It's not for a lack of money people are homeless in the US (which is launching this). it's for a lack of political will, because voters don't want to provide free housing to homeless people. They're more concerned about being able to buy instead of rent a house (less apartments, more houses) or protect the value of their house ("no homeless people near me, and certainly an abundance of housing reduces prices for my house investment").
Hey, at least those issues won't be a problem, if homeless people can charter a flight to Mars, if these efforts pan out.
What they were actually reporting was the smell of the airlocks after they returned from their excursions. The moon has no atmosphere, so it has been accumulating dust from billions of years of asteroid impacts that have never come in contact with oxygen. Many of the chemicals in the dust are oxidative and so when it is exposed to air for the first time it rapidly oxidizes just like gunpowder!
And I think the outer space report was from space walks, and the explanation was that the first time the airlock itself was exposed to hard vacuum, the surfaces of the airlock would have a reaction that left a scent of ozone.
The Moon minerals contain plenty of it:
The finer regolith, the lunar soil of silicon dioxide glass.[2]
Minerals forming the lunar crust are made up of oxygen, silicon, magnesium, iron, calcium, and aluminum, along with small amounts of titanium, uranium, thorium, potassium, and hydrogen.[3]
I figure you mean free oxygen or diatomic oxygen O₂, but that stuff is rare in the universe, as it’s quite reactive, and largely irrelevant for asteroid impact chemistry extreme heat and pressure, plenty of oxygen available in the rocks smashing together.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxygen
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Materials_International_Space_...
Any dust on the Moon still consists mostly of silicates which cannot be oxidized.
When dust comes from meteorites, it contains a fraction made of iron sulfide (with small quantities of other sulfides) and another fraction made mainly of hydrocarbons.
The metallic sulfides can be oxidized, but they will not burn violently. The hydrocarbons are like a tar or pitch, because the volatile hydrocarbons would have sublimated in vacuum. So neither that tar is easily flammable.
The gunpowder smell is likely to be caused by the oxidation of the sulfides from the dust, which releases sulfur dioxide, the same like burnt gunpowder.
Presumably, moonwalks would also have some ozone like the space walk did. But, maybe the burning-moon-dust gunpowder smell was a lot stronger than the vacuumed-metal/paint ozone smell.
The dust that comes from meteorites contains up to 4 fractions: silicates, which cannot be oxidized, metallic iron, which oxidizes, but it does not form volatile substances that can be smelled, hydrocarbons in the form of a tar or pitch, which can burn but it cannot be ignited easily, and finally a fraction made of iron sulfide (troilite) with small quantities of other sulfides.
In contact with air, the sulfides will be oxidized, releasing sulfur dioxide. Burning black powder also releases sulfur dioxide, which is the main reason for its smell. Burning pure sulfur will produce the same smell.
I work with industrial vacuum machinery and the big slow down in a vacuum system is coaxing out water vapor which sticks to chamber and plumbing walls like glue. My guess is dissolved oxygen in the water vapor or the water vapor itself reacting with dust particles.
Makes me wonder even more why some people really want to go and live there.
There has been some great research into laser or solar sintering of regolith, and one of my first questions was if the resulting material is safe for humans.
An interactive microscope of regolith.[2] Like tiny broken glass, hard as rock, and sticking to everything like static-charged packing peanuts.
An old tech memo and paper.[3][4]
[1] https://an.rsl.wustl.edu/apollo/data/A17/resources/a17-techd... page "27-28" 258, 50 in pdf. Lots of other mentions of dust. [2] interactive microscope of regolith https://virtualmicroscope.org/sites/default/files/html5Asset... [3] The Effects of Lunar Dust on EVA Systems During the Apollo Missions https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/20050160460/downloads/20... [4] IMPACT OF DUST ON LUNAR EXPLORATION https://adsabs.harvard.edu/pdf/2007ESASP.643..239S
It seems to be under-reported that the Earth is pretty nice.
Let's take a moment to appreciate that we live on a populated planetary body. The Peter Thiel has not yet achieved its ultimate goal. Good times.
> Fine like powder, but sharp like glass
Sounds scary. But totally worth it!
[1] https://www.nasa.gov/image-article/nasas-dust-shield-success...
I told my neighbor: we could send some humans to Mars, but not expect to get them back!
Even if Mars were pre-terraformed, even if Mars were a perfect idyllic copy of Earth and a Garden of Eden just inviting humans to go there and set up bases, we could not send crews to Mars.
The final nail in this coffin was, for me, when I heard an ISS Expedition astronaut explain what NASA prohibits when they return from a long stretch on the Space Station. The astronauts are not permitted to jog or lift weights. They can't drive a vehicle or fly aircraft(!) They mustn't jump or twist their head around too fast. They must re-learn how to brush their teeth and how to drink fluids. They may feel dizzy, nauseous, or have trouble with spatial judgement. They are, essentially, helpless toddlers confined to their quarters. I mean, it is quite obvious by the way that they must drag these national heroes onto a gurney from the capsule after splash-down that their physiques are no longer normal.
The astronauts experience a lot of muscle atrophy and unique procedures in microgravity. If an astronaut can't even jog, or pass a roadside sobriety test, or go to the bathroom for themselves after an ISS mission, how, after 6 months' travel in deep space, will they accomplish anything at a Mars base, even mere survival?
Surely we could send up all supplies with autonomous vessels. Pre-stock water tanks and oxygen and air and have robots build a basic Mars-base there, before any astronaut arrives. But if the actual journey is practically incapacitating our actual human beings, the whole deal is off.
So no, we'll never get to Mars in the way that Musk and NASA promise. We'll keep sending robots eager to find out more and explore the interesting parts. The robots can bring back all the samples they want. They'll send pictures and even audio and plenty of sensor data. But humans will be lucky if we get a stable colony on the Moon (I believe that Moon Bases have their own currently insurmountable obstacles.) I think that humankind should be really happy and satisfied that we've got orbital space stations with continuous habitation now.
I expect the answer is spin gravity. Have a long cable with a counterweight on the other end, spin it at some rate. We would need some studying about the exact impacts (how hard is it to learn to start/stop compensating for Coriolis forces?), but it'd be much easier than full weightlessness.
> Although it is clear that the health risks from asbestos exposure increase with heavier exposure and longer exposure time, investigators have found asbestos-related diseases in individuals with only brief exposures. Generally, those who develop asbestos-related diseases show no signs of illness for a long time after exposure. It can take from 10 to 40 years or more for symptoms of an asbestos-related condition to appear. [1]
[1] https://www.cancer.gov/about-cancer/causes-prevention/risk/s...
Moon dust is still problematic since although smaller it also can't be digested by macrophages and it's believed it would accumulate in the lungs, building up on repeated exposure.
It's by the cartoonist of Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal and his wife (the one with an actual science PhD). https://www.smbc-comics.com/
It will irritate human mucus membranes whenever it comes in contact. Irritate lungs, eyes, skin.
It degrades rubber seals.
But now I can just tell everyone my tooth is filled with moon dust.
That said, I've seen discussion elsewhere that lunar dust accelerated by any mechanism (impacts, or rocket fire) won't billow as dust does on Earth, but will launch on a ballistic trajectory. Whether that's suborbital, orbital, or (lunar) escape velocity depends on the initiating event.
We've found numerous lunar and Martial fragments as Earth-impact meteorites, with various sources giving 200--400 known Martian fragments:
<https://www.sciencealert.com/almost-200-fragments-of-mars-ma...>
Lunar dust liberated by impacts is all but certainly a component of near-Earth space dust, but probably a small percentage based on a quick search. Most seems to be of comet or asteroid origin.
But having solid ground is still nice.
A workable compromise is making big habitats in a dome, that gives sunlight, but shields from radiation. And the ground needs to be processed obviously.
The advantage of Venus to me is is gravity.
Well, I guess that's what regolith means.
Still, I'm pretty sure we have plenty of people who wouldn't mind giving it a try.
We can park a big honkin magnet at the mars-sun lagrange point and cut that down massively.
It’s really only a concern if you ingest it.
Could the suit itself be used as a type of airlock, to leave outside things outside?
For example, mounting yourself onto a wall, then the back/whatever of the suit opens to the inside, and you hop out? (yes, there would be some dust recovery required, but minimal in comparison)
"Perchlorate is toxic to people only in the sense that it can disrupt the production of thyroid hormone, an important growth hormone needed by babies in the womb for normal development." (from https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/perchlorate-life-...)
Lots of people have this condition without perchlorate after all and it's just simple meds to fix it.
Example: a blog critiquing Mars colonization pointed out that humans cannot even live at the summit of Everest, and there is no "non-native microbial life" there. Notice the caveat: "non-native?" Guess who else did:
Tardigrade in Hawaiian shirt, wearing pixelated sunglasses
Honestly, which achievement would be considered more impressive-- Neil Armstrong setting foot on the Moon, or me getting there first because I was stuck to the bottom of his boot?
Well, guess who is now watching you navigate to the Wikipedia tardigrade article[1]:
Tardigrade lowers its pixelated glasses
Hell, in the five minutes that I've imagined them joining the team we've gone from
"never come into contact with the regolith"
to
"if you happen to come into contact with the regolith, remember: stop, drop, and roll."[2]
1: Ok, a tardigrade was probably not on his boot for the first Moon walk. But suppose we gently placed some the surface of the Moon, and observed their reaction...
two tardigrades pointing at you navigating back to Wikipedia
I had the opposite reaction. I thought it set forward a realistic set of challenges we have to solve and experiments we have to do before building anything more than a research outpost on Mars. That, in turn, makes a permanent Moon base more valuable.
Standout problems were low- and zero-g trauma medicine, plumbing (something Artemis II started working on) and mammalian reproduction.
I've had the thought for some time now that the most viable path to settlement in space -- if humans actually decide they want to do it -- is to settle space. Not the Moon, or Mars, or Venus, or anything else, but space itself.
In space you can build big rings and spin them for 1g gravity. We don't know if 1/6 or 1/3 gravity is enough for us to reproduce and prosper, but we know 1g is. Your environment is hermetically sealed and you control what comes in and out. You could, once you get good at this, actually create hyper-habitable environments tuned to be ideal for human life. People aren't tracking in nasty asbestos-like regolith or perchlorates or anything else you don't want.
Most reasonable near-mid term proposals for living on Mars or the Moon I've read about call for spending most time underground. Going there to do that seems pointless. Living in space itself could be much nicer.
The interior of such a ring would look nothing like this very Hollywood "luxury hotel" thing, but this little short film gives you a sense of what the relationship to the external space environment might be like:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iiPmgW21rwY
Radiation is still an issue, but there's ideas for that that could work for a ring in hard space vacuum that don't work as well on a planet. One is to put a big superconductor around the ring and give it a magnetosphere. The whole habitat is a big electromagnet. Most cosmic rays and solar particles are charged. The power requirements are not as great as you'd think.
For resources asteroids are probably better than planets. The solar system is full of asteroids that appear, from what we've seen, to be incredibly rich in raw materials, and these bodies have such low gravity that you could literally pull up next to them and go dig stuff out of them. The delta-V requirements of sending stuff back to your space-city are literally at the scale of "throw it real hard." Their low mass also means you don't have to dig deep and the heavy elements didn't sink to the core. You're going to find gigantic amounts of stuff like gold, platinum, pure iridium, fissile materials, etc.
Free living space habitats could move around. There could be moving towns and cities, more or less, that could tour the solar system and pick up resources and rendezvous with each other. Think steampunk style traction cities in space, kind of.
Politically you leave behind at least some of terrestrial politics. I'm not naive enough to think people would never find anything to fight about. We're good at coming up with stuff to fight about. But the notion of battling over land pretty much goes away. Space is called space for a reason. Culture wars become less relevant if everyone's town is mobile and if you don't like your neighbors you just move your whole "pod" around. Resources seem very abundant. I don't see a ton of resource competition unless we discover some critical or massively valuable resources that genuinely are rare and available in only a few places.
In the very long term, this path leads to the evolution of an actual spacefaring civilization rather than simply a repeat of terrestrial politics on another planet. Generation ships to the stars would be a natural evolution of this. After doing this for a few hundred or a few thousand years, we'd get so good at it that the idea of a caravan of these mobile cities departing for Centauri or Tau Ceti becomes imaginable and not a total suicide mission.
Compared to this I think going to Mars is a dead end. Even if we go there and survive and prosper, now we're just doing planetary civilization again. We're back to squabbling over dirt. The real evolutionary leap is doing something different. Fish didn't come on land to stay fish.
But there's also an argument that there's no point in trying until we at least have a couple of key technologies: fusion, very good automated manufacturing, and very good robotics. Fusion is key for enabling scalable power and mobility. Automated manufacturing and very good robotics are probably key to self-sufficiency.
Trying to do the "real space age" before the key technologies exist might be akin to, say, trying to start the EV revolution with lead-acid batteries or the PC revolution with vacuum tubes. While it's technically possible to try, it's just not going to "take."
Have you read the news lately?
Long exposure, 68 months, right. But it was only supposed to be in orbit for 11! Challenger being destroyed on reentry made a mess of things.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_Duration_Exposure_Facilit...
>It was placed in low Earth orbit by Space Shuttle Challenger in April 1984. [...] At LDEF's launch, retrieval was scheduled for March 19, 1985, eleven months after deployment.[4] Schedules slipped, postponing the retrieval mission first to 1986, then indefinitely due to the Challenger disaster. After 5.7 years its orbit had decayed to about 175 nautical miles (324 km) and it was likely to burn up on reentry in a little over a month.[6][9]: 15
First you need to figure out if it’s a surface infestation because of condensation or if it’s a constructive thermal bridge. The latter can be solved by raising the surface (wall, ceiling, etc) temperature through insulation or more inefficiently special heaters designed for this purpose.
In both cases, the contaminated material is removed down to the plaster or masonry. Wood, wallpaper and similar materials will likely be deeply contaminated and must be removed. For areas larger than 1 sq meter, it’s better to get a specialized contractor which will use HEPA vacuum cleaners, special bags, etc to ensure that the mould spores don’t spread in other rooms.
For small areas the agents of choice are bleach or hydrogen peroxide, both available in products for home use.
Have a reference tho: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_wind
Looking forward to seeing the next one!
Someone else linked to this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Exploration_Vehicle#Spec...
edit: in that context^ search for "SEV suitport design" find NASA has written some docs on the matter, eg https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/20130013652/downloads/20...
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Since the inside of the suit is already at pressure, you could just pop it open and step out.
The near-zero volume of the coupling would make things much easier to clean/isolate.
Isn't there a plan for the Artemis lunar rover to be configured this way? The outside of the suit never comes inside the rover.
All these ideas about space pre-date him by many decades.
He said they thought the odds of that happening were remote though, so I guess they decided to risk it with the suits. Apparently he mentioned the problem to his dad who accidentally told a reporter sitting next to him on a flight leading to a big media cycle about "flaming moon dust" prior to the mission.
In theory, they could have been equipped to partially pressurize the cabin with (say) helium - which would allow some sort of vacuum cleaner to work. But that could have added a fair bit of mass (by the LEM's very tight mass budget standards).
Lower gravity is giving the defender an advantage over the elements... at least until it gets low enough for things to start floating, when this flips around. In microgravity, water turns into floating blobs, but fire turns into actual floating fireballs.
Water blobs vs. fireballs. Pretty sure there's a nice videogame idea hiding in there somewhere.
Those are similar but sweeter. If I sterilize a room with UV it has a very distinct smell like nothing else aside from lightening and stun guns. I would UV the bathroom right now but then I have to vent the entire house and its 34F outside right now.
Diatomic oxygen is already a highly reactive fuel that is killing us and giving us cancer every single day. The ozone species is even more oxidative.
Oxygen is how we move about the energy gradient, but it's also killing us. Ozone is worse.
"Air purifiers" with ionization are probably not worth the squeeze.
The IDLH (Immediately Dangerous to Life and Health) level for ozone is five ppm.
That's half of chlorine which is 10 ppm.
Most major brand air purifiers put out a very minimal amount; the ionization is beneficial because it makes the really tiny (and thus most hazardous) particles clump and fall/stick to surfaces faster.
It's the offbrand units that generate lots of ozone to make people think they're "doing something", and commercial ozone generators for car/room deodorizing, that you have to be extremely careful with. Those need to be set up and then the room left for hours for the ozone to react with stuff, and then ventilated thoroughly.
I'm not normally one to miss the sarcastic or satirical posts, but this one seems oddly earnest.
They have a remote control that "arms" them and it starts beeping slow, the faster, then much faster then activates. It kills insects be destroying their lungs and entirely destroys mold, bacteria and even damages viral material. Hospitals run the same lamps in wings that they close down for sanitation. The entire area has to be 100% vented.
[1] - https://www.amazon.com/AeraLight-Whole-Surface-UV-Sanitizer/...
There are at least two types of UV-C light bulbs, as well as literal ozone generators that use ceramic platen and a fan. The type of UV-C bulb that is most common on Amazon and Ali is ~254 nanometers, and _does not_ produce Ozone. It does leave a smell, but it's more like an oldschool hospital antiseptic smell. probably the smell of the dead germs, yay.
Now 185nm is actually the correct size to turn O2 around the bulb into O3 (and more oxygens too, i once read, i think, kinda like cracking hydrocarbons to make longer chains or something).
UV-C bulbs (not base, which is an edison base) that can sterilize a room in 5-15 minutes are about 15-20 CM tall, with four crystal tubes that are connected together standing up on the base. image here [0]
you must run a fan over them if you want your money's worth. they get hot, the bases get hot, it makes the most sense in non-carpeted rooms to aim the crystal down and the base up, so that is real rough on them. that took me 2 bulbs to figure out.
If you can find a reputable place to get the box with ceramic and a fan that lasts more than 5 minutes, let me know, because that's closer to what i want for bedrooms and stuff.
The UV-C 185nm bulbs work great to make a car stop stinking, too! completely removes cigarette smells, if the car hasn't been smoked in for a while. run the A/C full blast and run the bulb for 15 minutes, open the windows for 5 minutes, roll em, sniff. Still smell? another 10 minutes, in the back seat, full A/C blasting. vent, sniff. Faint smell? replace the cabin air filter. Charge customer(?)
and i'm going to respond to your followup question to the GP as well: Covid. Obviously. They were telling us it would live on groceries and deliveries and that, so i put all deliveries in my laundry room and dosed em with UV-C for a minute. CDC or whatever studies said that 10-60 seconds was more than enough to kill sars-ncov-2.
I only use it for freshening cars, rooms, bathrooms, etc now.
WARNING: Do not be in the room with any UV-C light for more than a few seconds. Do not look at the bulb for literally any more than necessary to ensure it is on and safe. they make safety goggles that wrap your entire eye sockets to protect from UV, too. if you get a 185nm bulb, either completely ventilate the room with fresh air, or leave it sealed for 60 minutes then open it up for a few minutes, all the ozone reacts and goes away or something.
UV-C hurts your skin, yes, but it will make your eyeballs literally itch. so don't, don't don't look at it. they are not blacklights.
[0] https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/71LgjON7J+L._AC_.jpg
Humans are built to withstand a constant assault on their immune systems. We couldn't have survived if we didn't.
Its a bit naieve to claim that cleaning one's home will result in an extinction of enough microbes so as to be threatening to our immune system.
It's the same with F1. "We have the best drivers in the world!" You have the best drivers from the self-selection mechanism you impose on the sport. There are zero reasons to think these categories have good overlap.
No, they're not Olympic athletes but they're considerably more fit than the average American.
So no, pilots or astronauts are not "some of the most physically fittest people in America". They were exceptional human beings but lets be realistic.
The tiniest particles aren't necessarily the most dangerous, so even if "clumping" worked as advertised, it wouldn't necessarily be good. Air filters are worst at filtering particles at about 0.3 microns, they're better at filtering smaller ones (I understand it has something to do with brownian motion). I wouldn't be at all surprised if a similar thing affected our biological "filters". Either way, if you have a filter, you don't need UV to clean air. Just push more air through it if you need cleaner air faster.
I think they're referring to oxidative stress [1] caused by cellular respiration.
We harness the energy of oxygen. It's the fuel that powers us. But it's also so reactive that it's constantly damaging our DNA and intracellular components. Over time it ages us, causes cancer (daily - our biology fights back!), and will ultimately be part of what wears us down and kills us.
Look at oxygen as a very reactive and energy abundant fuel. And then consider its abundance in our atmosphere. And then how it powers human locomotion, human biochemistry. And how it creates free radicals and chain reactions that strip our DNA and mutate base pairs. And all the tens of thousands - no, countless more - interactions and reactions it's having all throughout our bodies at all times. And how our biology evolved compensation measures to keep those deleterious effects at bay for as long as possible - as long as necessary - to enable reproduction.
Our biology is utterly awe-inspiring when you think about it. An incredible machine molded by our gravity well and abundantly available energy. Not just fighting against entropy, but actively sailing its turbulent energy gradients.
Oh wait no that's a different kind of read.
Ar the scale terraforming entails, the crust reactions with the new atmosphere are closer to a rounding error.
;-)
I guess you could devise some scheme where kinetic energy is shed or transformed into useful tasks; for example, delivering to Venus an amount of water similar to Earth requires an icy ball half the diameter of the Moon - and the kinetic energy of this mass traveling at 10km/s is about half of the energy required to spin up Venus to a 24h cycle. So some space elevator like contraptions could hypothetically catch the snowballs and lay them on the surface while at the same time spinning up the planet.
But if you have the required clarketech it's unclear why bother with planets instead of creating exponentially larger and better habitats.
Also, the dose makes the poison and excess oxygen actually can poison humans. Deep sea divers have to worry about excess oxygen inducing seizures if they mess up their breathing gasses enough. And even 100% oxygen at regular pressure will slowly damage the lungs, something ICUs have to worry about.
Nick Lane had a great book about oxygen, Oxygen, which maybe isn't as good as his book about mitochondria but is well worth reading.
*say, Earth's moon
That would never happen to the Starship Enterprise. Even in Total Recall, where the baddies wanted to kill the poor, they cared about the integrity of the base keeping everyone alive.
Having no prospect for sustained profits is pretty good for keep PE away.
(OceanGate Titan was a money-losing obsession project, not a viable business.)
*Except maybe the O'Neill Space Colony idea - where the Moon Base is just a Lunar strip mine, plus mass driver to throw the "ore" into orbit. IIR, they used a load of NASA's 1970's "lies we must tell Congress" numbers in calculating their transportation costs. And their whole scenario is about half a century out of date now.
I like the way you think. :)
Maybe he was just naturally fit. Some people are. But he was undoubtedly fit.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_polio
> [...] Better hygiene meant that infants and young children had fewer opportunities to encounter and develop immunity to polio. Exposure to poliovirus was therefore delayed until late childhood or adult life, when it was more likely to take the paralytic form.[22]
The anti vaccine position makes a very strong claim, namely that vaccines will cause complications that are strong enough to justify not vaccinating children, which is obviously false since a lot of the diseases that are vaccinated against have actually killed children and the vaccines have dropped child mortality significantly and the complications that are supposed to be avoided by refraining from vaccines tend to be both rare and non life threatening.
You can't make the same argument with the hygiene hypothesis, because the claim is really weak. Nobody is saying that extreme hygiene will kill you. The argument is along the lines of "lack of exposure to environmental microbes, viruses or allergens may lead to an unprepared immune system that hasn't developed a wide variety of anti bodies or is more likely to develop allergies or autoimmune problems".
I'm not sure how I would be able to argue against this claim since it only takes one microbe, virus or allergen to make it true.
The context here isn't hand washing vs not hand washing, it's aggressive ozone + UV sterilisation vs regular hygiene.
Not to mention that the hygiene hypothesis has an even weaker version still, namely the "old friends hypothesis". It seems pretty weird to equivocate this to being against vaccines.
'Anti-vaccine claims' suggests a taking of sides on that knee-jerk division into those who claim without evidence that almost or even all vaccines are deadly and on the other hand, those who are frankly contemptuous of any claim that a particular vaccine (evident particularly with the vaccines developed in response to the Covid outbreak) might be dangerous for certain people. Both extreme views have been on view recently and are indefensible.
The major issue here is the difficult task of identifying people likely to react badly to any specific vaccine.
Meanwhile 'Congress and Institute of Medicine Confirm Government Licensed and Recommended Vaccines Can Cause Injury and Death' and 'The 1986 National Childhood Vaccine Act was the first U.S. law to officially acknowledge that childhood vaccines licensed and recommended by the federal government, which are routinely mandated for school attendance by state governments, can and do injure and kill a minority of children.'
This advice does not necessarily apply to far UVC (200-235 nm), which appears to be much safer for human skin and corneas than UVC outside this specific band. More research is needed before calling it "safe" but far UVC is almost certainly less hazardous than the rest of the UVC band.
Pay close attention to wavelength when purchasing UVC light sources.
I'll keep my eye out for more research on far-uvc and the possibility of getting a bulb to test.
oh by the way, i must have sent back 2 dozen "185nm" UVC bulbs from a dozen "manufacturers" because they didn't produce ozone, because they were fraudulent listings of 253.7nm bulbs - so this is why i was trying to steer people away from amazon and ali, as it's real easy to get the wrong type if you're looking for ozone. I've only managed to acquire 4 bulbs total in the last 5 years that produced ozone, and i burnt out two before someone said "put a fan on it, those bulbs are designed to be inside an air exchanger!"
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38037431/
i'd never heard of ozone in far-uvc nor really far-uvc. For what it's worth, i don't think it matters. the "warning" median dose for Ozone is 1ppm, 100 times more than far-UVC puts out. the "danger" is 5ppm. For ref, Chlorine is 10ppm.
253.7nm does not produce any (or less than 1ppb, which i consider the same thing for my body), and 185nm produces a lot. My warning is specifically to people who want to or need to use the lamps and also think that google isn't very good.
supposition: we don't have the material or material science that is transparent enough between 185 and 254 nanometers to induce more ozone levels than 185nm does.
https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2019/11/28/domes-are-very...
At the right altitude where you can "float" on the ocean, it's a pretty comfortable temperature and there's plenty of solar energy but you're shielded from the solar radiation. So, long term, your body will still work, assuming you can solve "the other problems."
Of course, the down-side is that there's nothing to stand on and probably more importantly, there aren't many useful materials to work with besides tons of carbon, oxygen, and nitrogen. Not much hydrogen there, so not much water, which probably is the biggest problem. One of them, anyhow. Also, there's probably not a whole lot to do besides float (zoom, actually) around and slowly go stir crazy in your bubble.
But relatively speaking, it's way nicer than living in a hole on mars where you'll slowly die from gravity sickness, or radiation poisoning, or whatever.
Actually, the cloud layer at that level is mostly sulfuric acid, from which you can get your water. It also means you need to be in a hazmat suit when you walk outside, but that's still a step up from everywhere else, where you need a bulky pressure suit instead.
Whether it is really possible, is a different question, but after you have an atmosphere, you could have engineered microorganism processing the soil etc.
(Turns out there's a region in Antarctic with them too, so we can always test things there.)
2) If you have a source of hydrogen: water. Bonus as you don't have to make the dome hold pressure. A layer of water of the right depth will generate the force needed, the structure only needs to keep itself level. The only pressure holding is outside that, enough to keep the water from boiling. And, well, it's water--if it's hit by a rock that isn't too big you'll just have hole in the top layer, easily fixed. The same general idea would work on the Moon but the water is far from transparent if you pile up enough of it and you need a lot of hydrogen.
I imagine it will cause some material to off-gas aldehydes at the very least.
But I would worry about the effect on e.g. plastic seals. There are a lot of plastics that become brittle with ozone exposure, let alone UV exposure.
"Hot car smell" is plastics in the car releasing volatile gas from the heat and sunlight, and surfaces in general fade, peel and crack from sun exposure over time. Thought maybe something like that would happen with different exposed materials to the lamps.
There will never, ever, ever[1] be a scenario where if you weighed up the options of "expand into some less habitable area of the Earth" versus "expand to Mars", the latter is the better option either 1) financially, or b) quality of life.
Nobody[2] ever picks the dramatically more expensive and dramatically worse option!
Also, people that are desperate enough to even consider living in the least desirable -- but still just barely habitable -- parts of planet Earth are essentially by definition too poor to afford interplanetary travel.
And no, no amount future sci-fi technology can possibly overcome the simple energy costs of this! If someone can afford the hugely energy intensive interplanetary travel, and the up-front investment required to survive incredibly harsh environments, then by definition they could more productively invest that here on Earth! It's the cheaper and better option in every possible way, and always will be.
This will remain true even if it's standing room only on the entire planetary surface -- it'll be cheaper to build levels upwards while digging downwards.
Maybe our atmosphere will become horrifically polluted? Sure, okay, air filters are faaar cheaper than a full vacuum-capable space suit!
Etc, etc, etc...
[1] Okay, fine, maybe in a million years. Whatever ends up preferring Mars at that point will no longer be "human" by any sane classification.
[2] For some values of nobody. There are morons that buy overpriced branded handbags made of literal trash. I doubt idiots like that will make for a successful, self-sustaining colony.
Building a city in Antarctica will be economically viable long before building a city on Mars is.
It's unlikely that we can persist in our current trajectory for another 100 years without catastrophic climate events puttung a stop to all of these endeavours.
And, rarely, have economic considerations been the only driver for those great societal leaps.
We have converted most of the land to agriculture and released maybe trillions of tons of greenhouse gas in the atmosphere, there are 8 billions of us working on it. And what did we do? Increased the global temperature 2 degrees? Made the sea level rise a couple of meters?
It may be bad for us, but compared to terraforming a planet like Mars, that's nothing, and we have the entire humanity industrial complex to do it while on mars, we need to build everything, starting from a hostile environment.
For mars this just isn't happening unless we ship half of Earth's people and resources over there. Who will have to live on a toxic planet.
But we can't even ship all that stuff there because we don't have enough fuel to do that (it requires many times the payload in fuel) and all the launches would make earth uninhabitable. Terraforming mars is therefore science fiction unless we break a lot of barriers like clean fusion, space elevators etc. And even then the material question will remain a problem.
I think even reverting climate change on earth, a much easier problem than terraforming a remote planet, is a pipe dream. If we're going to be going carbon capture at that global scale, we're going to need to extract so much material, manufacture so much equipment, transporter it all, deal with all the captured carbon, maintenance, power etc all stuff that's not possible to do completely carbon neutral, that we're just polluting a lot more. Especially if we want to do it at a timescale where it still matters.
I don't think it is possible to ever transport enough to make this happen.
The advancements required to arrive at modern LLMs and the tech needed to get humans safely to Mars or live safely on the Moon are orders of magnitude in difference.
Keeping humans alive is hard.
Of course you’ll probably have lots of side-effects.
Anyone know of speculative plans of this sort?
NASA has proposed using "synthetic biology to take advantage of and improve upon natural perchlorate reducing bacteria. These terrestrial microbes are not directly suitable for off-world use, but their key genes pcrAB and cld...catalyze the reduction of perchlorates to chloride and oxygen" [1].
Any effort is only temporary though, because Mars doesn’t have a magnetic field, so the sun is constantly stripping atmosphere off it. It’s not a renewable resource there like it is here.
