@arstechnica I'm torn between liking Starliner a lot but also hating Boeing as a company. Kind of like how I like Crew dragon and the idea of Starship, but SpaceX has been so soured for me I can't enjoy anything they do fully.
@nyrath the closest I feel we could get is a photon drive. But a Black body photon drive has terrible thrust, and an antimatter photon drive uses propellant. Only options I can see for a true propellantless drive is swimming in spacetime or creating gravitational gradients. But creating gravitational gradients that would result in falling forward is firmly in the "and then a miracle happens" portion of the equation.
One of the weirdest modern things to me is this obsession with generations. Maybe I haven't read the right stuff, but you pick up a 19th or 18th century book and they talk about the past, or conflict in families between old and young, but never this weird cohort-antagonism thing?
Could be it's random culture shit, but maybe it's because people have fewer kids, so they don't span generations? Or maybe tech acceleration means cohorts have more differences that are real?
@ZachWeinersmith I thinks it's marketing and media. The financial powers that be like us being in neat little boxes they can market too. And the media likes people being in nice little boxes so they have someone to blame. Put them both together and we end up with a culture that forces the imaginary importance of generational cohorts on us non stop until people start to belive the importance is real.
Whenever I see "there is a planet in the habitable zone, but it's a gas giant" I always think gas giants can have rocky moons so it's still a viable candidate for habitability.
Finding a gas giant isn't a downer. I would even go so far as to say a large gas giant in the habitable zone potentially increases the possibilities of a habitable world. Even accounting for radiation belts. The number of moons they can have ups the dice rolls.
@isaackuo Exactly, ice shell moons are probably very common as well. The most common life in the galaxy could very well be subsurface life living in oceans of ice moons undergoing tidal heating. For more Terran centric life it also still stands. A large rocky moon could orbit far away from its gas giant outside of its radiation belt and do just fine with its own magnetic feild. Exo moons give us multiple chances per orbit position instead of a single rocky planet.
Boy, my 12 year old great-nephew just made me feel totally inadequate.
Apparently he listens to podcasts while simultaneously reading technical books on totally different topics. His father (my nephew) has given him tests and his comprehension of both cast and text are excellent.
As a drawback, he does suffer from severe ADHD. His mental world is like he is surrounded by falling scraps of book pages, and he has to read each one before they hit the ground.
@nyrath As someone who also has ADHD and is possibly (most certainly) on the spectrum, this is relatable. That requirement to have to absorb as much information on a given topic before you can move on is troublesome. A single search out of curiosity will end with 15 new tabs and 2 hours suddenly gone.
@nyrath this is how I discovered your website in the first place. I was digging through material on torch drives and one of the many tabs was Atomic Rockets.
Ice worlds like Europa and Enceladus are intriguing targets for the search for life because they have oceans of water. But that water is locked under a thick shell of ice that could be kilometers deep. Researchers are testing new technologies to drill through the ice, such as the Search for Life Using Submersible Head (SLUSH) probe. This probe is heated to melt through the ice but has a rotating drill to speed up the descent. It was recently tested on Devon Island.
@fraser it occurs to me if we could improve neutrino based communication and have the sources and detectors small enough. That could offer a way to communicate with a probe through the ice. Bitrates would be terrible but it's that or a 10km cable.
@nyrath I alternate between the two. I'll be hyper focused on the growth pattern of moss in a high oxygen low pressure environment for a story. Then make a spaceship that operates on a non specified field drive with zero explanation for a game.
@nyrath this is super useful. I've been using space engine and math to plot stuff like this for stories, games, and just for fun. Because interstellar navigation and rout plotting at relativistic speeds is fun for the whole family.
I like the Excelsior from the silent 1918 sci-fi film "A trip to Mars". It took them 6 months to reach Mars in what is basically an airplane boat with a horizontal deck.
@isaackuo the political and financial landscape in the western world is becoming less and less viable for national space programs. NASA isn't able to do anything new long term anymore. Even Artemis isn't safe and honestly I'm not even that confident it won't be canceled.
It's looking like our best hope for actual progress in space is private ventures and China.
“…after the machine failed to launch a facial recognition application that nobody expected to be part of the process of using a vending machine.” is quite a thing to read here in the year of our Lord, 2024. Feels like one for the @pluralistic files.
@mcnees this is a other reason why I wear masks sunglasses and hats in public. The only privacy you get from the tech industry is the privacy you make for yourself.
@nyrath outside of prestige, I don't really see how China landing on the moon impacts Artemis in any tangible way. If we have a Chinese mission on the moon and a NASA mission on the moon. That just means we have more humans on the moon, which is good thing.
But if this cold war mindset boosts Artemis funding then that's also a good thing. Make spaceflights, not conflicts.