The worst part is the banks. You have to get lucky to be allowed to use online banking without agreeing to some sucky TOS.

For communication? Does Lebanon have a right to defend itself?

This is like asking why Biden has a phone line to the fascists in charge of Israel. Does that make Biden a legitimate target?

If I run some AI model on my GPU and power my computer via solar power and some batteries, am I actually contributing significantly to GHG emissions?

Like what is the embodied energy of an AI model?

As usual, pundits and scientists confuse what is and what could be with the truth. For example plastic recycling isn’t possible because “right now economics don’t make it profitable”. Meaning capitalism is killing us, not plastics. I suspect the same is true for AI.

I actually believe one day we’ll need lawyers and courts for complex virtual reality worlds.

No just free association. But having no alternatives to legitimate needs, like participating in our civilization’s free speech discourse through the internet, free association doesn’t help. So before the fediverse you were “forced” to associate with reddit/facebook/twitter or have little association at all.

I’m not sure how anarchism would work for a social media platform. Everyone is a mod? Everyone can post anything and can delete anything? 😀

I believe generally as a philosophy anarchism only makes sense as all authority should be challenged and needs to be justified or be abolished. The amount of authority justified and needed might be relative to the level of “enlightenment” of the participants.

Not sure what sapphire means, but here is the article. Just appending records and differential backups would seem to be the way to go.

the new optical disks are claimed to be “highly stable so there are no special storage requirements.” The researchers tout an expected shelf life of 50 to 100 years

I wish there was a cheap and millennia-long lasting microfilm you could transfer books to. A projector is a pretty simple device to operate. Hmm that reminds me of “Last Words (2020)”.

Well yeah but BluRay is still much more expensive and smaller capacity. Lets hope this new 125TB disk works out

M-Disk is rated to last like 100 years. They are also working on a 125 Terabyte CD. Optical storage is the way to go.

Fascism.

People have been lied to for decades and we all know it’s going to get worse in the future. The democrats are neoliberals who will continue to exploit people. The news media and social media are all owned by oligarchs. Wealth inequality is getting worse. Climate change won’t be solved and will make all things worse. Why should people vote for the status quo? Work hard, get fucked? No solidarity, no rational action, no plan. And nuclear war when?

Fascism and nationalism is not just something to break this but also has the better story. Something the stupid masses can believe in again. Trump is telling them everything they want to hear.

I think you need to compress the air and cool it and you get condensation. I think the advantage of baking the soil would be that the concentration of water vapor would be higher so less energy.

Hmm… maybe the smartest way would be to just build greenhouses and pump compressed air into it. Plants grow, absorb CO2, release oxygen and water. At night you lower insulation and condense excess water out of the air. What is left is a surplus of oxygen. Of course that requires a ton of glass.

I dabble a little (3D printers, composites). I’m thinking more about 30-100 years for actually living on moon or mars like a real self sufficient colony instead of missions.

I do believe mechanical engineering can be represented in a way that is accessible to AI. It doesn’t need general knowledge or sentience. Not just the generative stuff we have now in CAD, but more like the AI that can generate images. Ways to generate infinitely complex “nonsense” machines isn’t hard, but AI can then learn of how to work more intuitive.

At some point we’ll have an AI that can design, supervise manufacture / CNC and robots to assemble and then control all the machines we need for this. Of course the design would have lots of human input at start. But robotics are improving and deep AI is able to do remarkable things already. Eventually we would feed all the existing CAD designs and function and physical laws and material science into an AI as a lot of data and then suddenly you can bootstrap an entire industrial society fully automated. But every step and progress towards that goal would make it that much cheaper and easier to do.

Of course that’s sci-fi but so is the idea of living on mars :)

True, and you have more gravity. On the other hand you have perchlorides. Obviously you need water but I thought they did find some already near the south pole on the moon? (EDIT: Yes but apparently little and not very concentrated). I didn’t know there was so little carbon though.

Well yeah, then underground in lava tubes. But then the moon would be much easier for building habitats to live in.

There is a sort of paradox. To do any of this in any scale would be much more likely with automation. And automation, like robots being able to build robots and then factories and anything else is coming especially with the recent advances in AI and computer vision etc. And then such megaprojects won’t be unthinkeable any more. But then it would probably also be easier to build a mega space habitats mining the moon. Without automation, it might never be worth it to actually colonize there so it’s better to wait a few more decades.

There is Spacecraft_radiation_challenges.

I believe simply using enough water would be perfectly fine for shielding. The problem is using enough of it and the extra weight.

In Stowaway (2021) - IMDb they have a special room that is shielded using electromagnetism.

You’d probably need to grab ice balls rich in nitrogen ice from the kuiper belt and somehow hurl them on a curse to impact mars. And do that a lot. Or maybe build a railgun on Triton to shoot nitrogen bullets at mars

The wikipedia article mentions the idea of superconducting rings build around mars surface. They could also be used for energy transport. This is basically already possible with current technology.

Maybe it’s also possible to somehow extract energy from the solar wind but that is only speculation on my part.

Yeah The Expanse is awesome but they are mining rather big ice chunks. In the Starcarrier series they find a giant shipyard churning through protoplanetary disk. Which sounds kind of ideal for mining raw materials for e.g. space habitats. But I guess a low gravity moon or asteroid would work just as well.

You could probably just roll out big black tarp and connect to a vacuum. The black tarp would increase heating from sunlight and the vacuum would press the tarp to the ground and suck up the air. Then during the night you roll up and prepare for the next day.

Basically a rolling robot that rolls the tarp up, then continues rolling, then reverses and rolls the tarp back out.

But it would probably be better to just condense the water out of the air at night at a higher volume.

What if you had a giant vacuum nozzle at the front and shoot the ice particles out the back of your rocket? :D

Hmm that might actually not be so stupid. First there must be some gas pressure since water ice would sublimate otherwise, so that actually should help gather and guide particles.
Then if you would go slow enough the forces should be minimal and you could mine the water ice this way. Or extract solids and turn the water into big blocks of pykrete to reinforce the nozzle. Or use the blocks of ice to build a space habitat. Or accelerate waste out the back to accelerate again. You’d only need a reactor with enough power.