I used my particle physics and knowledge of quantum topology to hybridise a new species of drought-resistant pineapple just the other day. It’s that easy!
Oh, I do my plumbing based on political science. But that’s not especially modern. The real genius is using music theory to run my email server. I’m setting self-hosted jazz on a saxophone next weekend.
Well, we did have plenty of engineered items before having the proper physics theory to explain what was happening. Physics does a whole lot more than simply enabling engineering to do more. It’s the basis of our understanding of the universe.
Linus Pauling (the Linus Pauling) had a moment in his life when he became obsessed with the idea that antioxidants would make us all live forever.
It’s also worth noting that anaerobic organisms are a thing, and they die too. Yes, cells suffer with oxidation and this is indeed related to aging, but if you remove all oxygen from the equation, any replication of genetic material will still slowly age and eventually kill you.
the daily intake of natural antioxidant sources is very important in the prevention of oxidative stress, since it has many positive effects on our health.
Not breathing oxygen is way more toxic, though. That will kill you in a few minutes.
Sure, I imagine off-world lifeforms having entirely different metabolism. Like when we hear “this planet has a methane atmosphere” it’s like holy cow, sounds rough, but alien entities would possibly think the same thing about our planet of water and nitrogen. Imagine how horrible it would sound to someone who was water-soluble. “H2O rains down from the sky!!”
We keep finding life on earth in places where we didn’t think life was possible. And yet, when we look at the stars we have the nerve to talk about there being a “goldilocks zone” for planets in other solar systems, like that’s the only way life could exist there.
I’m sure there’s life out there somewhere, and I wouldn’t be surprised at all if carbon/water based life turns out to be a minority in the universe.
Yes, water is a simple compound made of some of the most common elements in the universe, so it’s reasonable to think other life might also evolve to use it. Carbon is also a really handy element for making complex molecules, and is also really common. But, it’s a failure of the imagination to think that life elsewhere has to follow the same basic chemistry as here on earth.
Unfortunately, most life will likely be Carbon based, in some manner (synthetic life could be different). The key is forming the large, complex molecules that make life, life. You need an element that can form chains. You also need to attach things to those chains.
The only 2 atoms that can do this are carbon and silicon. Both can form “organic” type molecules. Unfortunately, silicon has an additional reaction pathway that makes the chain easily break down in the presence of water. The conditions for silicon based life are so odd as to be unlikely to happen on the scale needed by natural processes. There might be some work arounds we don’t know about, they would be extremes.
Synthetic life is another story. Once you have active control over your environment, a number of other options open up. The first step is the kicker however, getting from abiotic natural rubble to a working replicator.
There’s a reason we are looking in Goldilocks zones, they are the most likely environment for the only process that seems viable.
Man, I love science people. Like, are you guys aware of how cool you are? I love being around people who talk about awesome shit like this, even tho I don’t understand most of it. Keep being you o7
You live on a world where the temperature is only on average 288K? It’s so cold there that H2O exists in its solid form on the surface in places!!! How can you people even move let alone have any active biological processes?
Makes you think, why didn’t they put a cadaver in there? Like a dead human, preserved for the alien lads to have a proper look at. Surely there would be volunteers down for donating themselves after their death.
With modern tech and ingenuity yes … much much faster.
But a naked human … fastest recorded running speed is 44.7 kph (27.7 mph) … but in flight, or free fall can reach a stabilized controlled terminal velocity of 193 kph (120 mph) and a maximum controlled streamlined terminal velocity of 500 kph (310 mph)
Imagine if only 1/10 of all countries GDP gouvernement spending went to scientists and the patent bullshit didn’t exist ? We’d be mining asteroids and sipping coffee on Mars.
Venus would take longer, but would be vastly easier to terraform to a habitable world. The atmosphere should be able to be transformed into an earth like atmosphere by dumping a few comets and some bacteria in. Might take the bacteria a few thousand years, but they did it here in Earth caused the first mass extinction.
We might wanna check to see if any bacteria exist on Venus first, but honestly if there are, they haven’t made the evolutionary jump in the last 4 billion years, so I doubt it will happen just cause we add the necessary water.
While we are at it, we may as well solve the dark forest problem, turn the solar system into a massive spaceship, and extend the life of our sun, by turning Mercury into a solar thruster/ star lifter.
I’m partial to the idea of converting Mercury into a star lifter / thruster / planetary shade. Blocking sunlight to Venus would cause the atmosphere to cool, then freeze and fall as snow. Then you can disassemble Venus too for more raw material. That’s a massive store of carbon, oxygen, and sulfur. Solar powered mass drivers operating out of a planetary vacuum cut costs of launching material into space.
People often object to the idea because we can’t afford it, it’s too difficult, or out of concern for preserving those planets. Yeah, we won’t be doing all that. It will be our descendants in the far future. A task for new civilizations, over eons. Discovering life on Mercury and Venus is a long shot. But if it is there, it’s doomed without human intervention. Convert those two planets to Dyson swarm, and they’ll have matter for countless orbital habitats, not just for whoever humans evolve into, but for nature preserves too.
Don’t disassemble Venus. That planet is far too easy to terraform. Disassemble Mars, asteroids, and the various otherwise useless moons, comets, asteroids, and proto-planets in the heliosphere
Well, I understand the argument for terraforming, and I’d bet good money we will terraform it long before disassembly, but I’m more of an O’Neil Cylinder / Dyson Swarm kind of guy. I prefer the idea of overwhelming surface area via orbital habitats rather than colonizing gravity wells. I also don’t trust Venus not to catastrophically resurface itself and refill the atmosphere with CO2 and sulphuric acid in a mass volcanic event.
Long term, but far too soon the Sun will expand into a red giant and devour Mercury, Venus, and likely Earth as well. If it’s possible to employ a Dyson Swarm to lift material from a star to reduce its mass, then it may be feasible to prevent or mitigate the red giant phase to preserve Earth and extend its habitability, perhaps indefinitely. If preserving the birthplace of known life seems more important than building a copy in a more precarious orbit, then we ought to sacrifice that copy to expand the Dyson Swarm and mine the Sun faster. Mercury first though. We’ve got time. Mars can probably go too.
Oh yes, and if the notion of slowly altering Earth’s orbit by tossing asteroids past us ever needs to happen, then surely rapid firing 2 or 3 planets worth of material across our bow ought to get the job done much faster.
Considering the eons involved with stripping both inward planets down to the last bucketful though, I’m certainly in favor of a few millennia to fully explore and research them both beforehand.
I’m not seeing why the same couldn’t be said for Mars, drop some mold spores and water bears down there, maybe some photosynthetic bacteria, slowly build a blanket of CO2 to warm the planet, melt/release the water from the surface, a thousand years gives a habitable planet, no asteroid steering required.
Mars is roughly a single order of magnitude larger than The Moon, in mass. The Earth is roughly 81 times the mass of The Moon. Mars doesn’t have a magnetic field protecting it, and can’t unless we add a significant amount of metals, and mass to the planet. It also doesn’t have an atmosphere due to the two previous facts.
Meanwhile, Venus is roughly the size of The Earth at a scale of 4.8673 : 5.97222. It doesn’t have enough water though. It also doesn’t have a large iron core to create a magnetic field to protect the inhabitants. However, we could re-route several comets fairly easily to impact Venus giving it a small amount of mass, but also all the water that is needed to start the bacteria creating a Nitrogen rich atmosphere that has a large percentage of Oxygen, turning Venus into a tropical planet that will lose its atmosphere in a few billion years. To counteract this, as we throw 20-30 comets at Venus, we should also throw 100-200 Iron rich asteroids at Venus so that they will be absorbed into the molten core and form a magnetic field for Venus.
Now we have 2 Earth-like planets in a few hundred to thousand years.
To create such a gravitational well on Mars, so that we aren’t constantly losing both our normal skeletural muscles, but also more importantly, our organ muscles, you would have to create a stable black hole in the core of Mars, or you would have to bombard Mars, and its pathetic moons, with millions of asteroids.
To create a long term naturally stable, new earth, Venus is just closer to the masses that we actually need. By dropping just the comets onto Venus you just added a lot of mass, and that gets Venus even closer to being “Earth-like.” We will have to give Venus a comparative moon, but with asteroid mining, and starlifting, that shouldn’t be an issue.
By using Mercury to create a solar thruster, we gain access to unlimited space dust, that will form unlimited asteroids for us, in the Kuiper Belt.
Would be neat if they found a way to only spend like 200 billion a year (the GDP of Hungary and as much as the second biggest military spender) on the people grinder.
I don’t think even a purely defensive military could be that small for the US. We have a lot of coastline on two oceans, plus distant holdings in Alaska and Hawaii. Even discharging Guam and the like would still be a lot of ground and ocean to cover.
My googling says the US spent/185b on the DHS for this year and has 100b for FY2024, which includes the stupid mexico wall. I’m sure there would be more things to deal with not included in that number and it would take time to transition, but any reduction is a positive gain if you ask me.
But we spend nearly $200 billion just paying salaries. We spend the most because we are also an expensive country to live in and that means paying the folks who volunteer a decent wage.
We would have to significantly downsize the military personnel and pretty much operate as homeland defense only.
It’s currently used to monopolize important discoveries and technologies. The Huawei debacle is the biggest proof. No country should be able to control another’s technological advance based on weither they’re friends with them at the moment or not. Also, it’s not like big tech stealing from small/medium enterprise never happens. Either they just buy the company or strangle it one way or another to bankrupt it and then buy it for cheap.
You make the patents too easy to get and it fucks the little guy over as the big corps hoover up all the ideas. You make them difficult or impossible to get then that also benefits the big guys over the little guys as they will just steal people’s ideas and produce them for cheaper with their existing infrastructure which creates an even bigger monopoly.
There is a sweet spot that society is trying to reach. It’s imperfect like any system but it’s far far better than having no system.
You’ve not even considered that in order to get a patent granted you have to disclose your invention to the public which stops big corporations hoarding too many trade secrets.
All in all, the idea that patents shouldn’t exist benefits nobody except the large corporations. Say goodbye to start ups growing in size if that is the case.
Just because big tech does these things doesn’t mean we should remove any pretense of rules against it. If they want something a little guy has, they should buy it, not take it for free.
I like to analyze art ( usually alone and in my mind ) so bear with me. His art is Very interesting but it’s always big robot/drone/ megalithique structures in an open field. While I can totally imagine a big robotic mascots rotting away for months after a malfunction, his work more akin to the 50s view of what the future would be but with modern lenses/tech than a plausible future . In the steel vs digital war, the digital won and his work doesn’t show any of it.
Last time I saw this kind of challenge it was on reddit and I just replied with ℝ, but people brought up that this leaves out complex numbers. I’ll now contend, however, that any number not included in that isn’t real.
I heard “g” was created at around the same time in two different parts of the world. One of them claims it to be pronounced “g” and the other claims it to be pronounced “g.”
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