was worth for the US to launch Operation Paperclip.

Sure but I'm not sure how their freedom from worrying about human rights abuse has anything at all to do with their rocket research. They never had any human test pilots or manned rocket vehicle tests (that are public record anyway). Perhaps, you confusing that with their medical research.

Re: China lands rover on Mars

#358
post #338

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps. The Energia booster was quite good. The real reason they stopped flying it is that the Soviet Union went broke, which is also why there is no Soviet Union anymore.

I think the political narrative of the dissolution of the Soviet Union was a bit more complex than that. The root cause was a political dissatisfaction in the "member" states and as Kremlin under Gorbachev tried to create a more financially dynamic political system, they accidentally also gave enough leash to the vassal states to create an unstoppable tidal wave of reforms. They could have rolled the tanks in as duri…

I haven't lived there so I appreciate the perspective. There certainly is no single cause. What I see as the proximal cause, or the straw that broke the camel's back was that starting in the seventies, the USSR had become a petrostate. The USSR wasn't producing enough food for the population, but this wasn't a problem through the seventies and early eighties due to the high oil prices. The USSR simply sold oil to pay for food imports.

In the mid eighties, the oil price crashed, and in order to feed the USSR, they had to take out increasingly large hard currency loans, which eventually got so big, that the only way to make them happen was with western government backing. The (implicit or explicit) condition was that if they rolled tanks in Poland or East Germany, the money, and hence the grain, would be cut off. Gorbachev said in an interview that in 1988 or 1989, the USSR was months away from mass starvation had the imports ceased.

Some give Reagan credit for convincing the Saudis to pump more oil and set this chain of events in motion, but I have no idea if that's true or not. Of course I'm disregarding why exactly it was that the USSR couldn't produce enough food with the massive amount of arable land available to it, or why it exactly there were these pro-democracy movements popping up in Poland and East Germany and other places in the Warsaw Pact.

Re: China lands rover on Mars

#359

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t think the Uigyurs would agree with that statement. Particularly the ones that are being raped and re-educated in camps.

Well I indeed know people who are through the reeducation camp, they are certainly changed, for a better mental and economical status. They were practicing some weirdass Sharia laws to their families and friends. As for the Xinjiang reeducation news, they were originated from Adrian Zenz and a small group of reporters from Australia, who both have never put feet on Xinjiang. How much the whole Xinjiang incident is pr…

Chinas reeducation camps are the greatest blessing on earth. Unfortunately, it seems several professors and celebrities remain intransigent inspite of years of reeducation. They fail to properly absorb Xi Jinping thought, like so many CEOs have done. They must not be allowed to graduate from the camp unless they are properly reeducated.

>How much the whole Xinjiang incident is propaganda, and how much reality, I don't know.

Such a shame.

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