good point. I hadn’t even considered the whole USB keylogger problem.

Mars is not at all that inhospitable as you seem to think. It has all the resources: sunlight, CO2, water. There’s really not much more needed. The reason why Mars is a desert today is because life just never happened to have developed there, but if it had, it would be as inhabited as any fertile land is.

this is exactly what i was looking for.

Secure boot can be made secure in principle. The internal disk is encrypted, the bootloader stores the cryption key internally. When you change which OS is booted, the bootloader refuses to give out the key or deletes the key altogether. For one, you would immediately noticed that your OS was tampered with. For two, even when an alternative OS manages to boot, it can’t read your data.

like i could go write a very long article here about how to do things, but i think that would miss the point. we’ll simply wait and see what happens, though i suspect it could take at least 100 years.

no? never heard of it

But an empire? That’s utterly ridiculous.

What’s your argument here? Why is it ridiculous?

Maybe in 40,000 years or something, but not on any foreseeable timescale.

Similarly, the NYT predicted in 1903 that it would take “one million to ten million years for humanity to develop an operating flying machine” (airplane). The wright brothers achieved the first powered airplane flight sixty-nine days later. Link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flying_Machines_Which_Do_Not_Fly

You might want to think about this.

“point in this direction and fire the engines” becomes a pain because, say you’re constantly rolling, and you need to change the direction your long axis points. What thrusters do you fire in what combination to steer the ship? Or do you stop the roll, maneuver/use your telescope/dock/whatever, then start rolling again? So now you’ve got to deal with gravity starting and stopping variously throughout the journey.

according to the hohmann transfer orbit

you only do one burst at the beginning of the journey, then drift for 6 months before entering the atmosphere of the target planet to slow down.

So there’s 6 months where you don’t need to fire any engine. My plan is to first do the acceleration burn, then install solar panels on the outside of the ship (attach them via some kind of cord and cable) they fly outward due to centrifugal force so they get constant sun exposure, and then put the ship into rotation. So you don’t need to do any work on the outside anymore, until you’re shortly before landing, then you stop rotation, get in the solar panels, enter the atmosphere, do landing burn, and land.

yeah 200 mbar of oxygen should be fine, also 0.3g if we’re gonna land on mars eventually we might as well get used to the gravity level.

lol you’re right actually :p

I did the calculation somewhere else in this thread, the outer walls of the spaceship (diameter 9m) would rotate with 24 km/h, so if you run really fast, you can outrun the rotation and start to float.

Edit: a healthy adult should be able to sprint 100 m in 15 seconds, which is precisely 24 km/h. Source.

autistic girls exist, you know?

Spaceflight creates jobs.

although people can eventually adapt to higher rates after incremented, prolonged exposure

🤨️ we’re talking 6 months travel time here, what do they mean by “prolonged exposure”

actually i have been, and i have attributed it to the device not providing consistent centrifugal forces. instead, gravity interferes and makes it inconsistent. which would not happen on a spaceship.

I get your sentiment but that’s exactly why we need space colonization.

There is a thing called translatio imperii which means that empires aren’t created nor destroyed, they just move from one location to the next, always on the frontline of humanity.

If we don’t get spaceflight, the US will stay an imperial entity for eternity. Only if space colonization succeeds, mars can become the next empire which means that the US stops being one, interestingly.

Spaceflight creates jobs.

I think i understand why you feel that way, it happens to me constantly. Since there is already so much hype about this, you don’t need to hype it as well. Enough hype already.

Basically, there should always be attention on every launch, but it’s not necessary that everybody obsesses over every launch. Only that somebody does. Since so many eyes are watching this mission already, you don’t feel any need to spend your time on it as well.

what is this data based on?