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

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

#281

Post by dotancohen »

jonas21 wrote: post #275
mapt wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This sort of scenario, which was thought too improbable to plan for, even by an organization as psychotically obsessed with astronaut safety as NASA, is exactly why human spaceflight was important for exploration. Because astronauts could improvise a sensible solution and the tech couldn't.

If you didn't have the humans on board, you wouldn't need to pressurize the cabin with oxygen. Or even have a cabin.

Yes, the presence of humans adds additional challenges that we overcome and learn from. The learning is the entire point of these missions.

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

#282

Post by lisper »

cornholio wrote: post #276
lisper wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just put a parachute on the asteroid. ;-)

All that kinetic energy needs to go somewhere. It's irrelevant if the asteroid burns up in the atmosphere or if trillions of tiny parachutes heat the atmosphere. I guess you could devise some scheme where kinetic energy is shed or transformed into useful tasks; for example, delivering to Venus an amount of water similar to Earth requires an icy ball half the diameter of the Moon - and the kinetic energy of this mass…

You must have missed the smiley emoticon. Yes, I am well aware that parachutes on asteroids won't work. It was a joke. (I used to work for NASA.)

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

#283

Post by naravara »

jodrellblank wrote: post #258
naravara wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 d…

The closest thing I’ve heard of is genetically engineering some extremophile bacteria to seed some bacterial colonies with, and then building some domed habitats and dropping plants and fungi into it. And then you could allow some of that life to grow outside the dome and spread over time, slowly bulking up the oxygen levels. There are also proposals that you could have orbital focusing mirrors to beam additional heat at the planet and start to melt some of the water and frozen greenhouse gases.

Any effort is only temporary though, because Mars doesn’t have a magnetic field, so the sun is constantly stripping atmosphere off it. It’s not a renewable resource there like it is here.

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

#284

Post by DreadY2K »

ButlerianJihad wrote: post #266

Anyone expecting to colonize Mars, or even send humans there, within the next 1,000 years is going to be sorely disappointed. I told my neighbor: we could send some humans to Mars, but not expect to get them back! Even if Mars were pre-terraformed, even if Mars were a perfect idyllic copy of Earth and a Garden of Eden just inviting humans to go there and set up bases, we could not send crews to Mars. The final nail i…

> how, after 6 months' travel in deep space, will they accomplish anything at a Mars base, even mere survival?

I expect the answer is spin gravity. Have a long cable with a counterweight on the other end, spin it at some rate. We would need some studying about the exact impacts (how hard is it to learn to start/stop compensating for Coriolis forces?), but it'd be much easier than full weightlessness.

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

#285

Post by IAmBroom »

mr_toad wrote: post #66
Bender wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My UV sterilizing lights make my room smell like O3 Ozone and that smells nothing like spent gun-powder to me. The only other time I have smelled the same thing is when there has been mass lightening events in the sky. Were they talking about actual black powder or nitrocellulose? I've smelled black powder at the range when people bring out their antique rifles and that also does not smell like Ozone to me.

‘Ozone’ is the smell of ionisation, ‘gunpowder’ the smell of oxidisation.

Half right. Gunpowder is mostly the smell of sulfur compounds.

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

#286

Post by emsign »

tarcon wrote: post #246
emsign wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Outer space smells like burnt flesh is what I've heard. Space is full of toxic polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons which are created in novae and are everywhere in outer space in small amounts. They're the same chemicals that generate when organic compounds and fossil fuels are burnt. Makes me wonder even more why some people really want to go and live there.

Has anyone tried to breath space? :)

Maybe you try it. :)

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

#287

Post by VoidWarranty »

vixen99 wrote: post #193
manwe150 wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Maybe you should qualify 'anti-vaccine claims'. Throughout the history of vaccines which have saved countless lives, some people have died or suffered severe reactions linked to a vaccine. This is hardly surprising given our metabolic heterogeneity. 'Anti-vaccine claims' suggests a taking of sides on that knee-jerk division into those who claim without evidence that almost or even all vaccines are deadly and on the o…

Let's not be pedantic. Its quite obvious to anyone not living under a rock what "anti-vaccine" means.

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

#288

Post by cdavies7 »

grepfru_it wrote: post #257
diegoperini wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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/

Very clever!
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