One of the World’s Longest-Running Experiments Sends Up Sprouts
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
EDIT: I just realized that the LTEE and Beal’s experiment are being conducted at the same place, Michigan State University!
It reminds me of my own adventures making yogurt, each generation carried forward to the next batch. Being able to freeze the samples (for the ecoli, not the yogurt!) is really neat. At anytime they rewind the clock to test an ancestor.
Having recently read about https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ergodicity_economics, the parallels with the things Stephen Jay Gould argued about are fascinating.
I'm accustomed to thinking of Big Science as the LHCs and the Human Genome Project and the Human Brain Projects of the world, but there might be a category of experiments that are instances of Long-Term Science.
.. and how they are financed. Sometimes I wonder what humanity missed because experiments that only yield after more than one generation are rare.
It's terrifying because why would this have evolved?
Though to be viable as a backup for our species the colony would have to be able to survive, as well as be genetically viable, completely solo. Such preparation might include a "seed" vault for both plants and life, as well as a Horizon Zero Dawn style repository of all human knowledge. BTW that would also be a great international education standard for children even without it's use in the Doomsday setting.
This is the way habitats ecosystems work anyway. A trivial example might be aquariums: the bigger the easier to maintain a healty equilibrium.
If you have a couple hundred really well examined people who all really wanted to be somewhere the odds are much better, and all the more so, that problems can be contained when identified.
On Mars the whole thing would just collapse and people suffocate once the parts shipments from Earth were disrupted for a substantial period.
Furthermore, some 500 healthy adults do not form a stable society. Being in a high risk environment will flare tempers, 500 is on the low side of genetic diversity, there are no children, there will be pregnancies...
Are there any instances in the history of the human race where that idea has worked? My impression is that it always fails due to corruption or incorrect evaluation metrics or some other fundamental flaw in the starry-eyed idea of separating "good" from "bad".
In theory, it's perfectly straightforward to write a flawless, unexploitable large program in C. In practice, we get hacked by plugging something into a Lightning port.
We should be shaming them for wasting money vs. spending those billions to force real change on Earth to fix the climate situation here which will come due long before any off world living will be anywhere close to reality.
That's a false dichotomy, and just as much of a fantasy utopia as the 'solve our problems by moving to Mars' crowd:
- Space exploration and technology is an investment, not a waste.
- Space technology is not in competition with climate fixes, it helps. The most obvious example is Earth observation satellites, which are monitoring vegetation, cloud cover, ocean height, atmospheric composition, natural gas flares, forest fires, volcanic emissions, etc. right now. More long-term, reducing launch costs (like SpaceX is attempting with Starship) would increase the viability of solutions like space-based solar (24/7 sunlight, no atmosphere or cloud attenuation, no limit on surface area, no competition with agriculture/housing/etc., much less material/structure thanks to micro-gravity, etc.)
- Meanwhile there are billions being wasted on vanity projects (superyachts, palaces, etc.), and on actively harmful activities (the US war budget comes to mind), which are far more suitable targets than space tech.
- Online comment threads aren't going to change the spending habits of billionaires. Sure, if someone's making bullshit claims online (like 'moving to Mars will avoid climate change' or 'we should fix the climate before spending money on space') then calling them out can be good (hello!); combatting misinformation can sway the public discourse, even if just a little bit. On the other hand, armchair philosophising between like-minded individuals achieves absolutely nothing.
Finally, it's probably worth saying w.r.t. 'long before any off world living will be anywhere close to reality': off world living will never become reality if we (as a species) don't bother trying. Self-sustaining colonies on Mars, the Moon, etc. will probably take centuries, but only if we keep taking baby steps in that direction today. Before Falcon 9, the industry was pretty content to milk a few cash-cow rockets for inflated government contracts. Now re-usability is becoming expected (e.g. ULA's hand-waving platitudes about one day catching Vulcan's engines). Starship is a huge gamble, but I'm happy someone is trying it. The Human Landing System award from NASA is both encouraging (an experienced third-party doesn't think the gamble's odds are too bad), hilarious (the lunar gateway station would be dwarfed by its "landing module"), and hopefully a face-saving way for NASA to loosen its ties to SLS/Orion/etc. (forcing the "old guard" to up their game).
We should absolutely call out these particular billionaires for their terrible labour practices, tax dodging, market manipulation tweets, monopolising, etc. We should also call out billionaires in general for not doing enough to help the climate emergency. We should also call out governments for allowing these tax-dodgers to wield such economic power in the first place. We should also call out governments for their lacklustre climate efforts. And so on. Yet criticising space investment is a nonsense strawman.
On top of that, Antarctica has a breathable atmosphere, and water. Mars does not have a breathable atmosphere, and if it has water, it does not have water in an easily accessible form. Mars also has 2.5x the radiation one would experience orbiting the Earth, or approximately 35x the radiation one would generally experience on Earth.
We would literally have to destroy Earth before Mars becomes a more viable option for continued human existence.
Note also, that destroying just the thin tender habitable layer of Earth would suffice.
I don't doubt human's ability. Which is why I fight those who don't seem to care about preserving earth. Who seem to overlap quite strongly woth those who believe that other planets may provide a viable alternative.
I don't doubt our ability to destroy earth, but I do doubt our ability to successfully live somewhere else.
* It seems that, as a species, we have deep issues rooted in our tribal upbringing. Reaching a global actionable consensus seems as hard (if not harder) as colonizing another planet. The internet only catalyzes the "us vs they" thinking people struggle to get rid of. In one of its many incarnations, it's a nurture of horribly mistaken worldviews — and here I imply climate change denialism, in context. But also flat earth, etc.
* Viewed independently from antropogenic climate change catastrophy -- living on another planet would be extraordinary achievement, would you disagree? Launching a "toy" helicopter is kinda cool, but... living? For some of our greatest ancestors, the coolest achievement has been building millenia-lasting megastructures. Our generations are building fusion testbeds, orbital telescopes & commsat constellations; why wouldn't, say, a giant Earth-shaped globe monument on Mars be great? Perhaps not a globe, yea... but a Statue Of Liberty? Dao temple maybe? A hammer-and-sickle impact crater giga-egraving? Whatever.
* Both viewed together, rationally, Mars colonization is an option to escape extinction on Earth. Not a priority, sure; more like, a backup-of-backup-of-backup plan -- for when all else failed (see point 1). It's not like we can do it soon, either; advance preparations and long practice needed. I won't express any judgement of viability. I do see, however, how ambition and inter-tribe competition can drive this plan to a ready state (see point 2) -- sooner than fossil fuel combustion stops across the world.
All of the following are easier to accomplish than colonizing Mars: solving global warming, colonizing the ocean floor, colonizing the Moon. Indeed, the technologies we would need to terraform or colonize Mars to a sufficient level to be an escape hatch would necessarily involve solving all of those first.
But ask me again in a couple decades.
That being said, in my opinion, we should definitely pay more attention to saving this planet rather than finding new ones and doing the same thing all over again.
That's what I meant when I said "I'm all for space exploration".
> it's also about sacrifice in order to push the envelope and to rekindle The drive for exploration and discovery which made Western civilization great.
That "I'm all for space exploration" also covers this point as well. I'm not against space exploration and habitation. What I'm saying is we should definitely pay more attention to this planet because it is still possible to save this planet. Mars has so many obstacles that as one other comment said, Antarctic is more habitable than Mars. What I'm against is people who say "I'm off to Mars the first time tickets get available" to avoid current Earth problems (may it be their personal lives or the whole system). Expecting different things in context of these problems is just naive at best as these are human thinking problems which cannot be solved with reaching different planet i.e moving the goalpost.
Your first comment came off like that. If my interpretation was wrong then I'm sorry.
If you had to terraform a planet, which one would you choose?
Option 1: a bombed-out Earth with runaway global warming, acidic oceans, the end result of mass extinctions where there's dramatically less species diversity and some planet-wide ecologies have utterly collapsed.
Option 2: Mars.
I would at least hope the answer is obvious. No matter how much we trash Earth, it's still vastly more habitable than Mars or any other planet or moon in this solar system. The human species might not survive what we do to it, but parking a small repository of humans in orbit or on the Moon that would be capable of repopulation is still easily the winning species-survival strategy over terraforming Mars. (Though I suspect it's probably even better to keep that repository someplace on Earth.)
Reassuring as you say.
https://pollinators.ie/wildflowers-to-plant-or-not-to-plant/
Check out the Death Valley super blooms, they are amazing. Vast areas of the desert will just spring to life, polinate and spread seeds for the next generation, many/most of which will not grow for years.
https://gimletmedia.com/shows/science-vs/emhxgkd/a-seedy-lat...
1. https://www.regjeringen.no/en/topics/food-fisheries-and-agri...
Clickbait Headline
informative intro
Real Article Begins: Once upon a time…
Please just tell me the information, I’m not here to read a story
Text summarization is already pretty good for the real article issue you mentioned. I wonder if the same process could be applied in reverse to identify low quality headlines too.
But maybe it's a generational thing and stories are what more people expect now. I bet NYT knows its audience better than I do.
Kids these days. Bah.
To be more cynical, this is because it’s behind a paywall. They want to entice you with a little morsel of information, get you hooked into a story, then cut you off at the paywall.
If they gave away all the info in the first few lines, less people would want to keep reading
And there was that story just recently about bacteria found in the deep mantle, dormant for a couple million (?) years, that grew when cultured.
Amazing how patiently life can wait for the moment to be revived again, with no promise or knowledge of when the day may come.
If you're ever in East Lansing it's worth visiting Beal garden which is next to the campus library. It's so picturesque that students have their weddings there.