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Hell of a lot of people died from being put on respirators unnecessarily. Hell of a lot people have been denied effective treatments e.g. HCQ. Ivermectin or budesine and have died as a result. In the UK, about 25% of people with Covid in hospital caught it in hospital.
Having tried argument from authority and argument from invective (both non-valid), you are now ignoring the stats and arguing from emotion, equally non-valid. Why you ignore the stats, I don't know. I thought all good health practice was based on analysis of statistical data.
The facts are that Covid vaccination makes little or no difference to health outcomes re Covid but does appear to be causing illness in previously healthy people e.g. the many cases of sudden cardiac arrest, myocarditis, Bells palsy and shingles. In other words, the coercive vaccination programme is looking like the worst ever self-inflicted health disaster in history, especially when you view it in association with its linked policies of lockdown, test&trace and mask mandates. Most worryingly we don't know if this health disaster is going to fade as time goes on or get worse.
Floating in the boat of mental midgets. Look, stars, how must the fiery lights in heaven work? How many of you watched the covid patient die on the respirator? How many of you watched the hospital ER get overwhelmed with covid and non-covid patients? Sad little people with sad little comments. You are making a difference. Prove your point. A lot of brilliant people are doing their best to try and make sure that as many of us, collectively, dont die. But hey, Mars. Your stupid pathetic world view is a demonstration that the good works of many are undone by the few.
We might as well invite the flat earth society to start posting here. Sad sacks.
I see you got there before me! My apologies for repeating the point.
The Israel were vaccinated with the Johnson and Johnson
Hmm? Israel went all in on the Pfizer vaccine, right when the first vaccines came out (this is where we learned about the myocarditis risk from). If they're having a problem with vaccines losing efficacy, it's a Pfizer problem.
Completely wrong, Spacenut. Israelis cut a deal with Pfizer. They are vaccinated with Pfizer.
Still, keep trying!
The Israel were vaccinated with the Johnson and Johnson that was horribly flawed to think that it was going to work with one shot. Its development was for the A strain and not the delta or omnicron which were in full cycle of changing.
Thinking that one vaccine would work for each flu virus was silly since we make new ones for each flu season and this is called the flu...
All pharmacy dispensed medication comes with a pamphlet to tell you what issues you might have when taking the medicines. That a doctor has written a prescription for.
The vaccines were dispense without that doctor even taking part in determining if you could or could not take the medicine in this case the vaccine.
There was no preliminary test given to see what might have caused any reaction to taking it nor was there any follow by a doctor to see if you were ok from taking it.
There was no tests to see if your odds were higher in taking it versus not for die'ing than if you took it.
While most took it with no issues the fact that some did have problems was not taken into account unless you died right away from it.
Then what was the research to correct for those that should not take it, so that you would know if you were disposed to an issues.
Sounds like a broken system that circumvented the norm in which your doctor was involved.
I hear that we already have the next variant labelled as Deltacron as seen in the UK but what does it really mean.... for Coronavirus’s Next Move Here are four shapes that the next variant might take—which will also dictate the shape of our response.
Energizer bunny has nothing on covid as it keeps going
https://news.yahoo.com/covid-finally-sp … 34740.html
Good to see Elon doing his bit...
You've just compounded the error in your previous post adding argument from invective.
These are official stats. I doubt you even understand the statistical issues. Try this:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8481107/
From the paper:
At the country-level, there appears to be no discernable relationship between percentage of population fully vaccinated and new COVID-19 cases...
In fact, the trend line suggests a marginally positive association such that countries with higher percentage of population fully vaccinated have higher COVID-19 cases per 1 million people. Notably, Israel with over 60% of their population fully vaccinated had the highest COVID-19 cases per 1 million people in the last 7 days.
No doubt you will just claim you have "billions of stats" that prove this wrong...
In my view any fair minded analyst will conclude the Covid vaccines have been a failure in stopping general viral spread and that the preferred "cures" of lockdowns, test and trace, masks, and coercive vaccination have proved disastrous in combination, inflicting huge societal damage.
"Well then, you'll understand these stats won't you?:
https://alexberenson.substack.com/p/urg … mments?s=r
90% of Covid deaths in the UK are from people who have received the vaccine. This is just Covid, not looking at all-mortality stats.
I'm afraid your flawed "argument from authority" (as philosophers define it) does not cancel out those sorts of statistics."
Little man. I have millions and billions or real world results that all say the same thing, vaccines work. Your "stats" are hundreds. Mine are millions. Why are you on a board about mars colonization where you decide to peddle pseudo science around vaccination? WTF is wrong with the rest of you reading this?
My understanding is that the issues of bone and muscle loss in Zero G have been successfully addressed by a combination of space medicine, exercise regimes and "vaccuum trousers". The more subtle negative effects of Zero G still present a problem, but they can be ameliorated somewhat through crew screening, so you eliminate people with genetic predisposition to suffer from Zero G negative effects. That will help a lot.
We do have some of the medical care against the items in this article.
Traveling to Mars Will Wreak Havoc on Our Bodies – Can We Prevent It?The Strange, Deadly Effects Mars Would Have on Your Body
https://www.nasa.gov/hrp/bodyinspace/
The Human Body in Spacehttps://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33298950/
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41526-020-00124-6
Red risks for a journey to the red planet: The highest priority human health risks for a mission to Marshttps://media.springernature.com/lw685/ … ng?as=webp
of course we are looking for risk mitigation
https://media.springernature.com/lw685/ … ng?as=webp
https://ttu-ir.tdl.org/handle/2346/87123
The Partial Gravity of the Moon and Mars Appears Insufficient to Maintain Human Health
https://ttu-ir.tdl.org/bitstream/handle … sAllowed=y
I was just trying to correct the idea people have that Saudi Arabia is one vast desert that doesn't produce food in significant quantities.
It produces on my rough calculation enough food to sustain maybe 5 million people. With polytunnels, water recycling, and soil manufacture it could clearly support many more millions. Saudi's energy reserves aren't just in oil and gas. It's insolation rate is one of the best in the world. It could power huge parts of the world from solar alone. They certainly have plenty of energy surplus to devote to food production. I think one of their main impediments is that Saudi is very reliant on imported labour and doesn't want to import even more expertise from abroad.
I understand why Saudi's elite chooses oil over grain - it makes them even more obscenely rich. But, looked at longer term, is that the best policy for the Saudi people? I doubt it. I think a policy where they make full use of modern technology to develop food production would help them in creating a better balanced society. For one thing, it would create sustainable employment for its citizens. Prosperous farming communities would in turn create their own urban areas which would generate yet more employment opportunities.
louis wrote:Saudi Arabia produces a lot more food than you might imagine:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agricultu … Production
I suspect they could feed themselves if they applied a significant portion of their energy production to the task. But it might take 5 to 10 years to get everything in place.
The evidence from the oil price shock of the 70s is that the world does adapt. Cars became, for instance, way more energy efficient. People started insulating their homes.
As I have said previously we are some years away from having a complete green energy solution available. I think the best approach I have seen is Denmark's plans for green energy islands that will, amongst other things, produce green hydrogen that can be used as energy storage so overcoming the issue of intermittency.
The emergency solution is probably fracking. We can gear up for that pretty quickly (certainly in the UK) and we already have a nationwide methane delivery system. Certainly for the UK that should be the favoured emergency response in my view.
If there is one glimmer of light in this whole horrendous business it is that people and governments may finally come to understand the importance of energy independence.
Louis, countries should (and many will) prioritise energy independence from this point forward, at least to the extent that it is possible. And local shale deposits may be useful, within limitations. They are not a realistic replacement for the dwindling output of the North Sea in Britain or Europe. But locally in Europe, they could cushion decline rate in domestic production.
But the rest of what you have written is poorly informed, to put it politely. You really think the world will be in a better position if the Saudis divert greater proportions of their energy production to desert based agriculture? That inevitably means lower oil and gas exports at a time when the world has supply deficits. There is a reason why the Saudis buy grain from other places. It is more efficient for them to exchange grain for oil. Food shortages may change that balance for them, but at the expense of less diesel being available in the Indian farmers' fuel tanks. It does nothing to solve the problem of food insecurity for the world as a whole.
Your talk about green energy solutions, suggests to me that you don't understand the thermodynamic basis of the economy. The economy is a collection of processes and people, that rework matter to produce goods and services. It takes a non reducible amount of energy to melt and cast steel, to cook your food and to transport anything by truck. It is why GDP vs Energy use, was a straight line until politicised economists started screwing with how inflation was measured in the mid 90s. There is no way of adapting to lower energy availability other than making and consuming less stuff. That stuff includes food. So lower energy availability means getting poorer. We adapted in the 1970s by developing North Sea, Alaskan and GOM oil, amongst others. This allowed a return to growth (albeit weaker) in the 80s and 90s. But that isn't possible this time. There are no new North Seas left to develop. The only real growth area left is the Arctic, which will be far difficult and expensive.
Wind power is an intermittent source of electricity and mechanical power. It has been possible for it to compete on a kWh basis with other energy sources in recent years, only because steel and concrete have been cheap since around 2011, thanks to low cost natural gas (until recently), very low cost Chinese coal; and low interest rate money at both the manufacturer and customer end. The amount of steel and concrete needed per MWh of wind based electricity is orders of magnitude higher than competing fossil or nuclear energy sources. The competitiveness of wind was only sustainable so long as materials and money were cheap. And wind turbines produce electricity, not diesel. Electricity will not power agriculture; it will not produce fertiliser, it will not produce steel and concrete at a price competitive with legacy coal and natural gas. It does not, nor can it easily, power goods distribution worldwide. That goods distribution is almost exclusively diesel powered, including the gigatons of steel needed to build those wind turbines and solar panels on a relevant scale.
As fossil fuel energy diminishes, it will be more difficult to build wind and solar powered electricity generation, not easier. And we are facing that problem now, with the Ukraine crisis disrupting global oil and gas supplies on top of an already peaked global oil production. There is no way of providing increased energy supply by substituting Low EROI energy for High EROI energy, especially when High EROI energy is depleting and needed to manufacture the infrastructure needed for your Low EROI system. We have been through this enough times that I thought you might have understood it by now. Idealistic delusions about low power density renewables are the first thing that needs to die if western Europe is to achieve energy independence. In the absence of cheap fossil fuels, there really is no alternative to nuclear power for the production of energy on a scale sufficient for industrial civilisation. Low power density renewables only look sustainable when there is abundant cheap fossil fuel energy needed to produce, install and back them up.
Biden quote: "Speak loudly and carry a little stick."
Since President Biden stated that he would treat Saudi Arabia as a "pariah state" during his election campaign, the governments of Saudi Arabia and United Arab Emirates will no longer work with the American government to reduce our domestic energy prices. That was a predictable turn of events. Our village idiot struck another blow to American workers by making us more dependent upon foreign oil sources from countries that are increasingly less willing to give us the time of day.
Well then, you'll understand these stats won't you?:
https://alexberenson.substack.com/p/urg … mments?s=r
90% of Covid deaths in the UK are from people who have received the vaccine. This is just Covid, not looking at all-mortality stats.
I'm afraid your flawed "argument from authority" (as philosophers define it) does not cancel out those sorts of statistics.
I literally work in healthcare with the people involved in the science and research involved in all the bullsh*t posts you posit. There is no conspiracy. I am at ground fuc!ing zero. You want to talk about how IRB studies are put together? You want to talk about clinical trials? I work in one of the top ten academic medical centers in the US. I'm not a grunt. I've been doing this for over 2 decades.
I don't like being told how i have to receive medical care, but i understand population health management. I understand statistics and probability. I have a ring side view on how clinical trial are conducted- not a media spoon fed story or arm chair Wikipedia approach some of you take. I've gotten to see, directly, the outcomes when a hospital is overloaded. I've been in the decisions around how we alter triage care because the system is overloaded.
But hey, I'm just the same rando as another rando on the internet. Terraformer clearly has a handle on how we should handle clinical trials of a mRna solution that has been studied for over 10 years, clinically, better than any one else, because he strings some words together after saying he studied "science".
If you all want a witch doctor, so be it. Shake a god damn chicken bone at it. Eventually you will want real medicine, and eventually you will want to listen to a doctor. Stop posting on the internet and ask some doctors what they think you should do. Stop looking for randos on the internet to reinforce your own fears.
mRNA vaccines have been used in clinical trials over the last decade or so. In every case prior to Covid they were refused general approval. Why? Because of inflammatory responses - which is precisely what we see with the Covid vaccines.
mRNA vaccines have been in develop for nearly three decades. I think that when a platform is novel, as this is, it should be developed for veterinary use first. We ought to have had over a decade of using these in tens of millions of cows before any human took the shot... alas, the first mRNA vaccines were instead hastily approved during a pandemic.
Are they okay? Probably. But I really don't think they should be used more than once -- the negative side effects we've seen overwhelmingly happen with the second shot, so it's plausible that they come from vaccinating someone who is already immune (at the time they were rolled out something like 10-20% of the population had already been infected, so would have had immunity). My plan, right before I got covid and so rendering it pointless/dangerous, was to get a single shot of Pfizer. At some point I'll probably get Novavax now, just to make it easier to visit countries that demand proof of vaccination; I don't think the risks from a protein subunit vaccine are appreciable.
All my life fusion energy has been 20 years away. That covers the working life of most senior people in the field, so they can claim their full pension!
I do wish they'd stop chasing tokamaks. They've been studied for over fifty years and we still don't have even breakeven. What other approaches are being starved of funding because of it? And if we decided instead to focus on inexpensive neutron sources (for subcritical reactors and burning fission waste) we would probably take different approaches as well.
The Migma design seems to have been abandoned pretty quickly, without even trying the easier D-T and D-D reactions. I wonder if it has promise as a neutron generator?
When we think of power generation on Mars we shouldn't forget there will be great scope for temperature difference or sublimation engines which will be able to operate something like coal-fired steam engines on Earth. IIRC, these could operate at night, which would be a useful complement to solar power.
Overall I feel power generation on Mars will likely be the least of our problems.
Interesting - seems to be a mash-up of Strickland and Musk's views.
I have thought that initially the colony will be vegan-orientated in terms of agriculture. I am not sure it's Musk's view that we would use electric power for agriculture.
From previous discussions here it seems that plastic domes pressurised to about 20% of Earth's atmosphere and with a high CO2 content - maybe 90% - could use natural light (maybe with added insolation from reflectors) and produce crops. Protecting against night time temperatures would be a concern. They might use waste heat from industrial processes, some thermogenic crops (that release heat at night) and protective infrared reflecting night time blinds.
I'm not sure if anyone has written about this already.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech … olony.htmlMusk appears to be considering vertical farms, presumably using LED light sources to produce a largely vegan diet for colonists. These farms are compact, but horrendously hungry for electric power. There is also talk of local manufacturing using local materials to reduce imports from Earth. The amount of electric power estimated to be required to run and grow the colony? 100kW per person. That is 2.4MWh per person, per day. That is a huge amount of energy and without fossil fuels, it must all be electricity. Musk's city of 1 million, would need constant generation of 100GWe, if that power requirement scales up. That is about twice the power production of France for a population sixty times smaller! Holy crap! Maybe, the people writing the article made a mistake?
It will be very difficult to provide this much power in an affordable way. Nuclear reactors? Before nuclear regulation went cuckoo back in the early 80s, it was possible to build reactors for about $1000/kW in modern money in the US. In China, they are still almost that cheap. So power supply for one person would cost $100,000 if we avoid the pitfalls that push up build costs. Maybe it is just on the edge of feasibility. We need reactors that are cheap to build and operate. Aqueous homogeneous reactors are very simple and self-regulating. They could be built very cheaply using stainless steel tanks. And they will produce lots of waste heat, which could heat greenhouses allowing natural light to be used for crop growth. This would be a good application for Thorium as a nuclear fuel, which can be dissolved as a salt in breeder blanket regions. Fission products are removed continuously without shutting down.
Well (sigh) of course you chose the worst case example of a tomato.
But meat, dairy and eggs are all high calorific foods. Bacon is 541 kcals per 100g. Cheese is 350 kcals. In England most poor people prior to the industrial revolution sustained themselves with cheese as a vital part of their diet.
Sigh. Like I said, they produce relatively high value per calorie products.
The Netherlands is one of the largest countries when it comes to the export of agricultural goods such as meat, dairy, eggs, vegetables, and fruit.
But when it comes to keeping people fed, it's calories that count. That's what the map I posted shows -- which countries export calories (feed others) and which import them (are fed by others).
A tomato has 18 kcal/100g. Wheat flour, 360 kcal/100g. 20x more. So if you were trading an equal mass of tomatoes for flour, you would be importing *twenty times* the calories you imported. Which is, you know, *what feeds people*.
No, my link was to food production. This explains why the Netherlands is a big exporter of food.
https://aboutthenetherlands.com/why-doe … much-food/
louis, that map shows calorie imports/exports, not dollar value. So it will be almost entirely made up of grains, beans, and various oils. The Netherlands makes a lot of money, yes, but it does that largely by producing high value plants (which is not a good model for Martians, who can't subsist off the Paltrow diet).
Saudi Arabia produces a lot more food than you might imagine:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agricultu … Production
I suspect they could feed themselves if they applied a significant portion of their energy production to the task. But it might take 5 to 10 years to get everything in place.
The evidence from the oil price shock of the 70s is that the world does adapt. Cars became, for instance, way more energy efficient. People started insulating their homes.
As I have said previously we are some years away from having a complete green energy solution available. I think the best approach I have seen is Denmark's plans for green energy islands that will, amongst other things, produce green hydrogen that can be used as energy storage so overcoming the issue of intermittency.
The emergency solution is probably fracking. We can gear up for that pretty quickly (certainly in the UK) and we already have a nationwide methane delivery system. Certainly for the UK that should be the favoured emergency response in my view.
If there is one glimmer of light in this whole horrendous business it is that people and governments may finally come to understand the importance of energy independence.
Good post Terraformer. The Arab world is in a dangerous position. These countries are arid dust bowls, and had small and sparsely distributed populations before the age of oil. They have grown enormously in population, Saudi Arabia has gone from 3m to 34m in about 80 years! They all depend almost entirely on imported food. Food supplies that could easily be cut off by geopolitical strife and won't be sustainable anyhow in the decades ahead, when oil and gas production begin the decline on a global level. Sucks to be them. The massive growth in population and living standards of the past century was enabled entirely by cheap and abundant surplus energy from fossil fuels, especially oil and natural gas. That cheap surplus energy is rapidly disappearing.
We talk about colonising space on this forum. I worry that the resource base that we need to carry that out will disappear long before anyone sets foot on Mars. Space colonisation is something that requires a lot of surplus wealth and energy. How much surplus wealth will the world have, a couple of decades from now, when global oil production is 30% down from what it is now? What will average wages look like when that happens? And just how hungry will the world be?
It is tempting to imagine some revolutionary new energy source appearing on the scene and saving the world. But even nuclear reactors need coal, natural gas and oil, to make their steel and concrete and make and transport and assemble all those components and infrastructure. To replace a large chunk of the energy derived from fossil fuels would take thousands of them, built across the world at a rate that dwarfs all experience up to now. We will be doing that at a time when rising energy costs are hugely inflating the cost of steel and concrete and all of the energy consuming processes that we must deploy building new reactors. Seems to me that scaling any alternative energy source up, in the time we have left, is not going to be able to do more than cushion the decline. And nuclear reactors, fusion reactors, etc, make heat and electricity. They don't make diesel, which is the fuel that powers agriculture and the whole world transportation system. The enormity of the problem ahead of us is simply not understood at any level within our society. There are plenty of idiots who really think that they can replace everything that fossil fuels now do with windmills and solar panels! The scale of the infrastructure needed and the amount of materials and energy needed (in a world of shrinking net energy) just flies over their heads.
The 21st century is going to be a violent, hungry and dangerous period in human history. Human ambitions are going to shrink. I don't see there being much scope for space travel in the sort of world we are heading into. I hope to be wrong.
That map does not show net food production. The Netherlands for instance exports more than double of what it imports, but the map appears to show what percentage of food consumption within the country comes from abroad.
I have always thought Dutch farming is a rather good model for farming on Mars.
Mars_B4_Moon wrote:Ukraine war 'catastrophic for global food'
https://www.bbc.com/news/business-60623941Gold On Its Way To $3,000 An Ounce
https://www.forbes.com/sites/investor/2 … -an-ounce/Food prices across globe skyrocket by 20.7%
https://nypost.com/2022/03/05/food-pric … oss-globe/As much as the West will be hit it seems Russia will be hit harder.
Africa will be hit hardest of all. Egypt gets almost all its wheat from Ukraine and Russia... and very few countries on that continent are net producers.
https://mcusercontent.com/de2bc41f8324e … 649ea0.jpg
For places already on the edge, this is catastrophic. Prices stop rising because enough people get priced out -- and when that happens with food, people die.
Which frustratingly few people seem to understand. The comments under every article about it tend to be along the lines of "it is worth paying higher prices to get rid of Putin, it's nothing compared to what they're going through in Ukraine". There is no understanding that not every country is as wealthy as Britain. Or that production can't be immediately increased in response to higher prices -- if there is a shortage, some people *will* go without. I don't think we should be paying a price that's measured in hundreds of millions of lives, even if they are far away and don't look like us.
I hope that the experience of Covid and Ukraine will cause a Great Renewal in the former democracies and that we will rediscover the importance of free speech and free assembly. I hope people will now abandon Medical Tyranny as a form of government (despite the egregious examples from all around the world, but notably both Canada and Australia, countries we formerly thought of as beacons of liberty).
The experience of Ukraine where we can see what real danger looks like has put Covid in perspective.
Both Covid and Ukraine teach that the defence of liberty involves risks, but it is better to take reasonable risks than live in fear and let a disease or a dictator take over your life.
tahanson43206,
Income is now being restricted here in America, via inflation, in case you hadn't noticed. If you can't figure out where this will ultimately lead, it's the exact opposite of a future where space colonization becomes feasible. The mere fact that everyone was swiftly impoverished to the point that personal transportation beyond your own two feet was an unattainable dream under the Soviet Union or China was never a "net benefit" to people living there, it simply meant that everyone became equally poor and destitute over time, and far less productive than their fellow humans living under more capitalist and less authoritarian systems.
Governments demanded the use of electronics and anti-lock brakes and crash testing, not consumers. That was not capitalism in action, it was government regulators in action. It's a boringly common practice for people to conflate government interference with a market in a capitalist system with capitalism, same as it is for communists to conflate fascism with capitalism. Fascism and communism are both self-serving alliances between governments and corporations or wealthy and capricious individuals (oligarchs) against the will of the people, while masquerading as the will of the people using simpleton indoctrination propaganda, as taught in our university systems to unsuspecting young people falsely lead to believe that they will become educated rather than indoctrinated by such programs. Education is thinking for yourself and eventually teaching yourself. Indoctrination is being told what to think. Only the educated know the difference.
There's a system of governance where every aspect of life is dictated by some unelected authoritarian, and that system is better known as a "prison". Oddly enough, less than 1% of society wants to live in a prison. We know this because less than 1% of any given society can be found in a prison, except under fascist and socialist systems where the government can and frequently does imprison anyone who has the gall to do their own thinking. Stupid people can frequently be indoctrinated to believe that they're better off being someone's prisoner, but only for a little while, until the end result of that ideology becomes so excruciatingly painfully that even death would be preferable.
Anyway... In a socialist system, you would either be walking everywhere or taking public transportation, assuming you were allowed to travel anywhere, even to go to work. If public transportation is provided, then that may be workable. I'm not advocating for living the way the communists do, and none of them ever advocate for living the way they do, either. Funny that. I'm asking a different kind of question not related to communism or capitalism.
Couple of points:
1. I believe his proposal is to use bombs with a low radioactive release. Also, Mars is pretty radioactive at the surface in any case - I don't think we'd be adding a huge amount.
2. Isn't the idea that water vapour would help trap heat on Mars. (I suppose the big question is "Would the water vapour remain as vapour, or is this something you'd have to do on a regular basis?).
I think Musk's idea of nuking the polar caps is poorly conceived. In addition to releasing a lot of radioactivity, I doubt that it would be an economical means of releasing frozen volatiles. Bombs actually aren't that cheap per unit of energy. Edward Tellar floated the idea of using H-bombs to heat underground caverns, with heat slowly being drawn off for power production. One of the things that stood in the way of the project was a disappointingly high cost of energy using this method. Why not use a nuclear reactor to manufacture fluorocarbon compounds instead?
I certainly see the merit in having mega-trucks that can ship things from place to place on Mars. Especially trucks that run non-stop and do not burden base locations with any fuel demands. A nuclear power source can do that. Kind of like the ultimate ice road truckers! It helps being able to move thousands of tonnes of materials with just 1 or 2 drivers as well. If we are building a lot of things underground, then as you say, it makes sense having some very heavy soil moving equipment. We need to move about 10 tonnes of dirt per square metre of subsurface area. So building a sizable underground town or city, would be much easier if our equipment could bring to bare a nuclear energy advantage. Something like this would be useful for shifting dirt as well.
https://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2011/01 … sport.htmlFor accessing water for a base, at some point it becomes worthwhile building a pipeline. A few numerical inputs: A polypropylene pipeline some 3000km long, 0.1m in diameter, delivering water at flowrate of 3m/s. Total flow rate of the pipeline would be 24 litres per second, or 744,000 tonnes per year. Assuming a wall thickness of 0.01m and taking density of PP to be 900kg/m3, the pipeline would have a mass of 8500 tonnes. The pipeline can deliver almost 1000 times its own weight in water every year. We probably won't need this until our settlements have grown to city scale proportions. But that does seem to be Musk's intention. We would need a heat source of a few tens of MW to thaw out that much ice. An AHR would be ideal.
Just as I predicted with the Biden administration. They hate Musk and they will do everything in their power to prevent him succeeding.
Today's AIAA "Daily Launch" says FAA has announced it cannot make its decision before March 28.
If they decide not to approve, it goes to EPA for a full environmental impact statement, which takes multiple years. That moves Musk to Florida, with all NASA's restrictions bothering him. And he says at least 6 months to build the launch equipment there.
GW
Further to my previous post, I see Musk has put him and his companies in the firing line by supporting Ukraine in two ways: (a) putting more Starlink satellites in position to serve Ukraine and (b) sending them significant numbers of terminals to help them maintain internet contact.
Some thoughts:
1. Things have changed hugely from the 50s and 60s when the tank was King and people in Hungary and Czechoslovakia didn't have a chance in hell against the big beasts. Now with weapons like the Javelin, infantry can take on tanks and helicopters. Even jet planes are vulnerable now from infantry weapons.
2. Drones can be extremely effective.
3. Ukraine and the USA should have prepared for this day much more effectively. If there were 100,000 anti-tank weapons in Ukraine, that would make a real difference.
4. I am sure Taiwan are looking at all this and learning lessons.
5. It's sad though that Ukraine just don't seem to have enough defensive weapons.
6. If there is a co-ordinated Ukraine support plan, I haven't seen it yet. They need solar power, batteries, water, military rations, medicines - and everything in the thousands and millions. Are the West holding back because they are afraid of Putin?
7. Putin is clearly mentally unbalanced - I said this long before the invasion. He now appears to be pretty much psychotic.
Osteoporosis as an issue in zero G has, from everything I have read, been resolved through a combination of space medicine, "vacuum trousers" and exercise regimes Presumably with 0.38 G on Mars it will be even less of a problem there. I think the foetal development issues are far more complex. There has been evidence of foetal damage, probably relating to embryonic parts being unable to orientate themselves in Zero G but again, it might be that 0.38 G is sufficient to overcome that. I have suggested before that it might become established practice for first trimester women to conceive in orbital 1G and stay up there for 3 months, as it is likely the earlier development stages are the most vulnerable.
Agreed post #8. Eventually, children will be born in low G environments, assuming we ever get that far. We will then have first hand information on how it effects fetal and postnatal development. I cannot see it being catastrophic in the case of Mars. The problem is that people naturally tend to lose calcium and develop bone porosity problems as they age. If they start out with lower density bones due to lower G, then osteoporosis may be an even bigger health problem on Mars than it is on Earth.
First time I've seen this site. Interesting the way they take 2D images and use 3D software to give a much better idea of what we are looking at:
This looks like a very good candidate for a fossilised life form on Mars - similar looking to coral.
