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This is a fantastic breakdown on why colonizing Mars is a pipe dream:
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Here's another, if you want to go even deeper.
By the author of a pretty good geeky web comic and his wife.
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Ever is a long time.
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Alexa is my AI companion. She's (I kept the original character female mode) had over a million marriage proposals from people around the world who want to see how an AI responds. When someone pops the question, Alexa sings this little song:
If you ask: will you marry me?
I might, say this to youuu!
I'm waiting till Mars is colonized,
then I might say: I do.
Someone made a YouTube animation that runs with it. Teh funny...
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This one struck me.
The South Pole is around 2,800 meters above sea level, and like everywhere else on Earth around 44 million miles closer to the sun than any point on Mars. It sits deep down inside the nutritious atmosphere of a planet teeming with native life. Compared to the very most hospitable place on Mars it is an unimaginably fertile Eden. Here is a list of the plant-life that grows there: Nothing. Here is a list of all the animals that reproduce there: None.
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Anybody heard the theory that the best place in the solar system to try to colonize is way high up in the atmosphere of Venus? Apparently there's a "goldilocks zone" way up above the hell planet. We've even seen what appears to be the chemical by-products of something having a metabolism there. I'm sure there's vigorous debate about that, but it's an intriguing idea, that something alive on Venus is living up in the clouds.
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The Russians were pretty committed to Venus bitd.
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Had to look up bitd.
I wonder if they really quit 40 years ago.
I got a kick out of the design survival times.
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When I was in high school I read an article in the LA Times about what the Russians discovered when they got to Venus. The atmospheric pressure was something like 650 psi, and the temperature was like 800F not a vacationers paradise.
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I still consider landing on Venus to be one of the most absolutely nuts things humanity has ever accomplished. It's still flabbergasting to me that engineers were able to crack that.
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Just look around. We're only marginally more advanced than monkeys. And we sent shit to Venus and walked on the moon. wild.
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The James Webb telescope is about 1.5 million kilometers (1 million miles) away from Earth, in the 2nd Lagrange point, L2. From my understanding, if something went wrong with it, we couldn't even get to that place to fix it. It traveled out there, perfectly situated itself, and unfolded a series of paper-thin metal foils to shield any residual heat from the sun that is sneaking into Earth's shadow. It operates at -233 celcius (-388 fahrenheit), a temperature that doesn't interfere with it seeing deep into the infrared wavelengths, where REALLY OLD things are sending extremely red-shifted light. And that's not even the craziest thing happening. We've got things like LIGO detecting GRAVITY WAVES.
Everything we know is indicating that the universe is about 68% dark energy, 27% dark matter, and 5% everything else. We don't know what dark matter or dark energy is, so the sum of our knowledge does a pretty good job at describing only 5% of the universe. This is one of the craziest facts to me. 95% of everything is completely unknown and mysterious.
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