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https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.php?feature=7610

Have any of you seen this? The Curiosity took a ginormous 360 degree panoramic shot of the Martian landscape over Thanksgiving week. This is the first time they've thought to use their rover equipped with its fancy camera to take nice pictures of things.

If you just want to skip the explanation, the image links are here. You can choose from the lightweight 75 megs to the one with 1.8 billion pixels that weighs in at two and a half gigs.

I've only been able to view tiny example shots so far, but I love Mars. Although, I can't help but notice it does look a lot like some random spot in Nowhere, Arizona. Maybe instead of Mars we could get the idea of building things on an alien planet out of our collective systems by building domes in random ass deserts for awhile, it's probably cheaper and they have oxygen and all that.

Do you guys think there's any actual likelihood of getting a person up there in your lifetimes? And should we, with the spending it would represent to even begin to take a stab at it? Seems like everyone used to be more hopeful about that idea and now I'm not sure if anyone gives a crap anymore.

I love the pictures, and it does look like Arizona! This turned from a quick link to some deep questions as well! I'll provide my two cents!

First of all,  space travel is coming a long way very quickly. A bunch of companies have begun the race to create practical and affordable privatized space travel. Things like reusable launch systems are being developed, and I think it is possible that people can have the opportunity to go to space in my lifetime. To qualify this, I mean go to space in a shuttle ride that lasts anywhere from a few hours to a few days.

This will be very expensive at first but might come down a bit in price as things get more efficient over time. There was a time that no "average person" could afford a cell phone. Now, cell phones are considered a "necessity" and everyone has one. I doubt space travel will become as practical, affordable, or common as cell phones; however, it may be the same price as a trip to Disney land one day. Both because of Disney's insane prices, and the price of space travel coming down a bit.

As for living on another planet, Elon Musk believes it will be that way. He started SpaceX with the serious intention of colonizing Mars. I have my doubts that this will happen in my lifetime though. The cost and massive amount of resources required to be transported to the new planet make this idea nearly impossible. It costs so much in fuel just to get a shuttle outside of Earth's atmosphere that "affordable" space travel would have to mean it is only a few hundred thousand dollars, rather than millions, just to go into space and back. Imagine having to fly building material; hundreds of people; skilled laborers (that are also paid salaries); tons of water, dirt, food, animals, and air; and other things all the way to Mars.

Several major technological breakthroughs would have to happen to make this possible. This includes a biodome that has enough plant life to produce oxygen faster than the residents use it up, some source of water that is sustainable for the entire population, and a dome that can be completely sealed without any leak or failure. There is no atmosphere on Mars, so any failure of the dome would be fatal for the entire population. I don't want to think about what it would take just to maintain the dome, assuming we could build it. If there was a working dome on Mars that we found, I doubt we could populate it and keep it running.

I love the concept of living on another planet in science fiction, but I can't imagine a way to achieve it in real life. Earth is pretty great to me as well, and there is a lot here that we don't understand yet. Seems to me like we have a lot to do on this plant before we live on another. Who knows though, maybe someone smarter than me will prove me wrong. Two billionaires are trying (Jeff Bezos is the other with Blue Origin).

I think the deadline is something like 2035. if it doesn't happen by then it probably won't happen until something like 2060 or 70. The spending is ridiculously small compared to something like the military. NASA budget for 2020 is only $22B. The cost to develop the F35 fighter jet was over $430B. If space had even 1% of government funding (it doesn't) it'd be an easy yes, and we'd probably have done it ages ago but I digress.

I think it's very much possible. Planes were a think for wealthy hobbyists when my Grandfather was born. He rode a horse to work for years. When he died air travel was common place and he drove a Crown Vic around town.

If they put a man on the moon before I was born, I don't see why they couldn't put one on mars by the time I die. I just don't see anyone bothering with it in that time.

There was a whole lot of pressure to get somebody on the moon ASAP and full support from the government and the public, and the kind of international pissing contest that led to it doesn't exist for Mars. The best we have is a couple of rich guys pushing for it. (Who will both be significantly less rich if a bunch of angry college kids ever get their way.)

Bezos and Musk both seem a bit nuts though in a trying to run before you can crawl way. I wonder what could have happened if Bezos had just doubled NASA's funding with a bit of his own money and asked for it to be put towards a practical goal like get one single dude on Mars to increase public interest/awareness. These guys going on about self sustaining cities or a trillion damn people living in space are a little hard to take seriously without seeing at least that much first. When it's all dependent on a couple of individuals there's also the fact that either one of them could literally die tomorrow, and would development there continue without them pushing for it?

The most reasonable stepping stone goal I've seen to going to mars was solar mining. Nabbing one of the loose asteroids and pulling out the raw materials for it. I heard about some guys that were looking into trying it and they found a promising one that they could reasonably reach and get to earth. I think they scrapped the plan when they realized the thing was mostly platinum and there was more of it in that rock then in the entire economy on earth. While it would have been a huge boost in working materials it would have crashed the worlds economy. 

I figure if we start pulling valuable metals that are just floating loose in the solar system we would eventually begin a extra planetary industry. Why waste the rocket fuel putting a mining vessel in space when you could just make it there. From there we could move on to working larger solar bodies. Mars potentially becoming an agricultural post to feed a growing solar industry, also being a nearby gravity center for people to build up bone density again. 

Who knows how much of that would be necessary or feasible though.

Mining in space would be awesome! It is also not practical though. Think about it. You would need to design a special vessel that can go to Mars, locate the asteroid (probably autonomously since a human life wouldn't be risked for the mission), capture it, bring it back to Earth, enter the atmosphere without burning up the asteroid, and land so you can retrieve it. That, with fuel costs, and you would be billions of dollars in the hole just to get the raw materials. Now, you still have to refine it and sell it. To make a profit you would need a HUGE asteroid, but that makes it so you need a bigger ship to transport it as well. While you are doing that, someone else would be pulling the same metal from the ground and selling it for immediate profit. You could also crash the prices if you bring too much home (as you hint at above) and make it impossible to turn a profit.

Making a refinery or something in space would be a great idea, but again I question the practicality. One example of the challenges we face doing this in space vs on Earth can be seen on just melting the ore. This could be done in a furnace on Earth, but in space, you would need a special space furnace. The furnace would have to be sealed and flooded with oxygen just to burn anything, something that is taken for granted when building a furnace on Earth. The oxygen tank on our space furnace would have to be HUGE and connected to a fuel tank with whatever you were burning to make the furnace hot. If you leaked air into space your fire would die. If you leaked too much air into the furnace, or let the system run backward, you would probably blow it up. So your system would be amazingly complex and dangerous. It would also need to run autonomously unless you were bringing in extra oxygen so the workers could breathe while running it, which might cause other safety issues if you (for example) burned up all the oxygen in the furnace and people couldn't breathe.

I don't mean to be a downer, but you also have to keep in mind that once things reach space they usually have a REALLY small amount of fuel onboard. You only need small amounts of thrust for course correction since once you start travelling you can kill the engines and "glide" in the zero resistance/gravity environment. Fuel burn usually is like 90% leaving Earth (mostly from a primary rocket that falls away and doesn't go into space), then maybe 3% to set a course and velocity, 2% for course corrections along the way, and 5% for mission end (getting into orbit or landing). Even planning to come back to earth requires you to take like 10% more fuel, which is why there is a lot of "space junk" that we just left out there. Carrying enough fuel to run a furnace would be crazy and dangerous compared to what we do now. That is doable but not easy.

Right now it isn't necessary. Who knows, it might become more needed in the future if we run out of things here. I don't know if it would be easier to start a space mining company or a space colony, but the refinery would be lower risk to human casualties for sure.

Well your entire first paragraph can be refuted by pointing out pretty much all of our platinum and several other metals aren't from earth. They came down from space. (Might be getting that mixed up with palladium. I get some of the P metals mixed up in my head sometimes.)

Your premise for the refinery is that we would be using fire. Fire isn't necessary to melt metal. Heat and pressure is. You're also assuming that humans would need to be at the plant. If engineered properly they wouldn't need to be present for most of the process. Technically the heat necessary to process could be made from massive solar mirrors or magnifying glass. There's more than enough silica just floating in space to do that. That would require no oxygen at all.

All of the fuel issues you're pointing out is the big issue for rocket propelled vessels. Which would be the big issue for planetary colonization. There are plenty of asteroids that come closer than mars though. The asteroids that come close enough wouldn't need a manned vessel to redirect to an earth orbit. I already pointed out that I don't know how necessary or feasible any of that is. You're mostly planning for terran metal processing in a non terran environment though. That's bad planning.

 

 

It does not matter, if it is here it will be easier to mine and refine. Unless there is none to be found here on Earth, finding it is cheaper. I do agree that materials not found on Earth would need to be mined in space. The cost for these would still be through the roof though! 

Heat and pressure. Mirrors do not provide pressure. To pressurize something you need to fill it with a fluid (air or gas), so the problem still exists. I did say that I was assuming we used a normal furnace design, which burns some fuel to create the heat. A design for a sunlight mirror furnace doesn't exist currently.  We are actually really bad at harnessing sunlight as an energy source. This is one of the reasons that solar energy hasn't replaced fossil fuels in all applications. For example, let's say we had a mirror system that could melt the hardest metal found in space with the highest melting point. This would make my entire argument irrelevant and make the refinery work easily; except you would have no way to contain the super hot sunlight. The mirrors (usually made from polished metal and a clear material like glass) would melt. The furnace itself (probably made from metal?) would melt. It's the same problem we have with turning a laser cutter (which exists) into a lightsaber. We can't make a blade of light that is confined to a small space. The technology for this is more difficult than what I described.

Yes, a fully autonomous system would be the way to go. This is also harder than it seems though there is a reason most production plants on Earth still have machine operators. There are fully automated production lines though, so if you could build in space and make the furnace, making the furnace automated would be possible.

Pulling in an asteroid to Earth is more possible! There are still issues of course, or we would be doing this daily, but it's something that could be figured out. The closer the target is the easier it will be to collect. They are also working on some forms of space travel that don't require fuel. Things like electromagnetic propulsion, ionic propulsion, and solar sailing! I believe all of that is still theoretical, but it would make it easier to do mining missions and space colonization. 

This is fair... there is no drive to go to space for a pressing issue (like we are out of X and need to go to space to get more), so the drive is the vision of these billionaires. Their goals are crazy, but usually crazy goals are the ones that produce the best results. To be honest, from everything I have heard, SpaceX makes more progress a lot faster than NASA. Now I think NASA launches things on other companies rockets (rather than launching their own). The movement is gaining popularity though! A lot of people in the aerospace community have stopped dreaming about working at NASA and started dreaming about working for SpaceX or Blue Origin. 

I think our government has better things to worry about at the moment. Also, private industries tend to do better than government controlled ones once there is competition. If anything, the rise of private space travel companies set the timeline for humans living in space ahead by a bit. Now, they need a real way to make a profit and get people interested. For example, if going to the moon was going to cost 200$, then everyone would be investing in one of those companies and excited about really going to space. They would pay that. Right now, ticket prices are estimated to be more like 20 million or something... I don't know about you guys, but that is outside of my price range at the moment. The huge cost decreases public interest; however, if there was something practical to do in space, then the industry might see a boost from that.

I don't think Bezos or Musk are going anywhere, but if they did, the companies they started would probably live on. They are established enough that someone else could take over. It would defiantly hurt the company and industry at this point though... it isn't concrete enough that it would be easy to manage without the founder and visionary driving things. They almost need to race each other to put a man on Mars to make people believe they could one day colonize it... that would take awhile though. It would also be a one way suicide mission for the astronaut, I believe. We can't make a vessel that can carry enough fuel to go to Mars, land, and come back.

"Do you guys think there's any actual likelihood of getting a person up there in your lifetimes? And should we, with the spending it would represent to even begin to take a stab at it? Seems like everyone used to be more hopeful about that idea and now I'm not sure if anyone gives a crap anymore."

Likelyhood -- Maybe not in my lifetime.

Should we? -- Yes

President Bush was the last President that actively pursued a Mars landing. Obama wanted to give space to the mega-corporations, so people like Elon Musk and other top 1%ers would be able to pursue their dreams. Trump is fascinated by his Starship Troopers, so I expect to see Space Marines if he is re-elected.

As long as the billionaires will be able to charge the millionaires, there will be space flight, eventually to Mars. Or maybe the Chinese will accellerate their efforts and take control of outer space, leaving the rest of the world grounded on Earth.

With the way technology develops, I wouldn't be surprised if, a few centuries from now, space travel is available for the price of a plane ticket today.  As has already been pointed out, the longer a technology is developed, the cheaper it becomes.  There was a time when a "cheap" computer would put you $250,000 in the hole, (that's without adjusting for inflation).  Now a high end computer won't cost you more than 1-2 thousand dollars. 

Of course, if we ever make space travel commercially available, it'd probably wise to do something about the negative effects of zero-gravity on the human body.  It wouldn't do to be giving all the space tourists bone damage and whatnot, as I imagine that'd be bad for business.  And even if we do get something like a space-cruise in the future, it's kinda sad to think that we'll probably never really leave the solar system.  We'd have to crack light-speed for that, or else figure out some way to stop humans from aging.  Cryogenics probably won't fly with the people who have friends and family back on earth; they'll want to see all those people again once they return.  Not to mention the fact that freezing oneself in a block of ice would probably result in some pretty negative effects, no matter how much technology advances.  When it comes down to it, earth is all we've got, so I think we'd better do a good job taking care of it.

A few centuries ago we were riding around on horses, and it was theorized that traveling faster than 40 miles per hour would be lethal. This is actually true, the thought was that you would "travel faster than air could get into your lungs" or something like that. It was a big argument against trains when they first came out. All of this to say that we have no idea what technology will look like in a few centuries. Stuff we didn't imagine was possible will be common.

The best reference I have is to look at spy gadgets in 90s cartoons. They featured amazing, futuristic, impossible gadgets like a wireless phone/watch combo and cars that could turn into a boat or plane. These exist now. So hundreds of years from now we might have things like teleportation and common-place space travel. In today's world it is hard to imagine though. 

If we "crack light-speed" we would first have to relearn physics. Under the current theory, it is impossible to go faster than light-speed. That isn't to say that it is not possible, before Einstein there was a different theory that governed physics that seemed to work with the information we had at the time, but it is sorta hard to believe. Einstein's model has no counter examples when done properly (I believe), so there isn't a "flaw" to poke at like the pervious physical models of the universe.

For example, when we thought orbits were spherical, we got confused when our math didn't line up with charted locations of stars. Turns out, orbits are elliptical. Now, our math always lines up with charted star locations. There is no reason to believe that we are wrong about orbits... the same can be said about everything we can measure in physics. 

That's a pretty good point.  I didn't think about the fact that many of the things we take for granted now would've been considered lethal or impossible just a century or two ago.  Even still, I still think we should be careful not put all our hope in space, just in case things don't pan out the way we want them to.  (I'm not saying that's what you're doing, of course, but there are those who really do think this way).  

I think Elon Musk feels that way, haha. I do agree though! To be honest, I am not convinced there is much out there for us in space. Part of me wants to believe that we are ten years from Mass Effect in real life so I can be commander Shepard, but things more realistically point towards it not being that way. Especially in the near future.

Also, sorry if my opinions are annoying on this thread. I probably should mention that I am literally an Aerospace Engineer by trade and studied things like Orbital Mechanics, Modern Physics, and Rocket Design courses in college. This led me to, perhaps, post too much here. 

Keep posting, it's been interesting. The forums kind of needed a shot in the arm anyway, and I hadn't known all this. Do more nerd tricks pls.

I'm assuming that has something to do with the Discord, right?  

Can do!

I could touch on teleportation, I suppose. This is something that I think could be feasible, just not in the way that most people think of it. We can't "instantaneously" move from one location to another; however, something like "Wonka-vision" might be possible! 

There are no facts to support this insane theory is possible, but Wonka-vision is explained as "breaking a person up into millions of pieces and sending them to a T.V. through the air." What if we could do that? More specifically, what if we could turn someone's mass into a light wave and back?

For short range teleportation, traveling at the speed of light seems instantaneous, but is physically possible. Think of turning on a light and trying to count how long until the light fills the room. Combine that with the wave-partial duality theory (this theory states that all waves behave like particles and particles behave like waves) and something could be theorized. In my mind it works like this:

- We find a way to take a person and get the particles that makeup their body to break up and act like a wave

- Contain the wave and send it through "the air" like it is a radio signal or beam of light

- Capture it at the end point and reassemble the particles back into a person

Waves usually travel very quickly, so you would be moving fast. The problem is that we can't do anything I listed above. More problems include things like the fact that waves scatter as they travel distances. This might mean that only 70% of you makes the trip and the rest of you is lost as heat dissipation (or something like that). You can also ask the philosophical question of "if we disassemble someone and put them back together, are they the same person? I have no idea if yo would keep your memories after something like that, or if you would still be you (or alive even). None the less, I think this is the most plausible version of teleportation I can dream up that fits with scientific laws.

Ah, I've heard this plenty of times. Teleportation is the thing nerds argue about anywhere Star Trek debate comes up. It literally would be killing you by tearing you to pieces and reassembling a copy. But only the person who was killed would know the difference, and even then there's an argument of it would even matter or be provable unless souls or some kind of afterlife exists.

If you see your child disassembled before your eyes and an exact copy is put together ten feet away, is that still your child?

Of course in Star Trek they do at least keep the memories so that's a convenient handwave, and I'm not sure if that would work in reality.

Yeah it is a hard question too answer, especially since we can't actually do anything so it's all theory. For example, if my idea above works, then you could just have a tank that has all of the "raw materials" to make a person. To teleport you could disassemble a person and just add them to the tank, then have another tank make a replica using their genetic information. Now, would that replica be you? How would we recreate memories? Etc etc... 

I think my opinion on this was significantly influenced by liking that scene of Charlie and the Chocolate factory. We will probably never get to doing anything like this because we don't understand life well enough to be able to "disassemble" and "recreate" it. Heck, we can't even create new life (other than the old fashion way). However, if someone could send me objects by this method, then I would be a happy camper. 

There have been some sci fi things that took the darker interpretation of it, so that's probably a factor there for me too. And ultimately as far as living things go I can't shake the idea of it being a lot like taking a bunch of bones and hide and hamburger meat and sculpting a cow. Even if you could bring it to life and it contained all the atoms of the original, still sucks for the one that died.

I guess the ethics of all that would depend on what narrative the society itself accepts about it though. In Star Trek it's commonplace and just taken for granted, on other settings or reality I could see it being a major debate on both sides. (In fact I've started a story where this stuff will be a major theme, although it's about cloning.)

Objects would be cool, and really the only thing it could ethically be tested on. I'm sure there'd be animal experimentation though and to a degree you could test the memory thing with a trained rat or whatever I suppose.

Although I guess the boring practical IRL thing to look at before it every commonplace would be how much energy it would use up and if it could be made more cost efficient than just shipping things the current way.

And I'm sure it'd be weaponized immediately. That part would be pretty scary actually. One of the other big Star Trek questions is why no one ever just teleports a torpedo onto the bridge of the enemy ship.

Agreed, it would be very unethical to do this to a human. We would need to learn a lot more before considering disassembling a person at a molecular level. We also would need the whole process proven on objects before we did anything. Ethical or not, if you cant reassemble and "reanimate" the person then you definitely killed them.

You would change the mail/shipping game for sure. Testing would be much easier. With things like 3D printing people have already been talking about a version of this. It is less "teleportation" and more "if you set up a 3D printer in you house you can have companies send the design and program to print the object in your house." The problems are that you would need to buy all the raw materials first, and the company would need a way to keep you from printing a billion after they sent you the design. 3D printing is only possible with certain materials anyway.

Where I work we can email a CAD file to someone that feeds it into a machine and produces anything that fits in a 2 cubic feet box (roughly). That isn't teleportation, but if you could set the printer up to just read the email and print, then it is something close to what I described above. It is also only made from one (hard-plastic) material, so complex designs and wiring are not possible. Some 3D printers can print in metal though. I am not sure if there is one that has hybrid materials to make a metal wire and coat it in rubber or plastic, but it is possible. Nothing (to my knowledge) that sophisticated has been built, yet. 3D printing is a really cool, practical, technology being developed.

Weaponizing it would be difficult using this method. You would need to design a weapon to fit in the space of the printer and be made from the raw materials in it. Someone concerned could just remove the raw materials. However, if we figure out how to disassemble something, beam it to a different printer, and have it reassembled, then I agree.

A 3D printer could (theoretically) scan something as it "disassembled it" to create its own CAD file to do this too. We have scanners that create cad drawing of any surface they scan. The limitation is that you can only do surfaces, so anything "on the inside" is not replicated. If you were to scan, remove a layer, and repeat, maybe that could do it... Hmm. You would have to define the parameters like how much is disassembled with each scan. Unless you could take that thickness down to one atom, there is room for error... It is a neat thought though.

Oh, material properties aren't included in current scanned CAD models as well. that is an issue because the printer wouldn't know what to make the design out of, even if it could scan the geometry. Right now, our CAD people manually input material properties. Again, if you are disassembling this item you could check what the materials that you just disassembled are though.

We are, in reality, very far from automating this process. Sending a design to a 3D printer and having it auto-print might be happening soon though.

Shadow, why are you writing gay fantasy shit when you could be doing a plot with all of this?

I have thought about it... maybe I'll add a sci-fi story to my to do list. If you want, I'll put it at the top, haha.

Would it be theoretically possible to bend space itself to create some kind of wormhole connecting two points instead of ripping creatures apart?  Or is that concept limited to books like A Wrinkle In Time?  I imagine it would take a lot of energy, and there might not be any telling where you might wind up.  Like, you could end up somewhere in the middle of space.  And if wormholes are a fixed point in space, keeping a portal open for any point in time would be impossible because the planet would just move away from it too fast for anyone to enter.  The only solution to this that I can think of would be to somehow tie the wormhole to a physical object on each of the planets; essentially making a good old fashioned portal.

This sounds like string theory stuff. Theoretically, the answer is yes. The easiest way to describe it is if you imagine the universe as a 2D blank sheet of paper. If you allow a third dimension to enter the model (coming up out of the sheet of paper), then you can fold the paper. So if we are on the bottom left corner, we can roll the paper so that our corner touches the top right corner. This is equivalent to putting the other side of the universe right next to earth.

In real life this would require the existence of a new fourth dimension (if you call time the fourth dimension, then a fifth), it would allow you to fold the universe and do the same thing. We have no idea what that looks like in real life, but we can mathematically model it. Again, the numbers in the fifth dimension have no meaning, but we can calculate how far we would need to "bend the universe" in this made up direction to connect any two points in space. Practically, this means nothing. On a theoretical level, it is accurate. Real life would also require you to use enough force to "lift" or "bend" the universe though. You would also distort the universe in a measurable way by doing it (like where the paper bends while you fold it). 

Wormholes and portals are cool, but have no real life applications. We can't even do math on how they would work, nothing like it exists. You have to make a lot of assumptions, like they do in the video game Portal, where they assume that if connects the two points and conserves momentum across it. How? No clue.

Black holes are different, and so is manipulating distance. Both are real and possible. You can travel so fast that you make distances shrink (length contraction). You also can move so fast that time slows down (time dilation). We have actually done this and measured it. There are also cases where gravity is so strong it "bends" length, time, and even light. That's what black holes really are. They are extremely high gravitational zones that are so strong light can't escape them. That is why they are black. Anything that absorbs all of the light that touches it is black to us. The difference is that light isn't being absorbed, it is being pulled in. Black holes might not even be a hole. They could be really dense objects or a hyper dense gas. Since light can't escape them, we have no hope of seeing them. Getting close would be lethal. Going though one is not advised... in reality you would be crushed before you got close enough to be "in" the black hole.

I know you didn't mention a black hole, but I think black holes are interesting, and some people assume they are "wormholes."

Also, ending up somewhere random wouldn't be an issue. You can calculate where you would end up today with string theory. The issue is more that we are unable to find this forth dimension. We also can't bend the universe that we know of.

I do think at this point we have a much better idea of what's possible with technology and what's extremely unrealistic than people did 200 years ago though. Or even seventy years ago.

It is kind of funny though that we do things daily that would've blown all the classic sci fi authors away, while we just completely failed at the big things they expected. Miniaturization in computer technology and literally everything about your phone was inconceivable but just a pretty natural evolution of computers, while FTL and the kind of AIs they imagined, not so much.

This is true. It is also reasonable to assume that the "technological revolution" will eventually end. All of this technology was developed at such a rapid rate, but as we discover more there is less to discover. It is like life expectancy. Medical knowledge of things like germs and hand washing dramatically improved it. Other advancements came with things like surgeries, but medical knowledge has a limit to how long it can extend your life. We could be at the end of the technological revolution, half way, or just scratching the surface.

I also find it funny that we discovered so much about robots, computers, flight, etc., but are only recently learning how our own brains work, haha.

 

I'd rather focus on finding a way to keep the moon from eventually leaving us. The world would be so much more lame without tide pool critters and shapeshifting murderfurries.

A really long rope.


yw NASA, just DM me about where to direct the check.

I have a feeling that Mizal is about the create the next "NASA space pen" situation...

NASA's Space Pen is such a ridiculous urban legend and I'm quite upset by it. The reason you don't bring a pen to space is because you don't want graphite dust and any shattered fragments floating around in the only air you get to breathe for the forseeable future. And what happens when the lead runs out? Do you sharpen it? What if that spills? Sawdust is enough of a pain in the ass to clean up when it's only on the ground. How much of a pain in the ass is it going to be when it's not even restricted to the ground? free-floating in all directions? Getting caught in machinery? Do you have any idea what a fantastical fireball risk that sawdust or even just a bunch of dry vaguely-laminated sticks laying around in an oxygen-rich environment where they're free to float any which way that they're not supposed to be!? Fire is not a good thing to have in space! The Space Pen was developed later by an independent contractor and it was used by both space agencies of the cold war.

Plus wasn't the moral of the whole anecdote supposed to be "Don't spend millions of moneys on a high tech solution to a simple problem"? Wouldn't Mizal's answer be the precise opposite, as she's proposed a very low-tech solution to a complex problem?

I agree with you on all accounts, except maybe the machinery part. Hopefully, the engineers put air filters on those incase something like that happened. NASA didn't spend money on the pen until after it was developed either. That post was a joke. It was meant to read that Mizals suggestion was the "pencil solution" while NASA is working on "pen solutions."