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BrickHorn

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Posts posted by BrickHorn

  1. On 2/17/2024 at 11:22 PM, atomheartbevo said:

    My political evolution, highly condensed 

    1980s: Can’t vote but love America and Reagan and Bush and hate the Russians and Dukakis and the Democrats suck

    1990s-2000: I can vote and the Clintons fucked us and oh thank God Gore lost.

    2003: Iraq?  Really?  Fuck this, I’m done for now, and will sit out/vote 3rd party while the GOP realigns a little

    2008: Sarah Palin?  Really?  Fuck this, I like John McCain on some things, but I will keep sitting out/voting 3rd party and hoping the GOP gets its shit together.

    2012: The world didn’t end with Obama winning.  Not a big fan of Romney.  Still staying away from the GOP

    2016, 2020, 2024: The GOP must lose. By a lot.  I’m never coming back.

    I ditched the GOP a bit sooner than you did, but am ashamed to admit that I voted for Dole in 96 and W in 2000. It was mostly momentum from growing up in a conservative / GOP loyalist family with an extreme pro-life bent. The Iraq War and the Republican-backed christofascist war on science pushed me firmly away from the right. Everything since only confirms that I made the correct choice, and that I should have made it much earlier. 

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  2. 1 hour ago, Hagbard Celine said:

    from the wiki:

    "The Sabatier reaction has been proposed as a key step in reducing the cost of human mission to Mars (Mars Direct, SpaceX Starship) through in situ resource utilization. Hydrogen is combined with CO2 from the atmosphere, with methane then stored as fuel and the water side product electrolyzed yielding oxygen to be liquefied and stored as oxidizer and hydrogen to be recycled back into the reactor. The original hydrogen could be transported from Earth or separated from Martian sources of water."

    Once you have the ability to manufacture CH4 in situ on mars, you can start moving asteroids from the asteroid belt to martian lagrangian orbits.  Once you have enough mass, you move everyone off the planet for 5 years.  They live in orbit while you crash thousands of small asteroids in to the poles, releasing all of the water and oxygen.   When the "dust clears" you should have something to work with.

    The terraforming part (flora) is easy.  We could start today.  It's just a matter of money.

    It's the fauna part that is going to require getting medievial, because of the lack of the magnetic field.

    So the idea is to bombard Mars with asteroids until it has sufficient gravity? Mars has 11% the mass of Earth. You’d have to crash 8 Marses worth of asteroids into it to create an Earth-sized rocky planet. What does that do to the planet? And is the result just a pile of loose rubble or do the collisions result in seismic and volcanic activity of the type necessary to create a stable crust? And we need to make sure there’s enough water in those asteroids to create oceans. Which would in any event be freshwater for the next few billion years or so.

    And none of that addresses the absence of a magnetic field (creating problems in both the short and long term) and the difference in sunlight intensity. 

    So… what’s easier: building thousands of rockets to propel asteroids into Mars, resulting — at some point in the far future — in at best a shitty imitation of Earth that won’t last long without the protection of a magnetosphere, or shutting down fossil fuel use here on Earth for a short period while we ramp up renewables?

    Terraforming is fun to think about as an engineering project, but that exercise reveals just how silly the Mars bugout plan is. 

  3. 8 hours ago, Surly Bevo said:

    Well and there is the whole “unless we find a planet that is a pretty close facsimile to earth, colonization would take some pretty significant terraforming engineering….and if we have that capability why not just use it here on the home planet” thing. 

    Yep, that issue is massive as well. It’s why the idea that we’ll escape climate change by colonizing Mars is so dumb. How do you terraform a planet with virtually no water, no magnetic field, less sunlight, and only a fraction of Earth’s gravity? 

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  4. On 2/16/2024 at 9:44 AM, Sgt Hulk said:

    Had a brief convo on this yesterday.  Thinking about the folks that engineered and built this are no longer alive is wild.

    Facts like this put into perspective the practicality of humans colonizing another habitable planet. In the time it took for all of its designers to die, Voyager traveled 0.0025 light years from Earth. The nearest potentially habitable planet is 4 light years away - or 1,600x as far as Voyager has gotten so far.

    Even allowing for continued acceleration, you’re still looking at a journey that would last thousands of years and hundreds of generations - just to get to a potentially viable planet. 

    Unless we discover some new physics that allows for near light speed travel, it will never make sense to send human beings on a planet colonizing mission. 

  5. 32 minutes ago, MrBig said:

    @theliamissan is going hard on Elon. He found his troll account and saw he used it to call into into Alex Jones with a masked voice.

     

    Oh shit. Knowledge Fight covered that episode and debated whether that was actually Elon or just an imitator. Alex sure as shit acted like it was Elon, falling all over himself to kiss “Adrian’s” ass. It was as weird as you’d expect. Jones is such a pathetic worm.

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  6. 23 minutes ago, Bullneck said:

    I posted pretty much the same thing a couple of pages back.  It seems to have flown over everyone's head.

    No, we understood it. We just don’t agree that collective punishment is justifiable.

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  7. 11 hours ago, AnTiM said:

    Sorry, maybe you can tell me exactly how long people of different religions have been murdering one another.  That was the point I wanted to make.

    Like “war is hell,” ”these two religions have always hated each other” is a thought-terminating cliche. It’s useless, both for understanding the reasons for a given conflict and for identifying solutions. 

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  8. 4 minutes ago, longhornmatt said:

    But at least for the time being, it’s war, not genocide.

    There are different kinds of war and not all combatants are on equal moral footing. Just saying “War is hell, shit happens” doesn’t address the issue. It’s a thought-terminating cliche at best.

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  9. 1 hour ago, Bullneck said:

    Pages and pages ago someone said 10/7 was like a Comanche raid.  It was things like Comanche raids that gave rise to sayings like, "The only good Indian is a dead Indian."  Were white settlers right or wrong for taking people's land?  We would have to say that's wrong, correct?

    I posted that. And you really missed the point.

    And yes, Europeans were fucking wrong to steal the natives’ land. Is that even a question?

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  10. 39 minutes ago, Bullneck said:

    He's going to beat Gaza to death, and even if they live they'll never forget how bad it was and they'll never do anything to repeat it.

    What a fucked up shitty perspective. 

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  11. 19 minutes ago, DixonHur said:

    Anyone with a brain who can see that Israel's response has not been proportional to the attacks on Oct. 7th.

    The point of my question was not whether it would be reasonable to criticize Israel’s actions in Gaza, but rather to understand what makes you believe many (much less all) are critical of those actions. 

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  12. 1 hour ago, AnTiM said:

    Amazing how long it takes for us to realize that all the talking in the world does absolutely nothing for solving a thousand year old problem.

    For fuck’s sake. It’s not a thousand year old problem. 

    Some of y'all need to stop watching Fox News and The 700 Club and start reading some history books. 

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    High

    3 hours ago, BBQ2Bayou said:

    I ordered some of these and they seem to get me as high as the edibles from dispensaries in legal states, if not more

    Weird how the same psychoactive molecule has the same effect on you even when you’re in different states.

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  13. 19 minutes ago, YGIFS said:

    I didn't check the calendar but that would be weird to have Super Bowl indulgence basically start right after you have to give up drinking and heavy meals. 

    Good news: you don’t actually have to do that shit.

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  14. 9 minutes ago, jimmyjazz said:

    The fact that the Texas grid is busting at the seams with demand and very little excess capacity would seem to argue against catering to this bullshit ponzi scheme that is essentially a global money laundering enterprise.  But, here we are.

    Shocking that the Free Market Cult can only find free market solutions. Which of course aren’t solutions, but instead merely compound the harms. 

    Crypto mines burning energy for useless shit = batteries. Ha. Fucking morons. 

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  15. 1 hour ago, MonkeyDoughnut said:

    Correct. Miners rely on cheap energy. If you've got excess that would go to waste, they'll take if off your hands.  It's the old story like Norway exporting all its excess hydro power in the form of aluminum since you can't store electricity (cheaply yet) so they power aluminum plants with it at near zero cost. 

    Except that aluminum is useful and Norway’s solution prevents waste rather than perpetuates it. 

     

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