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Comment by Alupis | Hacker News Reader

Listening to the live stream yesterday evening - they performed a significant amount of troubleshooting for the toilet. This required consulting with a full team of experts, including a "Toilet Lead". It seems it wasn't "flushing" waste into the collection bag or something similar - but they were eventually able to get it working.

I found the language NASA and the astronauts used to communicate absolutely hilarious - "Yes, we're excited and eager to begin immediate fluid disposal!"

Glad they got it working - best of luck to Atemis II mission!

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> "Yes, we're excited and eager to begin immediate fluid disposal!"

corporate talk on a public science mission :/

This doesn't register as corpo talk to me, more tongue-in-cheek nerdy mission control talk. See also "rapid unscheduled disassembly".

I hope they remember to cut the mics during the fluid disposal event

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ruCsYGL3QlY

Apparently the way they got it working was to power cycle the toilet.

It needed more than a flush.

/ducks

Maybe it was doing updates... /s

I love this. No matter what we do and how far we push the limits of humanity, we still have to shit.

The second law of thermodynamics dictates that everything poops.

Anything alive that is using energy and doing work and transforming matter must poop in some form or another.

We don’t know what form life out there might take, but we know it poops.

Even post biological machine life would poop in the form of industrial waste, waste heat, etc.

Even near perfect recycling can only be near perfect, not perfect, due to the second law, which means a super efficient organism or closed cycle ecosystem or industry will still poop. Just not much. It will also emit a ton of waste heat, which I guess is kind of poop since mass and energy are ultimately equivalent.

If there’s weird life out there made of plasma or something, it poops. Probably charged particles or something.

The monolith in 2001? It poops. Somehow.

can't you have life that dies before it poops?

"death before dishonor" xD

Whatever eats that thing has to deal with the waste that it stores.

Wonderful defense mechanism.

In that case the corpse is the poop. There are insects whose adult stages do this.

I had the same realization lately. Shouldn't it be said more specifically that anything that consumes matter to turn it into energy (as all living things on Earth) must poop? If we make the distinction between mass and energy of course.

No I think that "everything poops" is absolutely perfect. Poop is entropy, and everything turns into entropy eventually.

It might not be traditional poop as we know it, but the point is, no matter how far we go one day, no matter what/who we meet out there, no matter how much we advance, there will always be waste to manage.

Waste might be literal poop, waste heat, spent uranium, used oil, slag from a smelter or whatever. We might be perfect recyclers one day, and we might repurpose almost everything, but there will always be a little bit of "poop" left over to manage.

Years ago I read about an actual scientific proposal to look for UFOs. A few people in the UFO scene with scientific backgrounds were trying to crowdfund it.

The idea was to place very sensitive wide angle infrared telescopes at remote locations that are UFO sighting hot spots. Because as long as physics is universal anything flying around, especially like supposed alien craft, must be using a lot of power and rejecting tons of waste heat. They’d have to light up very bright in IR and physics says there’s nothing you can do about it (unless you imagine wild ideas like dumping it into another multiverse slice).

You’d get lots of planes but you could cross reference against public data to remove most of those. And obviously something doing maneuvers that are aerodynamically impossible or would turn a human into strawberry jam is not a plane.

I thought it was a good idea but I don’t think it got funded. It was years ago so the tech might have been very expensive. I bet it would be cheaper now. IMO it would be a good low cost but high payoff experiment.

... and we seem to be unable to make something that works without "turning it off and turning it on again" :-)

I especially liked the part where mission control referred to using the toilet as "donation"

Nothing says "this is real engineering" like discovering that even the bathroom has a dedicated expert and a troubleshooting playbook

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