/sci/ - Science & Math

>>7924439
He was right. There have been no major inventions in the last 100 years that aren't just improvements of previous inventions. Cars? Modified carriages. Planes? Modified cars. Computers? Modified calculating machines. Etc etc.

Space colonization is a nerd fantasy. It has no congruence with reality, since reality deals with political, economic and ultimately biological facts of Human life. To wit: We are violent simians who only barely cooperate with each other. We prefer to kill each other off than take a big jump. Our economic laws are like the "physics of Human behavior". They are hard rules which dictate what people will do.

And there are ZERO economic models that permit space colonization. The capital required is so huge that it takes entire governments to achieve such things, and governments are run by rich people who don't want to make such stupid, nerdy investments. Rich people are unimaginative money trolls; they don't understand the larger universe since they're spending their lives grubbing after currency and assets. They live perfectly wonderful lives here on Earth. None of them are going to spend the trillions of dollars required to build that stupid Elysium habitat in that movie.

In short, the people best capitalized to take Humanity into space, are the worst sort of people to make the mental investment in such enterprise. Rich people greatly prefer to just kill people off by poverty, conflicts and outright war. That's not only cheaper, but frankly we're such a vicious species that we PREFER to kill each other off.

>>7767258

We will never build space habitats. Genociding Humans will always be the cheaper option, and frankly we prefer to kill off our population.

Space colonization is economically impossible.

>>7765705
>You confuse technology with energy sources

Most Westerners do. Energy is really the only major religion of the West. They can't question it, and they have to believe in it.

>>7765543
>Do you think there will be drastic improvements in technology that will allow us to sustain this number?

No. Don't be silly. All systems have carrying capacities and limits.

>If not, should we be aiming for zero growth and how would you go about this?

We'll go about it using another World War. Resource crunches are always resolved that way.

>>7765623
>What happened before big bang?

Nobody knows, and more to the point: Nobody CAN know. Our universe is a singularity. We can't see outside of it, and we can't see what happened before.

All efforts to find out these things are pointless. Intellectual masturbation.

>>7761377

Landing on the Ringworld from the open facing is very hazardous, even without the Ringworld Meteor Defense. The structure is spinning at over 770 miles per second. So your re-entry heating is apt to be *phenomenal*. You'd have to match velocities almost completely, which is a huge energy requirement for a spacecraft (not in the Larry Niven "Known Space" universe, however).

>>7757302

http://www.esa.int/spaceinimages/Images/2009/02/Hypervelocity_impact_sample

>>7758335

There's nothing to "look into". Matter came from a singularity. It was an origination event. Nothing can be known from "before" it. That's what 'singularity' implies.

>>7756801
>Going back to school as an adult is like using cheat-codes. Easiest thing ever. Your drive is so much higher, your discipline is ironclad, and school is ridiculously more easy than your real job.

The latter part is key. When you get out of school and enter the World Of Work, you find out that there aren't any guaranteed answers to problems. And if there are acceptable answers to be found for problems, it's hard work indeed finding efficient forms of those solutions.

Going back into an undergraduate environment would be a piece of cake in comparison. All you need to do is read, understand and then regurgitate the methodologies for finding the guaranteed-to-exist answers.

>>7758553

True and false.

The metric expansion of space reaches the speed of light around 14 billion lightyears of separation. At the distance of about 1 meter, the speed drops to about 10^-18 (one millionth-trillionth) meter per second. At the atomic scale of 10^-10 meter, that speed obviously drops to 10^-28 m/s. Therefore the space between atoms at that scale is expanding at a fantastically small rate, which is completely swamped by normal atomic motion. The space is expanding, but the atoms are moving so much more that you will never observe the separation effect.

The speed of the expansion of the universe only becomes noticeable super-galactically. Nothing structural larger than about 100 million lightyears can remain intact since the speed of the expansion outpaces the common velocities of objects within such structures. That's why galactic superclusters are the largest structures this universe has at this time. Larger than that scale, the universe just becomes randomly filamentary.

https://pam.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continent

We know of only one planet with land and oceans for which we've defined "continent". So it's really just a convention for Earth.

If pressed to make a definition supported by outright criteria, I'd define a continent as "large expanses of land formed by accretion by tectonic action". Generally islands aren't formed that way, nor are they that large.

I have trouble drawing the line of "life" below the virus. I define life as using DNA (software) and proteins (hardware) in a metabolic pursuit. Viruses have the first two items, but don't metabolize. I pretty much agree with the other poster who simply characterized them as a parasitic structure.

>>7750539
>What causes aging?

Our species has the usual vulnerability to genetic damage caused by free radicals. It's a huge process, but what basically happens is that as you age, your mitochondria get less efficient, fewer in number, and larger. They produce more free radicals (OH-, H3O, etc.) per ATP. Remember that mitochondria have their own DNA (and it's crucial DNA), and its pretty much naked to the free radical attack compared to the DNA in the cell nucleus. Eventually errors accumulate and too many cells under apoptosis. The net effect is a critical system failure for the organism.

Take the neurons, for example. They don't undergo mitosis. Hence, you have the same neurons at death that you have from birth. So these cells just get old and die off. However, it's rare that people die just from neuron collapse. If every other system was supported, death from brain failure would probably happen by 250 years.

The aging mechanism is complicated, but damage from free radicals is key. And we should be looking at species that exhibit far more resistance to such damage. Humans among many other species end up running about 60 kiloliters of oxygen through every kg of body mass. But there are species that run much higher metabolic limits. How do they do it?

>>7747603
>Why not take the water that's already there?

Because there aren't any people in deep space to use water.

And if existing economic models persist, there will never be any people in deep space.

We've been able to establish people in deep space since the 1960s. The technology already existed. The manufacturing base already existed. The money already existed.

So what's been MISSING all along has been an economic model that permitted space colonization.

And it remains missing. Nobody's going to spend upwards of $500 billion to get some useless PhD holders to Mars. Nobody's going to put truck drivers into space so they can shuttle people from L4/5 to Luna. The price is just too high, and the perils of a space existence are just too great.

If there's a real resource crunch here on Earth, it will be 1000 times cheaper just to commit genocides to get rid of the hooting packs of violent simians that caused the resource shortage. Leaders and elites will always choose the cheaper option. Leaders and elites will always opt to kill off Humans.

>>7745506
>What you can do is start an economy in space.

No, since nobody's sending Humans into space on a permanent basis, so that they can live, work and play in space itself. That's totally uneconomical. It will never be economical using the set of economic models that Humans accept. Therefore it will never happen.

----> The End <----

>>7745389
>Will it ever be possible or not?

Physically, of course it's possible. Economically, no, it's impossible.

Pursuing ore off Earth is at least 1000 times as expensive as pursuing ores on Earth itself. And 99.9999% of all use of metals and non-metals obtained from ores, are used on Earth itself.

Compared to the price of exploiting asteroidal materials, we have no shortages of similar materials on Earth.

And nobody's going to go out and bring back millions of tons of palladium, either. That sort of thing would crash the palladium market which would obviate the exercise in the first place.

Asteroidal mining, when Humans simply refuse to leave the Earth permanently, is just a stupid fantasy. Grow the fuck up.

>>7735728

Freeman Dyson has promoted a "dual origin" theory of the start of life. Breaking down life into hardware (proteins) and software (DNA and RNA), he speculates that living systems could have started out as proteins, needing no particular software to function, only reacting in a hardware fashion. Then some infection by early DNA occurred, and it became useful for the hardware to make use of DNA to store information.

We already know amino acids (the building blocks of proteins) form naturally. RNA seems to be able to self-assemble under certain conditions. Did life have a dual origin? Did purely information-carrying molecules infect life's basic hardware, a fortunate event since it allowed life to encode information and become more structurally flexible?

>>7733310
Take cell A going into cell B. When cell A dies, it's called "eating". When cell B dies, it's called "infection". When cell A survives inside B, it's called "symbiosis". That's the simple explanation of how we gained mitochondria and possibly other cell organelles.

There's an advantage for the mitochondria (and the plant equivalent of chloroplasts) going into another cell to live. The cell's inner environment is fairly predictable. That's a form of stability that the invasive cell can take advantage of. In return, the host cell could harvest anything the invasive cell produced. In this fashion, we ended up with mitochondria which produce our ATP.

>>7733299

Free membranes form from lipids quite easily in the lab. The latest theory of warm-water (not hot-water) hydrothermal vents in the ocean is probably the best one to follow. Read some Nick Lane (a leading biochemist).

By the end of this century, the era of Petroleum Starvation will begin. (We're currently in the era of Petroleum Depletion.) A lot of Humans will be relegated to simply remaining within 20 miles of their homes.

>>7726995
>How true is this?

True enough, except that space is expanding, and the metric expansion value exceeds lightspeed after about 14 billion lightyears. So in reality you will NEVER come back to your starting point, per se. What happens is that you're stuck in a causal bubble that at the current rate is about 14 BLY in diameter.

>>7724714
>Is it actually worth the cost?

You're kidding, right? The projected lifetime cost for manufacturing, launch, operation and maintenance is about $150 billion. That's ridiculous considering it's just a Cold War remnant welfare program.

>>7723621
>It seems like scientists are always asking for more money for these things, but what is the purpose?

The purpose is welfare. There are tens of thousands of PhDs worldwide who expect to be paid to sit around and play with math. This is not useful work.