241–250 of 351 posts
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Good catch "With the small stellar radius, Proxima d ... equilibrium temperature may reach 360K," NB: Earth's is 255K. Venus 260K, Mars 215K. So this doesn't tell the whole story, but is probably quite hot.
It is certainly tidally locked. So it has a hot side, a cold side, and an intermediate ring at the terminator. Probably not very comfortable.
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I'd say I do. Climate change is colossal in problem magnitude, but temporally slow and distributed in impact. Nuclear weapons are terrifying fast and centralized in impact. Unfortunately, our civilization is also mostly centralized. Cities, ports, highly productive land : total land area. If you're talking persistent radioactive effects for a decade+, it doesn't take many to severely cripple the world. As an example,…
How would the increase in the number of nuclear power plants lead to more nuclear weapons? There is no direct connection besides edge cases like Iran using it as a cover to develop nuclear weapons.
Consequently, for widespread nuclear reactors (read: in many countries), you also had widespread proliferation of lightly enriched uranium (in the fuel) and proliferation of plutonium (produced in the fuel as the reactor runs).
Both of these remove the most time and energy consuming step (low level enrichment) as an obstacle to state nuclear weapons development.
And they're fundamental to the way light water reactor technology works, especially with the limitations of the period. So the only way you could have had proliferation-resistance would have been to have some sort of global fuel-control and -custody agreement (presumably run by the United States, USSR, and maybe France, depending on the time period). Which sovereign countries would have likely felt some kind of way about.
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This is absolutely, objectively, incorrect. You might as well argue that you can build a self-sustaining base on Antarctica. Of course you can't, because Antarctica can't support life. No amount of shouting into a bullhorn about adventure will change that. It might be possible with an absolutely epic effort to airlift soil, nuclear reactors, nuclear and other fuels, machinery for every eventually (including chip fabs…
> soil Both aquaponics and aeroponics provide ways to grow plants without soil. Breeding insects or algae may provide nutrition with very small amounts of mass needing to be transported. > nuclear reactors Yes, these are a necessity but we've sent one to Antarctica before and we could send a more modern one to Mars. > nuclear and other fuels The good thing about nuclear fuel is that you need a very small amount of it…
I am all for exploration and science for the sake of science, but any talk of colonies is just wasted breath at this stage. We need to first explore how to live within our means on earth.
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A probe based on nuclear pulse propulsion could do it in around 50 years, with today's technology. It's not that we can't do it fast (within one average human lifespan), it's that the project would be very expensive and something like Nasa has a relatively tight budget. I mean we, as humanity, have to have an eccentric billionaire start a Martian fire (SpaceX Starship) under our lazy asses to even start to think abou…
Going to Mars seems pretty useless to me at this time. It’s a super hostile environment and we don’t have the technology yet to have a self sustaining base there. Give it a few decades and progress in robotics will make a Mars base much easier. There is plenty of work to be done on Earth. We have to solve clean energy production and in general reduce pollution. These are massive technological challenges that deserve…
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Isn't long term zero-g pretty hostile to our biology?
Mars is 0.3 G, which is just as hostile for long-term habitation. No human child conceived, born, and raised in that environment would have the ability to stand on Earth without an Aliens-style rigid exosuit. Their heart might not even be capable of pumping blood to their head.
Q: What does zero-g do to the human body?
A: It's really really unhealthy.
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I was saddened to hear about Winchell's cancer diagnosis last year[1]. I've wasted a ton of time there too, it's an oddity compared to the rest of the modern internet. I know very few other useful sites like it, and I love it all the more for its strange aesthetic. I don't agree with everything there either, but usually it's only very minor gripes. In this case though, it's hard to argue with the reality of the rocke…
Oh man, I hadn't heard about that. Best of luck to him but he's right prostate cancer is a pretty bad one. What are the other few sites you do know of? And you are absolutely right about the rocket equation. You can't really get around it.
[1]: https://gregegan.net
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Most premodern states (at least) in Europe didn't really have a monopoly on violence in the strict sense either. Kings were constrained by a variety of laws and customs which they couldn't easily change without triggering violent opposition and had to co-opt the local elites (who usually acted as independent actors) whenever they wanted to impose their will outside of the area they directly controlled. Even an 'absol…
Fair enough, it seems that you are primarily attacking the word Monopoly. What if we were to soften the claim to dominance. Rulers always maintained power based on their ability to resist violence from within and without. Economic leverage only existed as long as one could protect themselves from violent opposition. A trade embargo meant nothing if the opposition can seize your assets and production by force. In toda…
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We're now capable of programming cells to produce arbitrary proteins at will, how cool is that? Also please do look through the playlist in a sibling comment. Michael Levin's research is truly badass. He has grown tadpoles with an extra working eye on the back, and recently he has regrown an amputated leg on a frog. There's an astonishing amount of untapped possibilities in biology that are opening up only now as we…
Right, CRISPR is ok, but they haven't figured out that many real applications. This approach to vaccines has actually been around forever. I bookmarked this thread specifically to watch your links later. I appreciate them and will watch, as I am really interested in the topic. My hope is that biotech is the next step, but as I mentioned, for now I am highly pessimistic. We can't seem to treat virtually anything in an…
Thing is, medicine/biology is a unique field because it relies quite a lot on advancements in other fields for its tools. You couldn't research cells before microscope was invented. You can't begin figuring out what each part of a genome does before you've sequenced it. You can't begin to research functions of specific proteins before you've solved their structures and got the ability to manipulate their production and/or attach markers to them. And so on, and so forth. Not so long ago the main approach in medical research was basically "try stuff randomly on lab animals and see what has a beneficial effect". Now that we can peek into the internal workings of biological systems we can use a more direct, more engineering-like approach.
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Here's a good collection of details about the entire star system of Proxima Centauri, including its planets. https://www.star-facts.com/proxima-centauri/ Also fascinating, a relative distance vs time graph of close stars. It turns out we'll have closer distances for 6 in the next 10,000 - 50,000 years. https://www.star-facts.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/Neares... Somehow I feel like Elon Musk has a print out of tha…
"Unlike the Sun, which will evolve into a red giant in 6.5 billion years and reach the end of its life at an age of about 10 billion years, Proxima will stay on the main sequence for another four trillion years due to its low mass and low energy production." They laughed at me when I bought investment property on Proxima Centauri b, but who'll be the one laughing in 10.000000001 billion years?
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It is certainly tidally locked. So it has a hot side, a cold side, and an intermediate ring at the terminator. Probably not very comfortable.
Why is it certainly tidally locked when Mercury is not?
And Mercury is almost tidally locked. Venus will be, before long.