For those who might wonder (like I did), this article was published June 6, 1999.
58 karma · joined October 13, 2014
Longer term habitation will involve Martian agriculture. Microbes have already been developed to transform Martian soil into an arable form.
Back to the radiation question, after some quick research it's clear that as long as the living quarters are shielded (as above), a few hours of exposure a day are very low risk. The average dose rate at the Martian surface is well under 220 micrograys per day, and the levels only very rarely exceed that value. If one were out on the surface for five hours a day, the yearly dose would be less than that allowed for radiation workers in the USA. That level is considered negligible for increased cancers and other health problems.
Given that survival is assured, what's there is a new world, virtually unlimited resources, and unlimited potential.
Spaceflight oriented radiation shielding will also improve over time.
On Mars, radiation won't be much of a concern at all, since all living quarters will be underground, either under piled regolith, or deeper underground.
Humans on Mars will live in radiation shielded environments, and people have already endured longer space radiation exposure than received during the trip. At least the astronaut's sleeping habitat will be heavily radiation shielded on board the spacecraft.
Nuclear interplanetary craft will also shorten trip times appreciably within a decade or so.
See my other reply for more details...
Humans have survived in orbit, exposed to full-strength cosmic rays, for much longer than for the trip to Mars. Improved shielding will become practical as nuclear powered spacecraft come into their heyday, which will be sooner than you think. I believe that within ten years, nuclear transporters will be receiving Starships for docking, then making the trip to Mars substantially faster than using Hohmann type orbits.
Once on Mars, life will be mostly underground due to the high background radiation. Most surface activity will be via teleoperated robots, though surface vehicles should have enough shielding to be safe. Short excursions in suits should be fine too, subject to a yearly radiation dose limit.
Life underground can be as luxurious as effectively unlimited energy and resources can provide. Very large underground habitats can eventually be excavated, perhaps with the assistance of nuclear explosions. Large lava caves are also known to exist, and may provide sites for early settlements. Regardless, radiation exposure will absolutely NOT be an issue.
Martian gravity, while fun, may pose physiological issues. It may be necessary to construct large centrifuges providing some higher effective gravity level for some portion of Martian's days. Perhaps sleeping in those conditions will be sufficient, more research is needed for sure. I do think a large orbital hotel with simulated gravity would be a great SpaceX project, both for space tourism and research. It's a shame NASA has dropped the ball on simulated gravity for decades...
At any rate, the future is incredibly bright, and the spirit of human exploration will live on! I'm excited for the first Starship orbital flight in a few minutes!!!
You probably shouldn't cut off your nose to spite your face.
At any rate, here's a link with both natural and enhanced color: https://mastcamz.asu.edu/galleries/sol-1516-mastcam-z-360-pa...
https://nypost.com/2026/08/16/science/super-el-nino-odds-for...
(B) Mojo supports multiple GPU types, including AMD, Apple, and whatever may come along. That's one of its major selling points over CUDA. It's also targeted at other novel hardware accelerators etc.
Mojo is a fully ahead-of-time (AOT) compiled systems language. Julia is much more dynamic, and its AOT compilation story is still quite weak. Mojo also has explicit memory management, unlike Julia and its real time unfriendly garbage collector.
Mojo also has the concept of ownership, similar to Rust, while Julia does not.
Mojo is being pitched as an efficient, general purpose, Pythonic systems language which can target a variety of hardware types. That seems like a good target to me, I hope it's successful!
One thing to keep an eye on is whether or not a Windows port emerges after it's open sourced...
Look at the Asahi Linux effort, for instance...
As they say, there's no accounting for taste...
I've driven many "real sports cars", and I'm not not just "posting numbers from the Tesla spec sheets", my Model Y is my daily driver.
Ironically, you're the one "projecting".
If I switched to the same tires as the Performance version, that would increase to .95 G. That is better than many legacy sports cars.
Those who love engine noise are the modern equivalent of those who, shortly after cars became mass-market, wanted them to include buggy whips. ;-)
We've had "truly random" numbers for a long time, starting with those based on radioactive decay.
Current hardware RNGs already take advantage of provably random physical processes. Intel's RDRAND implementation is one good example. Yes, it is probably not a "perfect" source of randomness, though one can always take other sources of entropy and mix further. Doing so will always move the output towards a more random state.
I find it unlikely in the extreme that some future tech will be able to "predict" values from such a random stream (like you could with a PRNG given the seed). In other words, your cyphertext based on a RDRAND+ generated one time pad is safe for eternity, unless the pad is compromised.
Nvidia has also supported Linux well in general, so let's hope there's an attractive Linux option soon!
Personally I'd be just as happy with a small form factor desktop with the same hardware.
The article is delusional. In particular, these claims:
- The Iran war is over.
- Iran has "won" the war.
- The US has lost influence with Asian allies.
- The petrodollar is over.
- The US economy is weaker due to billionaires and the stock market.
It's especially laughable given the recent diplomacy with China.
I also predict a secular government is running Iran before the fall...
Rust is clearly well positioned for deeply embedded work, and has actual C/C++ level performance. Given AI coding assistance, Rust is looking more and more approachable...and of course faster processors and compiler improvements will solve the compilation speed issue over time.
All that said, there's nothing wrong with a fast, safe language with ML syntax!
(One dark horse in all this is Mojo, which may provide Rust level safety with a more ergonomic language, and a much faster compiler...)
AI isn't like that. One problem is that it's rather generally misunderstood at this point. "AI" is not "intelligence". It's intelligence-adjacent, and something like LLMs is part of our psyche...the subconscious facility that allows us to form sentences without really thinking about it.
At any rate, I have to agree with most of the points the blog author brings up.
I disagree with KSR's main points. Perchlorates are solvable, the effects of Martian gravity are not known (and are solvable if there is a problem), and finally radiation is a non-issue for those living in the only sane place on Mars, underground.
Whether or not Mars is a target in the near term, we need to proceed with our current plan of establishing a permanent base on the Moon. The only way to improve on Earth's resource limitations is to exploit the virtually unlimited riches available beyond her atmosphere, and the Moon is the first step. It's also a great place for heavy industry, not to mention astronomy!
What LLMs are NOT is intelligent in the same way as a human, which is to say they are not "AGI". They may be loosely AGI-equivalent for certain tasks, software development being the poster child. LLMs have no equivalent of "judgement", and they lie ("hallucinate") with impunity if they don't know the answer. Even with coding, they'll often do the wrong thing, such as writing tests that don't test anything.
It seems likely that LLMs will be one component of a truly conscious AI (AGI+), in the same way our subconscious facility to form sentences is part of our intelligence. We'll see how quickly the other pieces arrive, if ever.
"Cosmic inflation is believed to have occurred in an incredibly brief, rapid, and exponential expansion phase lasting from approximately 10^-37 to 10^-32 seconds after the Big Bang. During this minute interval, the universe expanded by a factor of at least 10^26, and potentially as much as 10^50."
Quite a theory, cosmic inflation...
A good friend worked on the well regarded Telesoft compiler…