81–90 of 91 posts
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Don't forget Trinity test site. It's only open for touring one day a year now, I believe.
https://www.nps.gov/whsa/learn/historyculture/trinity-site.h... > the first Saturdays of April and October ... so, a week from tomorrow!
I took a tour of Biosphere 2 when I was young. I remember the guide talking about two specific problems they didn't anticipate that dramatically altered the outcome of the experiment: The 'domes' are supported by a metal lattice framework. That structure actually blocked too much sun and created extra shade which affected the plant growth. The concrete used in the construction was sucking up carbon dioxide and changi…
My favorite failure mode was that the trees started to fall over under their own weight when they got too tall, because there was no wind inside the dome. As they learned, wind is essential for trees because they must grow stronger trunks in reaction to the wind, and the wind helps blow off parts of the tree that aren't strong enough.
I spent a week at the Biosphere during the transition, after the old crew had been fired and they were trying to figure out how to salvage something useful out of the project. It was a big a mess as every article written about it, including this one, said. One fact that stuck with me was all the sensor data was useless because no one had calibrated any of the sensors on installation. The other was that everyone unive…
Where'd the cockroaches come from? Presumably from the outside?
Hell i’d read an article analyzing exactly what role they played in the biospheres ecosystem. The article implies they’re bad, prima facie. If you want to be “scientific” then lets address exactly what they were contributing and hurting. Was biosphere 2 designed to account for an insect food chain? Was it designed to account for all the types of waste cockroaches eat? The more I think about it the less i feel like th…
I for one welcome...
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IMHO Biosphere 2 was not a realistic experiment for a self-sustained off-world colony. They tried to to mimic a complex self-regulating biosphere and failed. The pragmatic approach is going with a tightly controlled artificial ecosystem with the absolute minimum number of species and heavy technological involvement. The russian BIOS-3 is a much better model for a Mars colony.
Yes, this is the key point. Biosphere 2 had too many conflicting goals. Species diversity is cool and all. But if your goal is even century-scale self-sufficiency, you arguably you don't need pieces of so many ecosystems. I mean, what do bush babies really do for you? Cockroaches are a tough problem. And management of soil microbes. But maybe the most practical solution is to gamma sterilize all bulk inputs, and care…
Isn't there something we want that eats them?
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If people look at creating a Mars colony as a voluntary extreme sport, like climbing Everest, BASE jumping, or wingsuit flying, with their corresponding death rates, you might understand the motivation of the people wanting to go to mars a bit better. For those types of people risking death to do something extreme is fun and going to Mars would be both very high risk and extreme. A safety first attitude won't build a…
> For those types of people risking death to do something extreme is fun and going to Mars would be both very high risk and extreme. Getting there would be. Living there would be constant danger plus tedium, the space equivalent of working on a farm barely making ends meet for the rest of your life. Such lives don't have enough dopamine hits to keep people of such dispositions around long.
Training for ultra-marathons (and running them) is painful and tedious. The thing that people need are goals. For example "survive on Mars for 2 months". Then the next person will come along and say "I bet I can do in for 3". Then 6, then 12. And if enough people do it, suddenly you have a "base camp" from which to run your extreme survival competitions.
The dopamine drip will last a long time. Eventually, someone will fall in love with Mars in the same way they fall in love with Everest or El Capitan, or whatever, and then a colony can start.
Humans are crazy, and a subset of us enjoy pushing past the boundaries merely to prove that it is possible to ourselves. To prove that we have no limits. I think those people should be given every opportunity that humanity can afford to give them to push the limits of human capability.
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https://www.nps.gov/whsa/learn/historyculture/trinity-site.h... > the first Saturdays of April and October ... so, a week from tomorrow!
What's it like when the 1st Saturday of April is April 1st?
https://www.google.com/search?q=april+1+2017+%22trinity+site...
Here's an example of a video by a visitor on that day.
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Yes, this is the key point. Biosphere 2 had too many conflicting goals. Species diversity is cool and all. But if your goal is even century-scale self-sufficiency, you arguably you don't need pieces of so many ecosystems. I mean, what do bush babies really do for you? Cockroaches are a tough problem. And management of soil microbes. But maybe the most practical solution is to gamma sterilize all bulk inputs, and care…
Cockroaches are a tough problem. Isn't there something we want that eats them?
https://www.peststrategies.com/pest-guides/cockroach-guides/...
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"Right now a Mars colony would be plain suicide. " If the plan is to have a self-sustaining colony, then yes. But if supply flights are guarantied, I don't see the problem. You can grow food in space. We do. We just can't have a enclosed system yet and are probably quite far away from it. But I agree, that I think it makes much sense to do more ground- and moonwork first.
> But if supply flights are guarantied Nothing in spaceflight is guaranteed, and Earth-Mars spaceflight is a lot less subject to guarantee than Earth-ISS spaceflight, which hasn't been trouble free.
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> For those types of people risking death to do something extreme is fun and going to Mars would be both very high risk and extreme. Getting there would be. Living there would be constant danger plus tedium, the space equivalent of working on a farm barely making ends meet for the rest of your life. Such lives don't have enough dopamine hits to keep people of such dispositions around long.
Getting there would be lots of tedium, too.
Humans, somehow, manage.