Would that be before or after you elect a fascist “dictator on day one”? In a country where living costs make it impossible to have kids? Where healthcare spirals out of control and people don’t call an ambulance because of fear of bankruptcy? Where 12 year kids are forced to bear their rape babies to term? You are literally on the cusp of fascism you moron.

There is plenty wrong with China and ramming boats is not nice. But your ghoulish lust for blood and destruction is disgusting your fucking fascist prick.

How good does it work on an external 4K monitor? Can you watch 4k video? I imagine youtube and browsing reddit or news online shouldn’t be a problem.

Basically I’d like an ultra low power PC for boring desktop stuff on 4k monitor.

China bad propaganda. Instead of talking about the horrific civil war in Sudan, lets talk about ramming some ships and get the US involved in that… fucking insanity.

PS: Let me make this clear: I don’t give a shit about what China does unless it involves actual ethnic cleansing and mass rape. If we don’t give a shit about the latter, we shouldn’t “get involved” in the former.

Don’t they HAVE TO open their messaging app now with the “EU Digital Markets Act and Digital Services Act”?

EDIT: Huh, no they don’t (link) cause they are not “core platform”…

I think you need to compress the air and cool it and you get condensation. I think the advantage of baking the soil would be that the concentration of water vapor would be higher so less energy.

Hmm… maybe the smartest way would be to just build greenhouses and pump compressed air into it. Plants grow, absorb CO2, release oxygen and water. At night you lower insulation and condense excess water out of the air. What is left is a surplus of oxygen. Of course that requires a ton of glass.

I dabble a little (3D printers, composites). I’m thinking more about 30-100 years for actually living on moon or mars like a real self sufficient colony instead of missions.

I do believe mechanical engineering can be represented in a way that is accessible to AI. It doesn’t need general knowledge or sentience. Not just the generative stuff we have now in CAD, but more like the AI that can generate images. Ways to generate infinitely complex “nonsense” machines isn’t hard, but AI can then learn of how to work more intuitive.

At some point we’ll have an AI that can design, supervise manufacture / CNC and robots to assemble and then control all the machines we need for this. Of course the design would have lots of human input at start. But robotics are improving and deep AI is able to do remarkable things already. Eventually we would feed all the existing CAD designs and function and physical laws and material science into an AI as a lot of data and then suddenly you can bootstrap an entire industrial society fully automated. But every step and progress towards that goal would make it that much cheaper and easier to do.

Of course that’s sci-fi but so is the idea of living on mars :)

True, and you have more gravity. On the other hand you have perchlorides. Obviously you need water but I thought they did find some already near the south pole on the moon? (EDIT: Yes but apparently little and not very concentrated). I didn’t know there was so little carbon though.

Well yeah, then underground in lava tubes. But then the moon would be much easier for building habitats to live in.

There is a sort of paradox. To do any of this in any scale would be much more likely with automation. And automation, like robots being able to build robots and then factories and anything else is coming especially with the recent advances in AI and computer vision etc. And then such megaprojects won’t be unthinkeable any more. But then it would probably also be easier to build a mega space habitats mining the moon. Without automation, it might never be worth it to actually colonize there so it’s better to wait a few more decades.

There is Spacecraft_radiation_challenges.

I believe simply using enough water would be perfectly fine for shielding. The problem is using enough of it and the extra weight.

In Stowaway (2021) - IMDb they have a special room that is shielded using electromagnetism.

You’d probably need to grab ice balls rich in nitrogen ice from the kuiper belt and somehow hurl them on a curse to impact mars. And do that a lot. Or maybe build a railgun on Triton to shoot nitrogen bullets at mars

The wikipedia article mentions the idea of superconducting rings build around mars surface. They could also be used for energy transport. This is basically already possible with current technology.

Maybe it’s also possible to somehow extract energy from the solar wind but that is only speculation on my part.

Yeah The Expanse is awesome but they are mining rather big ice chunks. In the Starcarrier series they find a giant shipyard churning through protoplanetary disk. Which sounds kind of ideal for mining raw materials for e.g. space habitats. But I guess a low gravity moon or asteroid would work just as well.

You could probably just roll out big black tarp and connect to a vacuum. The black tarp would increase heating from sunlight and the vacuum would press the tarp to the ground and suck up the air. Then during the night you roll up and prepare for the next day.

Basically a rolling robot that rolls the tarp up, then continues rolling, then reverses and rolls the tarp back out.

But it would probably be better to just condense the water out of the air at night at a higher volume.

What if you had a giant vacuum nozzle at the front and shoot the ice particles out the back of your rocket? :D

Hmm that might actually not be so stupid. First there must be some gas pressure since water ice would sublimate otherwise, so that actually should help gather and guide particles.
Then if you would go slow enough the forces should be minimal and you could mine the water ice this way. Or extract solids and turn the water into big blocks of pykrete to reinforce the nozzle. Or use the blocks of ice to build a space habitat. Or accelerate waste out the back to accelerate again. You’d only need a reactor with enough power.

mining industry / [LTIFR of] 5.5 is middle of the road for manufacturing and construction, generally, but that includes all sorts of manufacturing, from building houses, to steel foundries , to making cars

They work in clean rooms and should have far more controlled conditions and a better safety culture than those industries. This is not good enough.

Also “middle of the road” is concerning, considering that this stuff is going up into space.

Hmm this reads like propaganda. Hey wait a minute, VOA?!

Of course this is basically “socialism” - Nations protecting their economy from cheap goods so that they can build up and maintain their own vehicle and drone manufacturing. And seeing how efficient the drones proved in Ukraine this is smart.

This is how imperialism always worked. This is just protectionism couched in “china bad”.

Looking at the test print, the next step might be to have a separate tool to mill the 3D printed surface so you have good tolerances. E3Ds ASMBL toolchanger had something like that. But collecting the metal shavings in vacuum and microgravity could be a problem :D

Oh wow super interesting. This article from esa explains the actual 3D printing process, a stainless steel wire is heated using a laser and melted onto the print surface. It’s funny that this would actually work better in the vacuum of space. With a large robot arm maybe you could 3D print big space truss structures.

They also talk about a circular economy, I guess you could melt old bits and turn them into wire and then recycle them.

Otherwise there is just this photo of a test piece and this video of the installation.

Well you’re just asking an economic question, are the costs worth the benefits?

I’d argue that linux will never be a good or user friendly operating system without case insensitive filenames.

That isn’t an opinion but could be verified through scientific study of how confused people act. You don’t even need computers, just ask someone to get the “something SomeTHing” from a labeled box in a cupboard. Presumably science would show that case insensitive naming of things is always less confusing when humans actually use the system.

The truth is that programmers enjoy writing code far more than reading code. And especially to open source developers “usability” is a dirty word. It’s not about the value of a thing, it’s about the beauty of how it is done.

You’re basically arguing that a system shouldn’t support user friendly things because that would add significant burden to the programmer.

The quintessential linux philosophy. Well done! I mean, what is language? Why have named code variables? This is just a random array of bytes!