201–210 of 288 posts
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This is what trips me up about terraforming. If we learn to create an atmosphere, are we going to instantly poison the oxygen we introduce?
It took about a billion years of photosynthesis on earth before all the ferrous iron dissolved in the oceans was oxidized and atmospheric oxygen concentration began to take off.
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the detail that kills me is moon dust has never contacted oxygen in billions of years, so every time an astronaut came back inside they were essentially doing a chemistry experiment for the first time. the whole moon is just waiting to react with air
This is what trips me up about terraforming. If we learn to create an atmosphere, are we going to instantly poison the oxygen we introduce?
*say, Earth's moon
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Empty out a glass of water and blow the floating blobs towards the fire.
The moon has gravity. The blobs wouldn't float.
Lower gravity is giving the defender an advantage over the elements... at least until it gets low enough for things to start floating, when this flips around. In microgravity, water turns into floating blobs, but fire turns into actual floating fireballs.
Water blobs vs. fireballs. Pretty sure there's a nice videogame idea hiding in there somewhere.
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This is what trips me up about terraforming. If we learn to create an atmosphere, are we going to instantly poison the oxygen we introduce?
Well, oxygen _is_ poison. It's eager to react (sometimes violently) with almost everything. It rusts and oxidates perfect shiny metals and silicon making everything an oxide!
I recall an article from a long time ago that basically said “astronauts report” the moon smells like spent gunpowder and outer space smell like… I think it was ozone. What they were actually reporting was the smell of the airlocks after they returned from their excursions. The moon has no atmosphere, so it has been accumulating dust from billions of years of asteroid impacts that have never come in contact with oxyg…
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Careful. The venn diagram bubble depicting your statement overlaps heavily with the anti-vaccine bubble. Its a bit naieve to claim that cleaning one's home will result in an extinction of enough microbes so as to be threatening to our immune system.
That’s because the parent claim is known as the hygiene hypothesis and has been disproven by science, in common with anti vaccine claims. The immune system has not been shown to benefit from training, but has been shown to be damaged by illness.
The anti vaccine position makes a very strong claim, namely that vaccines will cause complications that are strong enough to justify not vaccinating children, which is obviously false since a lot of the diseases that are vaccinated against have actually killed children and the vaccines have dropped child mortality significantly and the complications that are supposed to be avoided by refraining from vaccines tend to be both rare and non life threatening.
You can't make the same argument with the hygiene hypothesis, because the claim is really weak. Nobody is saying that extreme hygiene will kill you. The argument is along the lines of "lack of exposure to environmental microbes, viruses or allergens may lead to an unprepared immune system that hasn't developed a wide variety of anti bodies or is more likely to develop allergies or autoimmune problems".
I'm not sure how I would be able to argue against this claim since it only takes one microbe, virus or allergen to make it true.
The context here isn't hand washing vs not hand washing, it's aggressive ozone + UV sterilisation vs regular hygiene.
Not to mention that the hygiene hypothesis has an even weaker version still, namely the "old friends hypothesis". It seems pretty weird to equivocate this to being against vaccines.
I recall an article from a long time ago that basically said “astronauts report” the moon smells like spent gunpowder and outer space smell like… I think it was ozone. What they were actually reporting was the smell of the airlocks after they returned from their excursions. The moon has no atmosphere, so it has been accumulating dust from billions of years of asteroid impacts that have never come in contact with oxyg…
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How can it include oxygen?
Stars kinda famously fuse elements up to iron as part of normal operations. And even if you exclude that, the entire solar system is leftovers from a previous star - all that is inside our current star too. Sure, much of it isn't at the surface, but there's not much of a reason to expect that literally zero of it randomly floats up among the lighter elements. Have a reference tho: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_…
Looking forward to seeing the next one!
I recall an article from a long time ago that basically said “astronauts report” the moon smells like spent gunpowder and outer space smell like… I think it was ozone. What they were actually reporting was the smell of the airlocks after they returned from their excursions. The moon has no atmosphere, so it has been accumulating dust from billions of years of asteroid impacts that have never come in contact with oxyg…
i'm wondering how do people even know what ozone smells like?