Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

All 12 moonwalkers had "lunar hay fever" from dust smelling like gunpowder (2018)

esa.int

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

251–260 of 288 posts

Re: All 12 moonwalkers had "lunar hay fever" from dust smelling like gunpowder (2018)

#251

Post by jodrellblank »

bell-cot wrote: post #202
stonecharioteer wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Terraforming anything looks really expensive. Ask a finance guy to run numbers on terraforming places with gravity too weak to hold onto a useful atmosphere for any length of time*, and give you his opinion. *say, Earth's moon

There was a time (1930 - 1960) when Futurism believed we could do great things. Now I imagine a Moonbase or Mars base, and then it gets bought by Private Equity who cancel the maintenance budget, double the number of tourists, and when it OceanGate Titans with the loss of everyone, they shrug and the courts don't give them so much as a slap on the wrist.

That would never happen to the Starship Enterprise. Even in Total Recall, where the baddies wanted to kill the poor, they cared about the integrity of the base keeping everyone alive.

Re: All 12 moonwalkers had "lunar hay fever" from dust smelling like gunpowder (2018)

#253

Post by bsza »

hellopineapple wrote: post #145

Hourly cost doesn’t seems the right metrics, instead the cost should be tied to productivity or difficulty of problem solved

I’m guessing this comment was intended on a different post or on someone else’s comment.

Re: All 12 moonwalkers had "lunar hay fever" from dust smelling like gunpowder (2018)

#254

Post by yubiox »

raffael_de wrote: post #208
corysama wrote: post #34

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?

I used to have a hot tub and it had an ozone generating device for killing bacteria. I loved the smell but people here are saying if you can smell it you are getting dangerous levels of it. :(

Re: All 12 moonwalkers had "lunar hay fever" from dust smelling like gunpowder (2018)

#255

Post by junon »

everyone wrote: post #174
junon wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I always heard burnt steak.

They say that about vaccum. eg. an airlock after re-pressurising it after a spacewalk. Apparently a vaccum sucks stuff like sulphur from within steel to it's surface.

Ah this makes way more sense.

Re: All 12 moonwalkers had "lunar hay fever" from dust smelling like gunpowder (2018)

#256

Post by AlecSchueler »

SecretDreams wrote: post #163
SoftTalker wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Neither is realistic; living on the Moon or Mars or any other planet is a fantasy.

This is the thinking of someone on the timescales of a single life. If humanity persists another 1000 years on our current trajectory (US/world politics not withstanding), I think nothing is really a fantasy. Rather, it's all possible but maybe just not in our own lifetimes. But it is also terribly difficult for us to plan for tomorrow, let alone for a future where our descendants are at the helm.

> If humanity persists another 1000 years on our current trajectory

It's unlikely that we can persist in our current trajectory for another 100 years without catastrophic climate events puttung a stop to all of these endeavours.

Re: All 12 moonwalkers had "lunar hay fever" from dust smelling like gunpowder (2018)

#257

Post by grepfru_it »

diegoperini wrote: post #249
TeMPOraL wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But you could pour water at the fire from across the room! 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.

> Water blobs vs. fireballs. Pretty sure there's a nice videogame idea hiding in there somewhere. I like the way you think. :)

Merry Christmas

https://games.grepfru.it/water-vs-fire/

Re: All 12 moonwalkers had "lunar hay fever" from dust smelling like gunpowder (2018)

#258

Post by jodrellblank »

naravara wrote: post #75
wolvoleo wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doing something like that at planetary scale is science fiction anyway even if we did have the tech to do it.

If you can kick off self-sustaining biological processes it’ll happen on its own eventually, but you’d just be looking at generational time scales to do it. Of course you’ll probably have lots of side-effects.

How do we do that? I imagine dumping Earth life on Mars it will just die. What if we buried a terrarium at the Martian pole with a radio isotope and solar heater and controls so that it could try growing bacteria inside and controlled-leaking some outside into a nearby warm (liquid water) surroundings, and that could get many chances to evolve strains that could survive further away - analogous to ocean life around deep hydrothermal vents.

Anyone know of speculative plans of this sort?

Re: All 12 moonwalkers had "lunar hay fever" from dust smelling like gunpowder (2018)

#259

Post by SecretDreams »

ryandrake wrote: post #248
jiggawatts wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The counterargument is a simple opportunity cost calculation: There will never, ever, ever [1] be a scenario where if you weighed up the options of "expand into some less habitable area of the Earth" versus "expand to Mars", the latter is the better option either 1) financially, or b) quality of life. Nobody[2] ever picks the dramatically more expensive and dramatically worse option! Also, people that are desperate e…

I wish this kind of economic and biologic sanity was more common in discussions of colonizing outer space. We've watched too much Star Trek. Building a city in Antarctica will be economically viable long before building a city on Mars is.

Most of modern civilization has been built over the last century. 1000 years is a very long time brotha. We only got into space 60-70 years ago.

And, rarely, have economic considerations been the only driver for those great societal leaps.

Re: All 12 moonwalkers had "lunar hay fever" from dust smelling like gunpowder (2018)

#260

Post by Groxx »

ygra wrote: post #216
L_226 wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> our current star Looking forward to seeing the next one!

We first need to get rid of the current one in a few billion years. That won't end well for Earth, though.

Earth is just part of the same recycling collection plan, it's fine.
Post reply on HN