[HN Gopher] All 12 moonwalkers had "lunar hay fever" from dust s...
___________________________________________________________________
All 12 moonwalkers had "lunar hay fever" from dust smelling like
gunpowder (2018)
Author : cybermango
Score : 436 points
Date : 2026-04-17 18:17 UTC (1 days ago)
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(TXT) w3m dump (www.esa.int)
| m463 wrote:
| we have similar problems with volcanic ash on earth
| jMyles wrote:
| I walked up to the flows on Fagradalsfjall when it was erupting
| a couple of years ago, and I found the cinereous, sulfurous air
| to be very medicinal and clearing. I'm not sure it'd have good
| for me for more than a few hours, but as it was, it was great.
| I occasionally wish I were able to just have a chamber with
| that air in it.
| kzrdude wrote:
| There are some saunas on Iceland that expose you to earth
| gasses, might be exactly the kind of chamber you are after.
| I've visited one, and it was unfortunately cold for a sauna
| because that's naturally varying too.
| tim-tday wrote:
| Exactly, but the lack of a water cycle on the moon means that
| all the dust is sharp and always will be.
|
| It will irritate human mucus membranes whenever it comes in
| contact. Irritate lungs, eyes, skin.
|
| It degrades rubber seals.
| jjmarr wrote:
| Have any of them developed cancer from the space asbestos yet?
| loloquwowndueo wrote:
| Only 4 are still alive, all in their 90s so that'd be a long
| time - even if some do have cancer at this stage it's not
| likely to affect life expectancy I guess.
| AngryData wrote:
| We also have to remember that those astronauts were some of
| the most physically fit individuals in a nation of hundreds
| of millions which may skew the expected medical outcomes.
| Especially if we assume they always had the best healthcare
| available, if from nothing else than doctors asking similiar
| qiestions about the effects of space travel.
| wat10000 wrote:
| The exposure was brief, too. Wikipedia says mesothelioma
| has been known to develop from exposures of "only" 1 month.
| That's a scary short time if it's in your home or
| workplace, but comfortably longer than an Apollo mission.
| Could be an issue for a future base, though.
| bdamm wrote:
| It definitely puts a damper on my personal enthusiasm for
| visiting the moon hotel, or even encouraging researchers
| to live there.
| altmanaltman wrote:
| I mean Neil Armstrong literally smoked and did not
| "believe" in excercise so they were absolutely not the most
| physically fittest people. They were just freaks in terms
| of enduring a lot of stress tests. Physical endurance is
| just one aspect they train for. Other aspects were much
| more valued like them being military flight pilots/smart
| enough to understand the systems/mentally strong enough to
| not break down etc. You were not selecting for absolute raw
| fitness for the apollo missions.
| AngryData wrote:
| They didn't select for pure physical fitness but they
| were already selected for fitness as a pilot and then
| again when they were selected from the pilots to train as
| an astonaut. Its not like they just picked arbitrarily
| from the potential pool of candidates and gambled on
| getting better than average.
| altmanaltman wrote:
| Again, they don't select for pure fitness when it comes
| to pilots as well. The fact is that you didn't need to be
| super fit to handle those crafts. Fitness today is much
| more prioritized because astronauts spend exponentially
| longer time in space now than they did then and they have
| to work out in space to keep their bodies from getting
| used to being in space and zero gravity. They now spends
| months in space, previously max they would go for is like
| a week.
|
| So no, pilots or astronauts are not "some of the most
| physically fittest people in America". They were
| exceptional human beings but lets be realistic.
| spauldo wrote:
| Everybody smoked back then. Besides, until you get older
| your health is much more affected by your lifestyle than
| whether or not you smoke.
| altmanaltman wrote:
| Armstrong literally did not believe in physical excercise
| though. He thought the human heart had a fixed number of
| beats and didn't want to "waste" them. Look it up. They
| guys really did not care about physical fitness back
| then.
| spauldo wrote:
| Whether he believed in it or not, he passed rigorous
| physical tests for the Navy and NASA. They don't let just
| any slob be a fighter pilot, much less a test pilot or
| astronaut. If you don't have good cardiovascular fitness,
| you can't handle high G-forces or maintain good judgement
| while sleep deprived (those jets didn't fly themselves
| while the pilot napped like modern ones do).
|
| Maybe he was just naturally fit. Some people are. But he
| was undoubtedly fit.
| altmanaltman wrote:
| Look up those tests and see what they selected for, its
| not as much as raw physical fitness but rather how their
| bodies reacted to stress + a host of other pyschological
| factors + flight training. Yes, it is without a fact that
| they are no slobs but calling them the most fittest is
| also hyperbole and paints this image of hyper fit
| astronauts which wasn't true back then. They also didn't
| care much about long term effects of space travel on the
| body back then because missions were very short back
| then.
| ButlerianJihad wrote:
| It is important to point out that prominent physicians
| highly recommended cigarette smoking as a beneficial
| hobby for all Americans to partake in.
| themafia wrote:
| The military does not survey the population and then select
| the fittest. So, as a function, it cannot actually perform
| as you say.
|
| It's the same with F1. "We have the best drivers in the
| world!" You have the best drivers from the self-selection
| mechanism you impose on the sport. There are zero reasons
| to think these categories have good overlap.
| zamadatix wrote:
| They don't need to have sampled the entire population to
| have ended up with some of the most x individuals of the
| nation of y population size, they just need a large
| enough pool that the top end up among some of the best.
| tempaccount5050 wrote:
| That's just simply not true at all, I don't know where
| you're getting this idea. Literally every Olympic athlete
| was more fit that an any astronaut ever.
| spauldo wrote:
| Most astronauts were chosen from a decent sized pool of
| military pilots. Pilots are some of the most expensive
| assets the military has (moreso than the planes they fly)
| and they have to be physically fit. People wanting to
| become astronauts are subjected to rigorous physical
| testing.
|
| No, they're not Olympic athletes but they're considerably
| more fit than the average American.
| porphyra wrote:
| Even with actual asbestos, the risk goes up a lot with duration
| and intensity of exposure. Probably, the risks of getting
| cancer from a brief exposure is fairly low, and combined with
| the ridiculously small sample size of only 12 people to ever
| set foot on the moon, it's natural that none of them got "moon
| cancer". That said, with asbesto, it's still possible to get
| cancer even from brief exposures:
|
| > Although it is clear that the health risks from asbestos
| exposure increase with heavier exposure and longer exposure
| time, investigators have found asbestos-related diseases in
| individuals with only brief exposures. Generally, those who
| develop asbestos-related diseases show no signs of illness for
| a long time after exposure. It can take from 10 to 40 years or
| more for symptoms of an asbestos-related condition to appear.
| [1]
|
| [1] https://www.cancer.gov/about-cancer/causes-
| prevention/risk/s...
| HarHarVeryFunny wrote:
| Part of what makes asbestos (and also fiberglass) dangerous,
| isn't just the sharpness but also the long shape which means
| that macrophages can't engulf them.
|
| Moon dust is still problematic since although smaller it also
| can't be digested by macrophages and it's believed it would
| accumulate in the lungs, building up on repeated exposure.
| LorenPechtel wrote:
| Sounds to me like the threat would be silicosis.
| OsrsNeedsf2P wrote:
| They describe the dust on the moon as,
|
| > Fine like powder, but sharp like glass
|
| Sounds scary. But totally worth it!
| heckelson wrote:
| It's like Asbestos!
| krunck wrote:
| Mars has toxic levels of perchlorates in the regolith. That will
| require that humans never come in contact with the regolith or
| things that touched it. Those space suits that dock to vehicles
| seem like a necessity.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perchlorate#On_Mars
| snthpy wrote:
| TIL
| tim-tday wrote:
| Yeah, the ground on mars is literally toxic. Makes the concept
| of a Martian colony less appealing. Almost equal to a floating
| station on Venus. At least there you'd have the correct
| pressure. I seem to recall that the temperature on Venus at an
| altitude of one atmospheric pressure is manageable. It's just
| also acidic. Possibility easier to deal with than perchlorates.
| MengerSponge wrote:
| Mars is so bad, y'all.
| card_zero wrote:
| Since the perchlorate is generated by reaction with sunlight,
| it might be limited to a surface layer.
|
| Well, I guess that's what regolith means.
| kzrdude wrote:
| Regolith is all the loose stuff, everything that's not
| bedrock, even if it might be quite deep.
| vondur wrote:
| Rocket fuel for the taking?
| lukan wrote:
| Without massive terraforming all of Mars is very hostile.
|
| But having solid ground is still nice.
|
| A workable compromise is making big habitats in a dome, that
| gives sunlight, but shields from radiation. And the ground
| needs to be processed obviously.
|
| The advantage of Venus to me is is gravity.
| cosmic_cheese wrote:
| Gravity kind of cuts both ways. Closer to that of Earth is
| nearly guaranteed to be better for long term human health,
| but there's a possibility that martian gravity is "good
| enough" when supplemented with excercise while also making
| heavy operations and getting back out of the planet's
| gravity well easier.
| cduzz wrote:
| Venus seems like a wonderful place to live, relatively
| speaking.
|
| At the right altitude where you can "float" on the ocean,
| it's a pretty comfortable temperature and there's plenty of
| solar energy but you're shielded from the solar radiation.
| So, long term, your body will still work, assuming you can
| solve "the other problems."
|
| Of course, the down-side is that there's nothing to stand
| on and probably more importantly, there aren't many useful
| materials to work with besides tons of carbon, oxygen, and
| nitrogen. Not much hydrogen there, so not much water, which
| probably is the biggest problem. One of them, anyhow. Also,
| there's probably not a whole lot to do besides float (zoom,
| actually) around and slowly go stir crazy in your bubble.
|
| But relatively speaking, it's way nicer than living in a
| hole on mars where you'll slowly die from gravity sickness,
| or radiation poisoning, or whatever.
| jcranmer wrote:
| > Not much hydrogen there, so not much water, which
| probably is the biggest problem.
|
| Actually, the cloud layer at that level is mostly
| sulfuric acid, from which you can get your water. It also
| means you need to be in a hazmat suit when you walk
| outside, but that's still a step up from everywhere else,
| where you need a bulky pressure suit instead.
| operatingthetan wrote:
| If we terraform mars, isn't the dirt still toxic?
| lukan wrote:
| No, as terraforming means changing that.
|
| Whether it is really possible, is a different question,
| but after you have an atmosphere, you could have
| engineered microorganism processing the soil etc.
| operatingthetan wrote:
| In that sense then the term "terraforming" is on equal
| footing with alchemy.
| wolvoleo wrote:
| Doing something like that at planetary scale is science
| fiction anyway even if we did have the tech to do it.
| naravara wrote:
| If you can kick off self-sustaining biological processes
| it'll happen on its own eventually, but you'd just be
| looking at generational time scales to do it.
|
| Of course you'll probably have lots of side-effects.
| jodrellblank wrote:
| How do we do that? I imagine dumping Earth life on Mars
| it will just die. What if we buried a terrarium at the
| Martian pole with a radio isotope and solar heater and
| controls so that it could try growing bacteria inside and
| controlled-leaking some outside into a nearby warm
| (liquid water) surroundings, and that could get many
| chances to evolve strains that could survive further away
| - analogous to ocean life around deep hydrothermal vents.
|
| Anyone know of speculative plans of this sort?
| generic92034 wrote:
| I would not be so pessimistic. Look what the
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyanobacteria have done for
| our atmosphere.
| baq wrote:
| Talking to computers and expecting computers to answer
| coherent English was science fiction 4 years ago. Don't
| lose faith
| TonyAlicea10 wrote:
| I wouldn't go that far. It was pretty clear a long time
| ago that humans spending so much time filling the
| internet with content was going to eventually enable
| neural networks to pretend to communicate.
|
| The advancements required to arrive at modern LLMs and
| the tech needed to get humans safely to Mars or live
| safely on the Moon are orders of magnitude in difference.
|
| Keeping humans alive is _hard_.
| datsci_est_2015 wrote:
| Emergent complexity doesn't really apply to material
| sciences and organic chemistry in the same way it does
| for machine learning and digital systems.
| imtringued wrote:
| https://karpathy.github.io/2015/05/21/rnn-effectiveness/
| wolvoleo wrote:
| It's just that terraforming will require a lot of
| materials that will have to be brought over from Earth.
| And every tonne of materials to Mars requires many tonnes
| of fuel to launch from Earth.
|
| I don't think it is possible to ever transport enough to
| make this happen.
| wincy wrote:
| Maybe we'll turn all of Mars into paperclips with our
| efforts! Glorious paperclips. First Mars, then the
| universe!
| GuB-42 wrote:
| To put it into perspective, we are effectively
| terraforming Earth today, though maybe not in a good way.
|
| We have converted most of the land to agriculture and
| released maybe trillions of tons of greenhouse gas in the
| atmosphere, there are 8 billions of us working on it. And
| what did we do? Increased the global temperature 2
| degrees? Made the sea level rise a couple of meters?
|
| It may be bad for us, but compared to terraforming a
| planet like Mars, that's nothing, and we have the entire
| humanity industrial complex to do it while on mars, we
| need to build everything, starting from a hostile
| environment.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _In that sense then the term "terraforming" is on equal
| footing with alchemy_
|
| NASA has proposed using "synthetic biology to take
| advantage of and improve upon natural perchlorate
| reducing bacteria. These terrestrial microbes are not
| directly suitable for off-world use, but their key genes
| pcrAB and cld...catalyze the reduction of perchlorates to
| chloride and oxygen" [1].
|
| [1] https://www.nasa.gov/general/detoxifying-mars/
| marcosdumay wrote:
| Just exposing the Martian soil to water for some time is
| enough to destroy the perchlorates.
|
| (Turns out there's a region in Antarctic with them too,
| so we can always test things there.)
| tarr11 wrote:
| I wonder if it will turn out to be easier to adapt
| lifeforms to the planets than to try to adapt the planets
| to the lifeforms.
| lukan wrote:
| Both probably, but you cannot really adapt life to no
| water and hard radiation. (at most sustain it in stasis,
| but not growing)
| SoftTalker wrote:
| Neither is realistic; living on the Moon or Mars or any
| other planet is a fantasy.
| SecretDreams wrote:
| This is the thinking of someone on the timescales of a
| single life. If humanity persists another 1000 years on
| our current trajectory (US/world politics not
| withstanding), I think nothing is really a fantasy.
| Rather, it's all possible but maybe just not in our own
| lifetimes. But it is also terribly difficult for us to
| plan for tomorrow, let alone for a future where our
| descendants are at the helm.
| fellowmartian wrote:
| I agree, it's just a failure of imagination. Some folks
| correctly foresee not being able to continue what we're
| doing now in the exact same way in some new context and
| conclude everything is impossible. Life isn't this
| fickle, it's adapted before and will adapt again. This is
| why great science fiction is so valuable, as some people
| are better at imagining new ways of being more than
| others, and can show the rest of us the possibilities.
| jiggawatts wrote:
| The counterargument is a simple _opportunity cost_
| calculation:
|
| There will never, ever, _ever_ [1] be a scenario where if
| you weighed up the options of "expand into some less
| habitable area of the Earth" versus "expand to Mars", the
| latter is the better option either 1) financially, or b)
| quality of life.
|
| Nobody[2] ever picks the dramatically more expensive and
| dramatically worse option!
|
| Also, people that are _desperate enough_ to even consider
| living in the least desirable -- but still just barely
| habitable -- parts of planet Earth are essentially by
| definition _too poor to afford interplanetary travel_.
|
| And no, no amount future sci-fi technology can possibly
| overcome the simple energy costs of this! If someone can
| afford the hugely energy intensive interplanetary travel,
| _and_ the up-front investment required to survive
| incredibly harsh environments, then by definition they
| could more productively invest that here on Earth! It 's
| the cheaper and better option in every possible way, and
| _always will be_.
|
| This will remain true even if it's standing room only on
| the entire planetary surface -- it'll be cheaper to build
| levels upwards while digging downwards.
|
| Maybe our atmosphere will become _horrifically_ polluted?
| Sure, okay, air filters are _faaar_ cheaper than a full
| vacuum-capable space suit!
|
| Etc, etc, etc...
|
| [1] Okay, fine, maybe in a million years. Whatever ends
| up preferring Mars at that point will no longer be
| "human" by any sane classification.
|
| [2] For some values of nobody. There are _morons_ that
| buy overpriced branded handbags made of literal trash. I
| doubt idiots like that will make for a successful, self-
| sustaining colony.
| ryandrake wrote:
| I wish this kind of economic and biologic sanity was more
| common in discussions of colonizing outer space. We've
| watched too much Star Trek.
|
| Building a city in Antarctica will be economically viable
| long before building a city on Mars is.
| SecretDreams wrote:
| Most of modern civilization has been built over the last
| century. 1000 years is a very long time brotha. We only
| got into space 60-70 years ago.
|
| And, rarely, have economic considerations been the only
| driver for those great societal leaps.
| tclancy wrote:
| Well, of course _you_ would say that.
| AlecSchueler wrote:
| > If humanity persists another 1000 years on our current
| trajectory
|
| It's unlikely that we can persist in our current
| trajectory for another 100 years without catastrophic
| climate events puttung a stop to all of these endeavours.
| nradov wrote:
| Which dome construction material would be transparent to
| sunlight but block ionizing radiation?
| LorenPechtel wrote:
| 1) Why do you need sunlight?
|
| 2) If you have a source of hydrogen: water. Bonus as you
| don't have to make the dome hold pressure. A layer of
| water of the right depth will generate the force needed,
| the structure only needs to keep itself level. The only
| pressure holding is outside that, enough to keep the
| water from boiling. And, well, it's water--if it's hit by
| a rock that isn't too big you'll just have hole in the
| top layer, easily fixed. The same general idea would work
| on the Moon but the water is far from transparent if you
| pile up enough of it and you need a lot of hydrogen.
| lukan wrote:
| Well, I did wrote "gives sunlight" and that is a valid
| reply to it. But ... I would need sunlight actually. That
| seems somewhat possible with light tubes, but the much
| nicer solution, a transparent dome to still see mars
| clouds at day and the stars at night, is indeed not
| possible with current materials.
| OisinMoran wrote:
| You may enjoy this piece, Domes are over-rated:
|
| https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2019/11/28/domes-are-
| very...
| ozgung wrote:
| Sadly we underestimate the liveability of this Earth. Muskism
| makes people believe to the false premise that we can just
| buy a new planet, make it habitable with magical tech.
| Supported with pseudoscientific buzzwords like Terraforming
| etc. So we can recklessly consume this planet and jump to our
| new home when this one depletes. No need to care about our
| current home because it's a jumping board. Interesting as an
| old Sci-Fi fantasy so it attracts smart people, but if you
| really think about it's just lies and stupidity.
| tim333 wrote:
| Musk was also into the solar panels and EVs so it's not all
| trash the planet. Even if living on Mars or Venus isn't
| practical we might develop interesting tech trying.
| Gigachad wrote:
| Wasn't the solar panels thing just some financial fraud
| scheme?
| oskarkk wrote:
| Not exactly, it was a normal solar panel business started
| by Elon's cousins (SolarCity), but it wasn't going well,
| and in the end it was bought by Tesla for much bigger
| money than it was worth (let's say it was a bailout for
| Elon). Today Tesla solar panels are maybe 0.1%-1% of the
| business, they stopped giving any data on it years ago.
| grosswait wrote:
| If so, they are still going
| https://www.tesla.com/solarpanels so I guess not
| api wrote:
| One of the worst things Musk did is link himself in
| peoples' minds to things like space exploration and then
| linked these ideas to... other ideas I'm not going into on
| here.
|
| All these ideas about space pre-date him by many decades.
| LorenPechtel wrote:
| Another interesting one is Mercury. There is a latitude where
| the average ground temperature is comfortable for us. You
| simply need to dig in deep enough to put enough thermal mass
| above you to get that average rather than the swings. I don't
| know how deep that is on Mercury, on Earth 10 meters is
| enough. Real world, you'll want to go a bit farther towards
| the pole so your station is comfortable with the thermal load
| of whatever equipment you put in it.
| permo-w wrote:
| the swings?
| datsci_est_2015 wrote:
| Assuming they mean the ground acts as a heat sink, and
| sufficiently underground you're not subjected to the
| above average heat of the day and below average cold of
| the night.
| pitaj wrote:
| Isn't mercury tidally locked? Day is always day, night is
| always night.
| gnabgib wrote:
| It is not (it has a 88d year, and a 58.65d.. day[0]) , we
| just had a post about it - if you travel at 4kph you can
| chase the sun.. _A Mercury Rover Could Explore the Planet
| by Sticking to the Terminator_ (18 points, 1 week ago, 6
| comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47720941
|
| [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercury_(planet)
| yieldcrv wrote:
| floating colony on venus I heard was debunked, but that was
| also GPT 4.1 which was misaligned so I should seek a
| different source, from people, when I revisit this chain of
| thought
| ck2 wrote:
| there's a great PBS Space Time for that (of course)
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O5FqozA4IpA
| darknavi wrote:
| If this fact piques your interest, the book Delta-v by Daniel
| Suarez glances off this fact and uses it to justify exploring
| asteroid mining instead of a colony on Mars.
| LorenPechtel wrote:
| I'm not impressed with his science.
| bertylicious wrote:
| I'm not impressed with your comment.
| imglorp wrote:
| Or effective decontamination performed in the airlock. There
| was a recent demonstration of an electrostatic repulsion device
| reducing dust on suit fabric which might help with sticking.
| And an air shower like used for clean rooms does not seem too
| far out.
| nomel wrote:
| Is that required?
|
| Could the suit itself be used as a type of airlock, to leave
| outside things outside?
|
| For example, mounting yourself onto a wall, then the
| back/whatever of the suit opens to the inside, and you hop
| out? (yes, there would be some dust recovery required, but
| minimal in comparison)
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _mounting yourself onto a wall, then the back /whatever
| of the suit opens to the inside, and you hop out?_
|
| Isn't there a plan for the Artemis lunar rover to be
| configured this way? The outside of the suit never comes
| inside the rover.
| imglorp wrote:
| The challenge with the "suits stay outside" model is that
| you basically need some kind of airlock between the suit
| hatch and the ship hatch. You might imagine both hatches
| get contaminated when the suit is detached. Then when you
| dock, that whole between-hatch space needs to be
| decontaminated before you can open the two hatches, because
| the outside of the suit hatch brought that stuff into the
| airlock.
|
| Someone else linked to this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
| Space_Exploration_Vehicle#Spec...
|
| edit: in that context^ search for "SEV suitport design"
| find NASA has written some docs on the matter, eg https://n
| trs.nasa.gov/api/citations/20130013652/downloads/20...
| nomel wrote:
| It looks like that requires a panel to move out of the
| way. I was thinking more like "zipper" (probably more of
| a contiguous interface), so closer to zero volume when
| attaching, then it "unzips"/splits and pulls the back of
| the suit open, into the cabin. |
| | /\ | to | | | \/
|
| I don't see why an intermediate airlock would be
| required, except maybe for redundancy/safety reasons if
| the "unzip" process went wrong.
|
| Since the inside of the suit is already at pressure, you
| could just pop it open and step out.
|
| The near-zero volume of the coupling would make things
| much easier to clean/isolate.
| chromacity wrote:
| Calcium perchlorate is only slightly toxic. Not good for you,
| but living in an environment with background radiation levels
| 50x higher than on Earth may be your bigger worry...
|
| Still, I'm pretty sure we have plenty of people who wouldn't
| mind giving it a try.
| RetpolineDrama wrote:
| >but living in an environment with background radiation
| levels 50x higher than on Earth
|
| We can park a big honkin magnet at the mars-sun lagrange
| point and cut that down massively.
| amluto wrote:
| On the one hand, it's not particularly toxic as toxic things
| go. On the other hand, 0.6% is not a small concentration.
| mr_toad wrote:
| > That will require that humans never come in contact with the
| regolith or things that touched it.
|
| It's really only a concern if you ingest it.
| chmod775 wrote:
| Not a big deal then either. Just don't do it daily.
| LorenPechtel wrote:
| Personally, I suspect all anoxic environments will turn out to
| be unhealthy for humans. You'll have a bunch of reactive stuff
| about that on Earth would have been neutralized long ago.
| jancsika wrote:
| If we redefine our community to include tardigrades the outlook
| improves considerably.
|
| Example: a blog critiquing Mars colonization pointed out that
| humans cannot even live at the summit of Everest, _and_ there
| is no "non-native microbial life" there. Notice the caveat:
| "non-native?" Guess who else did:
|
| _Tardigrade in Hawaiian shirt, wearing pixelated sunglasses_
|
| Honestly, which achievement would be considered more
| impressive-- Neil Armstrong setting foot on the Moon, or me
| getting there first because I was stuck to the bottom of his
| boot?
|
| Well, guess who is now watching you navigate to the Wikipedia
| tardigrade article[1]:
|
| _Tardigrade lowers its pixelated glasses_
|
| Hell, in the five minutes that I've imagined them joining the
| team we've gone from
|
| "never come into contact with the regolith"
|
| to
|
| "if you happen to come into contact with the regolith,
| remember: stop, drop, and roll."[2]
|
| 1: Ok, a tardigrade was probably not on his boot for the first
| Moon walk. But suppose we gently placed some the surface of the
| Moon, and observed their reaction...
|
| _two tardigrades pointing at you navigating back to Wikipedia_
|
| 2: https://sciworthy.com/could-tardigrades-survive-on-mars/
| fulafel wrote:
| I'm not a Mars colonisation advocate, but sounds like exposure
| to that may be manageable:
|
| "Perchlorate is toxic to people only in the sense that it can
| disrupt the production of thyroid hormone, an important growth
| hormone needed by babies in the womb for normal development."
| (from https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/perchlorate-
| life-...)
|
| Lots of people have this condition without perchlorate after
| all and it's just simple meds to fix it.
| charlieyu1 wrote:
| Can we decompose the perchlorates for oxygen and energy?
| BFV wrote:
| That's such a weirdly specific detail but also kinda fascinating.
| Imagine going to the Moon and the first thing you notice is
| "huh... smells like gunpowder.
| skywhopper wrote:
| I just had a filling replaced at the dentist yesterday and when
| he was grinding away at it to shape it, I would get a terrible
| whiff of something like gunpowder. It was quite disturbing.
|
| But now I can just tell everyone my tooth is filled with moon
| dust.
| nottorp wrote:
| The weird part may be that everyone seems to know what
| gunpowder smells like...
| tcp_handshaker wrote:
| "The toxic side of the Moon" -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47768039
| ortusdux wrote:
| This is a big perk of the newer lunar rover design, wherein the
| suits stay outside the vehicle -
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Exploration_Vehicle#Spec...
|
| There has been some great research into laser or solar sintering
| of regolith, and one of my first questions was if the resulting
| material is safe for humans.
|
| https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-023-42008-1
| corysama wrote:
| I recall an article from a long time ago that basically said
| "astronauts report" the moon smells like spent gunpowder and
| outer space smell like... I think it was ozone.
|
| What they were actually reporting was the smell of the airlocks
| after they returned from their excursions. The moon has no
| atmosphere, so it has been accumulating dust from billions of
| years of asteroid impacts that have never come in contact with
| oxygen. Many of the chemicals in the dust are oxidative and so
| when it is exposed to air for the first time it rapidly
| _oxidizes_ just like gunpowder!
|
| And I think the outer space report was from space walks, and the
| explanation was that the first time the airlock itself was
| exposed to hard vacuum, the surfaces of the airlock would have a
| reaction that left a scent of ozone.
| Bender wrote:
| My UV sterilizing lights make my room smell like O3 _Ozone_ and
| that smells nothing like spent gun-powder to me. The only other
| time I have smelled the same thing is when there has been mass
| lightening events in the sky. Were they talking about actual
| black powder or nitrocellulose? I 've smelled black powder at
| the range when people bring out their antique rifles and that
| also does not smell like Ozone to me.
| coffeebeqn wrote:
| Photocopiers smell like ozone when they run if anyone's
| forgotten the smell
| Bender wrote:
| _Photocopiers smell like ozone when they run if anyone's
| forgotten the smell_
|
| Those are similar but sweeter. If I sterilize a room with
| UV it has a very distinct smell like nothing else aside
| from lightening and stun guns. I would UV the bathroom
| right now but then I have to vent the entire house and its
| 34F outside right now.
| echelon wrote:
| I don't think any of you should want to be smelling
| Ozone.
|
| Diatomic oxygen is already a highly reactive fuel that is
| killing us and giving us cancer every single day. The
| ozone species is even more oxidative.
|
| Oxygen is how we move about the energy gradient, but it's
| also killing us. Ozone is worse.
|
| "Air purifiers" with ionization are probably not worth
| the squeeze.
| Bender wrote:
| Absolutely. I vent the house after running UV lamps using
| a 4400 CFM air mover. _I leave the house and run
| errands._ I have 3 of these [1]
|
| They have a remote control that "arms" them and it starts
| beeping slow, the faster, then much faster then
| activates. It kills insects be destroying their lungs and
| entirely destroys mold, bacteria and even damages viral
| material. Hospitals run the same lamps in wings that they
| close down for sanitation. The entire area has to be 100%
| vented.
|
| [1] - https://www.amazon.com/AeraLight-Whole-Surface-UV-
| Sanitizer/...
| alfiedotwtf wrote:
| I worked for a germaphobe, and he put one of these ozone-
| injecting air purifiers in our tiny office. Every morning
| I would walk in and it felt like I was walking into a
| thunderstorm from the smell. No gunpowder, just thick
| ozone
| heavyset_go wrote:
| How does this affect surfaces like walls, finished wood
| furniture and floors, plastic, paint, etc?
|
| I imagine it will cause some material to off-gas
| aldehydes at the very least.
| vintermann wrote:
| I don't think off-gassing is a problem, ozone treatment
| is famously how they get rid of cigarette smell in used
| cars, furniture and whole apartments.
|
| But I would worry about the effect on e.g. plastic seals.
| There are a lot of plastics that become brittle with
| ozone exposure, let alone UV exposure.
| mjanx123 wrote:
| How long would it take for the ozone to recombine back,
| if you didn't vent the house?
| dmurray wrote:
| Aside from "killing us and giving us cancer every single
| day", isn't "diatomic oxygen" the stuff we breathe every
| single minute and need to survive?
|
| I'm not normally one to miss the sarcastic or satirical
| posts, but this one seems oddly earnest.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _isn 't "diatomic oxygen" the stuff we breathe every
| single minute and need to survive?_
|
| I think they're referring to oxidative stress [1] caused
| by cellular respiration.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxidative_stress
| heavyset_go wrote:
| Part of aging is the result of oxidation of DNA over time
| and as cells reproduce.
| Brian_K_White wrote:
| Yes and it wasn't sarcastic, both things (what you said
| and what they said) are simply true. I think their point
| was not to be alarmist like you should stop breathing,
| but simply that everyone knows the one thing and most
| people don't know the other thing, and it gives scale or
| context to the "you don't want extra ozone".
| echelon wrote:
| The other posters here are right. I just wanted to point
| out the odd beauty in the fact that the fuel that makes
| our biology possible is also one of the things that is
| killing us. If you get a chance, read up a little bit on
| redox reactions and oxidative stress and take a moment to
| appreciate that.
|
| We harness the energy of oxygen. It's the fuel that
| powers us. But it's also so reactive that it's constantly
| damaging our DNA and intracellular components. Over time
| it ages us, causes cancer (daily - our biology fights
| back!), and will ultimately be part of what wears us down
| and kills us.
|
| Look at oxygen as a very reactive and energy abundant
| fuel. And then consider its abundance in our atmosphere.
| And then how it powers human locomotion, human
| biochemistry. And how it creates free radicals and chain
| reactions that strip our DNA and mutate base pairs. And
| all the tens of thousands - no, countless more -
| interactions and reactions it's having all throughout our
| bodies at all times. And how our biology evolved
| compensation measures to keep those deleterious effects
| at bay for as long as possible - as long as necessary -
| to enable reproduction.
|
| Our biology is utterly awe-inspiring when you think about
| it. An incredible machine molded by our gravity well and
| abundantly available energy. Not just fighting against
| entropy, but actively sailing its turbulent energy
| gradients.
| KennyBlanken wrote:
| The permissible exposure limit for ozone is 0.1 PPM.
|
| The IDLH (Immediately Dangerous to Life and Health) level
| for ozone is five ppm.
|
| That's half of _chlorine_ which is 10 ppm.
|
| Most major brand air purifiers put out a very minimal
| amount; the ionization is beneficial because it makes the
| really tiny (and thus most hazardous) particles clump and
| fall/stick to surfaces faster.
|
| It's the offbrand units that generate lots of ozone to
| make people think they're "doing something", and
| commercial ozone generators for car/room deodorizing,
| that you have to be extremely careful with. Those need to
| be set up and then the room left for hours for the ozone
| to react with stuff, and then ventilated thoroughly.
| vintermann wrote:
| I don't trust most air purifier manufacturers. They
| totally would add a fancy-sounding feature which _sounds_
| good, even if it has negligible effect, or even negative
| effect. Case in point: they 're still pushing ultrasonic
| humidifiers.
|
| The tiniest particles aren't necessarily the most
| dangerous, so even if "clumping" worked as advertised, it
| wouldn't necessarily be good. Air filters are worst at
| filtering particles at about 0.3 microns, they're
| _better_ at filtering smaller ones (I understand it has
| something to do with brownian motion). I wouldn 't be at
| all surprised if a similar thing affected our biological
| "filters". Either way, if you have a filter, you don't
| need UV to clean air. Just push more air through it if
| you need cleaner air faster.
| colechristensen wrote:
| You might be smelling the oxidation of biologicals via
| ozone and UV might have the same chemical effect
| rrr_oh_man wrote:
| Side quest: Can you tell more about the UV sterilisation
| thing? Why do you do that? How often? Where? It seems
| like such a specific thing to do.
| Bender wrote:
| I primarily use them in the bathroom to kill off mold and
| bacteria about once every 3 months. I open up the water
| heater closet, drawers, etc... then I fire one of them
| up. I've used them in other places but the more they are
| used the more I have to vent the house.
| rrr_oh_man wrote:
| Has anything prompted you to do this? Have you been doing
| this for a long time? Have you noticed any changes (yes,
| I assume?!). Sorry for pelting you with questions, but
| this is so... interesting and I'm tempted to give it a
| shot.
| Bender wrote:
| Two of you are curious [1]
|
| [1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47812225
| genewitch wrote:
| Hi, i am not who you asked, but i feel like i've done
| enough research and have some warnings. UV-C light itself
| is antimicrobial, but only for surfaces that the light
| touches, and in the case of cloth it needs to penetrate a
| bit.
|
| There are at least two types of UV-C light bulbs, as well
| as literal ozone generators that use ceramic platen and a
| fan. The type of UV-C bulb that is most common on Amazon
| and Ali is ~254 nanometers, and __does not__ produce
| Ozone. It does leave a smell, but it 's more like an
| oldschool hospital antiseptic smell. probably the smell
| of the dead germs, yay.
|
| Now 185nm is actually the correct size to turn O2 around
| the bulb into O3 (and more oxygens too, i once read, i
| think, kinda like cracking hydrocarbons to make longer
| chains or something).
|
| UV-C _bulbs_ (not base, which is an edison base) that can
| sterilize a room in 5-15 minutes are about 15-20 CM tall,
| with four crystal tubes that are connected together
| standing up on the base. image here [0]
|
| you _must_ run a fan over them if you want your money 's
| worth. they get hot, the bases get hot, it makes the most
| sense in non-carpeted rooms to aim the crystal down and
| the base up, so that is real rough on them. that took me
| 2 bulbs to figure out.
|
| If you can find a reputable place to get the box with
| ceramic and a fan that lasts more than 5 minutes, let me
| know, because that's closer to what i want for bedrooms
| and stuff.
|
| The UV-C 185nm bulbs work _great_ to make a car stop
| stinking, too! completely removes cigarette smells, if
| the car hasn 't been smoked in for a while. run the A/C
| full blast and run the bulb for 15 minutes, open the
| windows for 5 minutes, roll em, sniff. Still smell?
| another 10 minutes, in the back seat, full A/C blasting.
| vent, sniff. Faint smell? replace the cabin air filter.
| Charge customer(?)
|
| and i'm going to respond to your followup question to the
| GP as well: Covid. Obviously. They were telling us it
| would live on groceries and deliveries and that, so i put
| all deliveries in my laundry room and dosed em with UV-C
| for a minute. CDC or whatever studies said that 10-60
| seconds was more than enough to kill sars-ncov-2.
|
| I only use it for freshening cars, rooms, bathrooms, etc
| now.
|
| WARNING: Do not be in the room with _any_ UV-C light for
| more than a few seconds. Do not look at the bulb for
| literally any more than necessary to ensure it is on and
| safe. they make safety goggles that wrap your entire eye
| sockets to protect from UV, too. if you get a 185nm bulb,
| either completely ventilate the room with fresh air, or
| leave it sealed for 60 minutes then open it up for a few
| minutes, all the ozone reacts and goes away or something.
|
| UV-C hurts your skin, yes, but it will make your eyeballs
| literally itch. so don't, don't don't look at it. they
| are _not_ blacklights.
|
| [0] https://m.media-
| amazon.com/images/I/71LgjON7J+L._AC_.jpg
| dreamcompiler wrote:
| > WARNING: Do not be in the room with any UV-C light for
| more than a few seconds.
|
| This advice does not necessarily apply to far UVC
| (200-235 nm), which appears to be much safer for human
| skin and corneas than UVC outside this specific band.
| More research is needed before calling it "safe" but far
| UVC is almost certainly less hazardous than the rest of
| the UVC band.
|
| Pay close attention to wavelength when purchasing UVC
| light sources.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Far-UVC
| genewitch wrote:
| 254 doesn't make ozone but; yes, i explained the two i
| have used and researched. i have not researched far-UVC.
| it's still germicidal, i still wouldn't want to be in the
| room with it. I had to check what wavelength "common" UV
| lasers are, and i'm guessing 261nm or so. If you aim that
| at your skin, it feels hot _real_ quick. Kinda feels, to
| me, like my entire life i 've been told that all UV is
| bad, but UV-A blockers are snake oil, etc.
|
| I'll keep my eye out for more research on far-uvc and the
| possibility of getting a bulb to test.
|
| oh by the way, i must have sent back 2 dozen "185nm" UVC
| bulbs from a dozen "manufacturers" because they didn't
| produce ozone, because they were fraudulent listings of
| 253.7nm bulbs - so this is why i was trying to steer
| people away from amazon and ali, as it's real easy to get
| the wrong type if you're looking for ozone. I've only
| managed to acquire 4 bulbs total in the last 5 years that
| produced ozone, and i burnt out two before someone said
| "put a fan on it, those bulbs are designed to be inside
| an air exchanger!"
| vintermann wrote:
| Yes, this is a common dilemma in air sterilization. Far
| UV-C isn't as nasty for skin, but it produces ozone, and
| ozone is nasty and really bad for your respiratory
| health.
| genewitch wrote:
| > induced ozone levels of less than 10 ppb, and much less
| in moderately or well-ventilated rooms compliant with US
| far-UVC dose recommendations, and very much less in rooms
| compliant with international far-UVC dose standards.
|
| https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38037431/
|
| i'd never heard of ozone in far-uvc nor really far-uvc.
| For what it's worth, i don't think it matters. the
| "warning" median dose for Ozone is 1ppm, 100 times more
| than far-UVC puts out. the "danger" is 5ppm. For ref,
| Chlorine is 10ppm.
|
| 253.7nm does not produce any (or less than 1ppb, which i
| consider the same thing for my body), and 185nm produces
| a lot. My warning is specifically to people who want to
| or need to use the lamps and also think that google isn't
| very good.
|
| supposition: we don't have the material or material
| science that is transparent enough between 185 and 254
| nanometers to induce more ozone levels than 185nm does.
| bertylicious wrote:
| What about shadows? The UV-C light can't reach
| everywhere, right? What about the back and undersides of
| product packaging you want to sterilise?
| genewitch wrote:
| i didn't touch the bottoms and the backs. like, put on
| socks, grasp box between socked feet, open box, remove
| the air bag packaging stuff, and if you want, UV it
| again. however, if you're using 185nm the ozone will get
| the "back" and inside. not the bottom, _maybe_ , but if
| you're concerned, flip it over. If you're concerned, make
| sure you read research papers on exposure time of
| pathogens to UV-C and/or Ozone to population destruction.
| as i mentioned, the papers i read before i bought the
| bulbs said 10-60 seconds _for covid_. originally there
| was a recommendation for up to 3 minutes, but some
| research group went and tested shorter and shorter
| lengths of time. so you 'd need to know the pathogen
| you're targeting and run it accordingly.
| KennyBlanken wrote:
| The only thing you're doing by sterilizing your house
| like that is making your immune system weaker.
|
| Humans are built to withstand a _constant_ assault on
| their immune systems. We couldn 't have survived if we
| didn't.
| VoidWarranty wrote:
| Careful. The venn diagram bubble depicting your statement
| overlaps heavily with the anti-vaccine bubble.
|
| Its a bit naieve to claim that cleaning one's home will
| result in an extinction of enough microbes so as to be
| threatening to our immune system.
| b65e8bee43c2ed0 wrote:
| Thank you! I wish I could upvote this twice, fellow
| redditor!
| mjmas wrote:
| See: Polio
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_polio
|
| > [...] Better hygiene meant that infants and young
| children had fewer opportunities to encounter and develop
| immunity to polio. Exposure to poliovirus was therefore
| delayed until late childhood or adult life, when it was
| more likely to take the paralytic form.[22]
| Bender wrote:
| Nothing strengthens an immune system like a weekly furry
| party or attending "tough mudders" events.
| manwe150 wrote:
| That's because the parent claim is known as the hygiene
| hypothesis and has been disproven by science, in common
| with anti vaccine claims. The immune system has not been
| shown to benefit from training, but has been shown to be
| damaged by illness.
| vixen99 wrote:
| Maybe you should qualify 'anti-vaccine claims'.
| Throughout the history of vaccines which have saved
| countless lives, some people have died or suffered severe
| reactions linked to a vaccine. This is hardly surprising
| given our metabolic heterogeneity.
|
| 'Anti-vaccine claims' suggests a taking of sides on that
| knee-jerk division into those who claim without evidence
| that almost or even all vaccines are deadly and on the
| other hand, those who are frankly contemptuous of any
| claim that a particular vaccine (evident particularly
| with the vaccines developed in response to the Covid
| outbreak) might be dangerous for certain people. Both
| extreme views have been on view recently and are
| indefensible.
|
| The major issue here is the difficult task of identifying
| people likely to react badly to any specific vaccine.
|
| Meanwhile 'Congress and Institute of Medicine Confirm
| Government Licensed and Recommended Vaccines Can Cause
| Injury and Death' and 'The 1986 National Childhood
| Vaccine Act was the first U.S. law to officially
| acknowledge that childhood vaccines licensed and
| recommended by the federal government, which are
| routinely mandated for school attendance by state
| governments, can and do injure and kill a minority of
| children.'
| imtringued wrote:
| I'm not sure how you would disprove the hygiene
| hypothesis, because it is a really weak claim and
| rejecting weak claims is really difficult.
|
| The anti vaccine position makes a very strong claim,
| namely that vaccines will cause complications that are
| strong enough to justify not vaccinating children, which
| is obviously false since a lot of the diseases that are
| vaccinated against have actually killed children and the
| vaccines have dropped child mortality significantly and
| the complications that are supposed to be avoided by
| refraining from vaccines tend to be both rare and non
| life threatening.
|
| You can't make the same argument with the hygiene
| hypothesis, because the claim is really weak. Nobody is
| saying that extreme hygiene will kill you. The argument
| is along the lines of "lack of exposure to environmental
| microbes, viruses or allergens may lead to an unprepared
| immune system that hasn't developed a wide variety of
| anti bodies or is more likely to develop allergies or
| autoimmune problems".
|
| I'm not sure how I would be able to argue against this
| claim since it only takes one microbe, virus or allergen
| to make it true.
|
| The context here isn't hand washing vs not hand washing,
| it's aggressive ozone + UV sterilisation vs regular
| hygiene.
|
| Not to mention that the hygiene hypothesis has an even
| weaker version still, namely the "old friends
| hypothesis". It seems pretty weird to equivocate this to
| being against vaccines.
| Bender wrote:
| Don't worry I know what I am doing.
| LoganDark wrote:
| Brushed DC motors (as in some drills, toothbrushes, etc.)
| emit ozone. Some light switches also create ozone-
| producing electrical arcing if you hold them perfectly
| between the on and off positions, or slowly cross the
| midpoint. (Less easy with the newer-style, less
| accessible rocker switches.)
| saltcured wrote:
| I also associate ozone with some electric motors, I think
| because they have brushes that arc during operation. Older
| power tools I encountered in the 1980s often did this, and
| you could see the blue arc if you looked into the vents at
| the right angle.
| aduty wrote:
| Brushless motors are popular now, but if you get the
| cheaper cordless tools they'll still have brushed motors.
| I have some Black & Decker 20V ones that do it. They tend
| to have less torque but I don't need Milwaukee or Makita
| tools just for diy around the house.
| mr_toad wrote:
| 'Ozone' is the smell of ionisation, 'gunpowder' the smell of
| oxidisation.
| corysama wrote:
| The ozone report was specifically about space walks. The
| gunpowder report was about moon walks.
|
| Presumably, moonwalks would also have some ozone like the
| space walk did. But, maybe the burning-moon-dust gunpowder
| smell was a lot stronger than the vacuumed-metal/paint ozone
| smell.
| lifeisstillgood wrote:
| Sorry for the tangent, but you sterilise a whole room with UV
| light? Is that efficient ? Do you do it after tidying /
| cleaning ? Is there a medical reason for the extra part? Is
| it just cool :-)
| Bender wrote:
| The house came with a bacteria that would normally be hard
| to get rid of. UV, bleach and peroxide took care of it. I
| just repeat the process to ensure there is no bacteria or
| mold. This seems to bother people in this thread which I
| find fascinating. A part of me wants to bring my black
| light to their dwelling.
| vl wrote:
| I have mold problem in one of the bathrooms. What would
| be your recommendation? Seal off bathroom and run UV,
| then vent? Or do I need to do entire house? I can also
| seal off bathroom and bedroom. Thanks!
| blub wrote:
| No, UV is unrelated to your issue.
|
| First you need to figure out if it's a surface
| infestation because of condensation or if it's a
| constructive thermal bridge. The latter can be solved by
| raising the surface (wall, ceiling, etc) temperature
| through insulation or more inefficiently special heaters
| designed for this purpose.
|
| In both cases, the contaminated material is removed down
| to the plaster or masonry. Wood, wallpaper and similar
| materials will likely be deeply contaminated and must be
| removed. For areas larger than 1 sq meter, it's better to
| get a specialized contractor which will use HEPA vacuum
| cleaners, special bags, etc to ensure that the mould
| spores don't spread in other rooms.
|
| For small areas the agents of choice are bleach or
| hydrogen peroxide, both available in products for home
| use.
| blub wrote:
| Was it from flooding or how did it get there? How did you
| detect it?
| adrian_b wrote:
| I assume that they talk about black powder.
|
| The dust that comes from meteorites contains up to 4
| fractions: silicates, which cannot be oxidized, metallic
| iron, which oxidizes, but it does not form volatile
| substances that can be smelled, hydrocarbons in the form of a
| tar or pitch, which can burn but it cannot be ignited easily,
| and finally a fraction made of iron sulfide (troilite) with
| small quantities of other sulfides.
|
| In contact with air, the sulfides will be oxidized, releasing
| sulfur dioxide. Burning black powder also releases sulfur
| dioxide, which is the main reason for its smell. Burning pure
| sulfur will produce the same smell.
| helterskelter wrote:
| At least some ISS astronauts describe smelling burnt metal
| after returning from EVA, if memory serves. (Others may smell
| ozone, I've just always remembered hearing burnt metal).
| junon wrote:
| I always heard burnt steak.
| everyone wrote:
| They say that about vaccum. eg. an airlock after re-
| pressurising it after a spacewalk. Apparently a vaccum
| sucks stuff like sulphur from within steel to it's surface.
| junon wrote:
| Ah this makes way more sense.
| thescriptkiddie wrote:
| the exterior of the ISS is constantly exposed to small mounts
| of atomic oxygen, which is an incredibly strong oxidizer.
| probably in addition to ozone there is a huge variety of
| organic and inorganic oxides that get tracked in through the
| airlock.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Materials_International_Space_.
| ..
| sbierwagen wrote:
| Fun trivia (well, perhaps not fun) in the second paragraph:
| "the Long Duration Exposure Facility (LDEF), which was
| retrieved in 1990 after spending 68 months in LEO"
|
| Long exposure, 68 months, right. But it was only supposed
| to be in orbit for 11! Challenger being destroyed on
| reentry made a mess of things.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_Duration_Exposure_Facili
| t...
|
| >It was placed in low Earth orbit by Space Shuttle
| Challenger in April 1984. [...] At LDEF's launch, retrieval
| was scheduled for March 19, 1985, eleven months after
| deployment.[4] Schedules slipped, postponing the retrieval
| mission first to 1986, then indefinitely due to the
| Challenger disaster. After 5.7 years its orbit had decayed
| to about 175 nautical miles (324 km) and it was likely to
| burn up on reentry in a little over a month.[6][9]: 15
| imzadi wrote:
| Challenger was destroyed on launch, not reentry.
| georgemcbay wrote:
| Yeah it was Columbia that was destroyed on reentry (17
| years later).
| gwerbin wrote:
| Which incidentally is the shuttle that brought back LDEF.
| jordanb wrote:
| There was some concern when Apollo 11 landed that when they
| repressurized the LEM with moon dust samples inside it would
| start a fire. I think they had a small test article that they
| blew a small stream of oxygen over to ensure it wouldn't auto-
| ignite.
| dotancohen wrote:
| And if the sample did auto-ignite, what was the procedure?
| verisimi wrote:
| Empty out a glass of water and blow the floating blobs
| towards the fire.
| quotemstr wrote:
| The moon has gravity. The blobs wouldn't float.
| Chaosvex wrote:
| Pretty sure it was a joke.
| monster_truck wrote:
| Nobody would joke about something as serious as moon
| fires dude, c'mon
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| But you could pour water at the fire from across the
| room!
|
| Lower gravity is giving the defender an advantage over
| the elements... at least until it gets low enough for
| things to start floating, when this flips around. In
| microgravity, water turns into floating blobs, but fire
| _turns into actual floating fireballs_.
|
| Water blobs vs. fireballs. Pretty sure there's a nice
| videogame idea hiding in there somewhere.
| diegoperini wrote:
| > Water blobs vs. fireballs. Pretty sure there's a nice
| videogame idea hiding in there somewhere.
|
| I like the way you think. :)
| grepfru_it wrote:
| Merry Christmas
|
| https://games.grepfru.it/water-vs-fire/
| bell-cot wrote:
| Throw all their samples back outside, then very carefully
| sweep the inside of the LEM and throw the broom & dustpan
| out too?
|
| In theory, they could have been equipped to partially
| pressurize the cabin with (say) helium - which would allow
| some sort of vacuum cleaner to work. But that could have
| added a fair bit of mass (by the LEM's _very_ tight mass
| budget standards).
| mapt wrote:
| This sort of scenario, which was thought too improbable
| to plan for, even by an organization as psychotically
| obsessed with astronaut safety as NASA, is exactly why
| human spaceflight was important for exploration. Because
| astronauts could improvise a sensible solution and the
| tech couldn't.
| jordanb wrote:
| I read it in Buzz Aldrin's book. He mentioned getting rid
| of all the samples if that happened. I would think the
| bigger problem would be moon dust all over their suits, but
| he didn't describe a plan for that.
|
| He said they thought the odds of that happening were remote
| though, so I guess they decided to risk it with the suits.
| Apparently he mentioned the problem to his dad who
| accidentally told a reporter sitting next to him on a
| flight leading to a big media cycle about "flaming moon
| dust" prior to the mission.
| cineticdaffodil wrote:
| Improvise. Adapt. Overcome or perish. One of the first man
| in orbit almost died because his suit couldnt fold its arms
| in vacuum. The enterprise moment where you encounter
| something new and unforseen must be scary as fuck.
| ItsClo688 wrote:
| the detail that kills me is moon dust has never contacted
| oxygen in billions of years, so every time an astronaut came
| back inside they were essentially doing a chemistry experiment
| for the first time. the whole moon is just waiting to react
| with air
| stonecharioteer wrote:
| This is what trips me up about terraforming. If we learn to
| create an atmosphere, are we going to instantly poison the
| oxygen we introduce?
| ItsClo688 wrote:
| great questionprobably not poison it directly, but you'd
| lose a significant chunk to oxidation reactions before
| reaching any stable equilibrium. the surface is essentially
| a massive reactive sink. mars has a similar problem, the
| perchlorate in the soil would react badly with a lot of
| things we'd want to introduce. the optimistic read is that
| oxidation reactions release energy and eventually reach
| stability. the pessimistic read is the timescale is
| geological.
| dotancohen wrote:
| Isn't Mars red due to oxygenation of the rocks? Is that
| ancient oxygenation or is there some quantity of oxygen
| in Mars atmosphere today? Does the atmospheric CO2
| sometimes break down (maybe under sunlight) and release
| some small quantity of O2 or might there be another
| source? Might something underground be respirating
| atmospheric CO2?
| rigonkulous wrote:
| The realistic read would then be, we'd be better off just
| blowing a giant bubble of water in any number of lagrange
| point and having ourselves a brand new water park to play
| with, bring dolphins to, etc ...
|
| Oh wait no that's a different kind of read.
| adrianN wrote:
| It took about a billion years of photosynthesis on earth
| before all the ferrous iron dissolved in the oceans was
| oxidized and atmospheric oxygen concentration began to take
| off.
| prox wrote:
| Fascinating
| gus_massa wrote:
| ... and it probably killed most of the then current
| bacteria/archea, because they were adapted to an
| atmosphere without oxygen
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Oxidation_Event
| cornholio wrote:
| Terraforming is an exceptionally energetic endeavor. Even
| if you had the perfect combination of icy asteroids with
| just the right amount of water, nitrogen, oxigen etc. and
| the means to hurl them towards Mars, this kinetic event
| would be so energetic that it would take centuries to
| millennia before the surface would cool to habitable
| temperatures. it's not physically possible to do it ex in
| the span of a human lifetime.
|
| Ar the scale terraforming entails, the crust reactions with
| the new atmosphere are closer to a rounding error.
| lisper wrote:
| Just put a parachute on the asteroid.
|
| ;-)
| singularity2001 wrote:
| if the moon will be settled it will be settled by AI
| embodied in some kind of (nano) robot or artificially
| created life.
| deepsun wrote:
| Well, oxygen _is_ poison. It's eager to react (sometimes
| violently) with almost everything. It rusts and oxidates
| perfect shiny metals and silicon making everything an
| oxide!
| lukan wrote:
| No. "Poison" refers to a substance toxic to humans, but
| we can be exposed to pure oxygen and breath it very fine.
| But yes, oxygen is _dangerous_.
| Symmetry wrote:
| "Poison" can also refer to a substance toxic to other
| animals. We say that chocolate is poisonous to dogs for
| instance. And a good fraction of Earth's biosphere was
| killed off by oxygen poisoning in the first of Earth's
| great mass extinctions.
|
| Also, the dose makes the poison and excess oxygen
| actually can poison humans. Deep sea divers have to worry
| about excess oxygen inducing seizures if they mess up
| their breathing gasses enough. And even 100% oxygen at
| regular pressure will slowly damage the lungs, something
| ICUs have to worry about.
|
| Nick Lane had a great book about oxygen, _Oxygen_ , which
| maybe isn't as good as his book about mitochondria but is
| well worth reading.
| bell-cot wrote:
| Terraforming anything looks _really_ expensive. Ask a
| finance guy to run numbers on terraforming places with
| gravity too weak to hold onto a useful atmosphere for any
| length of time*, and give you his opinion.
|
| *say, Earth's moon
| jodrellblank wrote:
| There was a time (1930 - 1960) when Futurism believed we
| could do great things. Now I imagine a Moonbase or Mars
| base, and then it gets bought by Private Equity who
| cancel the maintenance budget, double the number of
| tourists, and when it OceanGate Titans with the loss of
| everyone, they shrug and the courts don't give them so
| much as a slap on the wrist.
|
| That would never happen to the Starship Enterprise. Even
| in Total Recall, where the baddies wanted to kill the
| poor, they cared about the integrity of the base keeping
| everyone alive.
| FranOntanaya wrote:
| Well, sort of. Solar wind does include oxygen ions, so it's
| exposed to a small extent.
| slow_typist wrote:
| How can it include oxygen?
| floam wrote:
| Stars make it, our sun is made of it, it's the third most
| abundant element.
|
| Distant third
| yubblegum wrote:
| Somehwat surprised to see there are twice more Oxygen
| atoms than Carbon.
| kortex wrote:
| Carbon + helium fusion is rather favorable, vs carbon
| production by the triple alpha process (3He), so it's
| just reaction kinetics essentially.
| Groxx wrote:
| Stars kinda famously fuse elements up to iron as part of
| normal operations. And even if you exclude that, the
| entire solar system is leftovers from a previous star -
| all that is inside our current star too. Sure, much of it
| isn't at the surface, but there's not much of a reason to
| expect that _literally zero_ of it randomly floats up
| among the lighter elements.
|
| Have a reference tho:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_wind
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| That said, "heavy ions and atomic nuclei of elements such
| as carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, neon, magnesium, silicon,
| sulfur, and iron" makes up only "trace amounts" of the
| solar-wind plasma [1].
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_wind
| L_226 wrote:
| > our current star
|
| Looking forward to seeing the next one!
| ygra wrote:
| We first need to get rid of the current one in a few
| billion years. That won't end well for Earth, though.
| Groxx wrote:
| Earth is just part of the same recycling collection plan,
| it's fine.
| adrian_b wrote:
| The danger is not really great.
|
| Any dust on the Moon still consists mostly of silicates which
| cannot be oxidized.
|
| When dust comes from meteorites, it contains a fraction made
| of iron sulfide (with small quantities of other sulfides) and
| another fraction made mainly of hydrocarbons.
|
| The metallic sulfides can be oxidized, but they will not burn
| violently. The hydrocarbons are like a tar or pitch, because
| the volatile hydrocarbons would have sublimated in vacuum. So
| neither that tar is easily flammable.
|
| The gunpowder smell is likely to be caused by the oxidation
| of the sulfides from the dust, which releases sulfur dioxide,
| the same like burnt gunpowder.
| raffael_de wrote:
| i'm wondering how do people even know what ozone smells like?
| gsich wrote:
| smell during thunderstorms
| Wololooo wrote:
| Ever been next to an electric arc discharging? The odour you
| can smell is Ozone.
| jiggawatts wrote:
| It's the smell of photocopiers or laser printers operating.
| yubiox wrote:
| I used to have a hot tub and it had an ozone generating
| device for killing bacteria. I loved the smell but people
| here are saying if you can smell it you are getting dangerous
| levels of it. :(
| emsign wrote:
| Outer space smells like burnt flesh is what I've heard. Space
| is full of toxic polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons which are
| created in novae and are everywhere in outer space in small
| amounts. They're the same chemicals that generate when organic
| compounds and fossil fuels are burnt.
|
| Makes me wonder even more why some people really want to go and
| live there.
| tarcon wrote:
| Has anyone tried to breath space? :)
| nandomrumber wrote:
| Oxygen if the third most abundant element in the universe.[1]
|
| The Moon minerals contain plenty of it:
|
| _The finer regolith, the lunar soil of silicon dioxide
| glass_.[2]
|
| _Minerals forming the lunar crust are made up of oxygen,
| silicon, magnesium, iron, calcium, and aluminum, along with
| small amounts of titanium, uranium, thorium, potassium, and
| hydrogen._ [3]
|
| I figure you mean free oxygen or diatomic oxygen O2, but that
| stuff is rare in the universe, as it's quite reactive, and
| largely irrelevant for asteroid impact chemistry extreme heat
| and pressure, plenty of oxygen available in the rocks smashing
| together.
|
| 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxygen
|
| 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moon
|
| 3. https://science.nasa.gov/moon/composition/
| semi-extrinsic wrote:
| Even though some minerals on the Moon contain oxygen, it
| doesn't mean the dust can't oxidize further when exposed to a
| gaseous atmosphere with high oxygen partial pressure.
| daveguy wrote:
| Exactly this. Oxygen in minerals is very different than
| gaseous oxygen.
| mapt wrote:
| But does the oxidative effect of rare short-lived impact
| atmospheres match the other chemistry associated with being
| exposed to billions of years of hard (blackbody) sunlight,
| solar wind, and cosmic rays on the surface of a body without
| much of a magnetosphere? How much are those impact oxides,
| particularly the ones in fine dust, shorn of their chemical
| bonds?
| MisterTea wrote:
| > And I think the outer space report was from space walks, and
| the explanation was that the first time the airlock itself was
| exposed to hard vacuum, the surfaces of the airlock would have
| a reaction that left a scent of ozone.
|
| I work with industrial vacuum machinery and the big slow down
| in a vacuum system is coaxing out water vapor which sticks to
| chamber and plumbing walls like glue. My guess is dissolved
| oxygen in the water vapor or the water vapor itself reacting
| with dust particles.
| hvs wrote:
| If you want to get depressed about all the problems with trying
| to colonize Mars, I recommend A City on Mars:
| https://www.acityonmars.com/
|
| It's by the cartoonist of Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal and
| his wife (the one with an actual science PhD). https://www.smbc-
| comics.com/
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _If you want to get depressed about all the problems with
| trying to colonize Mars_
|
| I had the opposite reaction. I thought it set forward a
| realistic set of challenges we have to solve and experiments we
| have to do before building anything more than a research
| outpost on Mars. That, in turn, makes a permanent Moon base
| more valuable.
|
| Standout problems were low- and zero-g trauma medicine,
| plumbing (something Artemis II started working on) and
| mammalian reproduction.
| api wrote:
| This is on my reading list. I've read synopses of it, and I
| don't think it's going to change my mind a lot. I'm still long-
| term pro-space-exploration, but even before this book I'd come
| to the conclusion that this is a lot harder than naive nerds
| tend to think. I think it's worth doing and probably will be
| done eventually, but it's gonna take a while.
|
| I've had the thought for some time now that the most viable
| path to settlement in space -- if humans actually decide they
| want to do it -- is to settle space. Not the Moon, or Mars, or
| Venus, or anything else, but space itself.
|
| In space you can build big rings and spin them for 1g gravity.
| We don't know if 1/6 or 1/3 gravity is enough for us to
| reproduce and prosper, but we know 1g is. Your environment is
| hermetically sealed and you control what comes in and out. You
| could, once you get good at this, actually create hyper-
| habitable environments tuned to be ideal for human life. People
| aren't tracking in nasty asbestos-like regolith or perchlorates
| or anything else you don't want.
|
| Most reasonable near-mid term proposals for living on Mars or
| the Moon I've read about call for spending most time
| underground. Going there to do that seems pointless. Living in
| space itself could be much nicer.
|
| The interior of such a ring would look nothing like this very
| Hollywood "luxury hotel" thing, but this little short film
| gives you a sense of what the relationship to the external
| space environment might be like:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iiPmgW21rwY
|
| Radiation is still an issue, but there's ideas for that that
| could work for a ring in hard space vacuum that don't work as
| well on a planet. One is to put a big superconductor around the
| ring and give it a magnetosphere. The whole habitat is a big
| electromagnet. Most cosmic rays and solar particles are
| charged. The power requirements are not as great as you'd
| think.
|
| For resources asteroids are probably better than planets. The
| solar system is full of asteroids that appear, from what we've
| seen, to be incredibly rich in raw materials, and these bodies
| have such low gravity that you could literally pull up next to
| them and go dig stuff out of them. The delta-V requirements of
| sending stuff back to your space-city are literally at the
| scale of "throw it real hard." Their low mass also means you
| don't have to dig deep and the heavy elements didn't sink to
| the core. You're going to find gigantic amounts of stuff like
| gold, platinum, pure iridium, fissile materials, etc.
|
| Free living space habitats could move around. There could be
| moving towns and cities, more or less, that could tour the
| solar system and pick up resources and rendezvous with each
| other. Think steampunk style traction cities in space, kind of.
|
| Politically you leave behind at least some of terrestrial
| politics. I'm not naive enough to think people would never find
| anything to fight about. We're good at coming up with stuff to
| fight about. But the notion of battling over land pretty much
| goes away. Space is called space for a reason. Culture wars
| become less relevant if everyone's town is mobile and if you
| don't like your neighbors you just move your whole "pod"
| around. Resources seem very abundant. I don't see a ton of
| resource competition unless we discover some critical or
| massively valuable resources that genuinely are rare and
| available in only a few places.
|
| In the very long term, this path leads to the evolution of an
| actual spacefaring civilization rather than simply a repeat of
| terrestrial politics on another planet. Generation ships to the
| stars would be a natural evolution of this. After doing this
| for a few hundred or a few thousand years, we'd get so good at
| it that the idea of a caravan of these mobile cities departing
| for Centauri or Tau Ceti becomes imaginable and not a total
| suicide mission.
|
| Compared to this I think going to Mars is a dead end. Even if
| we go there and survive and prosper, now we're just doing
| planetary civilization again. We're back to squabbling over
| dirt. The real evolutionary leap is doing something
| _different._ Fish didn 't come on land to stay fish.
|
| But there's also an argument that there's no point in trying
| until we at least have a couple of key technologies: fusion,
| very good automated manufacturing, and very good robotics.
| Fusion is key for enabling scalable power and mobility.
| Automated manufacturing and very good robotics are probably key
| to self-sufficiency.
|
| Trying to do the "real space age" before the key technologies
| exist might be akin to, say, trying to start the EV revolution
| with lead-acid batteries or the PC revolution with vacuum
| tubes. While it's technically possible to try, it's just not
| going to "take."
| lucasaug wrote:
| When life gives you lemons, don't make lemonade
| Patrick_Devine wrote:
| Isn't this why NASA is developing the Electrodynamic Dust Shield
| [1] system?
|
| [1] https://www.nasa.gov/image-article/nasas-dust-shield-
| success...
| tillinghast wrote:
| Cue Cave Johnson: "The bean counters told me we literally could
| not afford to buy seven dollars worth of moon rocks, much less
| seventy million. Bought 'em anyway. Ground 'em up, mixed em into
| a gel. And guess what? Ground up moon rocks are pure poison. I am
| deathly ill."
| mirekrusin wrote:
| Sounds similar to asbestos.
| mncharity wrote:
| > "I think one of the most aggravating, restricting facets of
| lunar surface exploration is the dust and its adherence to
| everything no matter what kind of material, whether it be skin,
| suit material, metal, no matter what it be and its restrictive,
| friction-like action to everything it gets on [...] the simple
| large-tolerance mechanical devices on the Rover began to show the
| effect of dust as the EVAs went on. By the middle or the end of
| the third EVA, simple things like bag locks and the lock which
| held the pallet on the Rover began not only to malfunction but to
| not function at all. They effectively froze. We tried to dust
| them and bang the dust off and clean them, and there was just no
| way. The effect of dust on mirrors, cameras, and checklists is
| phenomenal. You have to live with it but you're continually
| fighting the dust problem both outside and inside the spacecraft.
| Once you get inside the spacecraft, as much as you dust yourself,
| you start taking off the suits and you have dust on your hands
| and your face and you're walking in it. You can be as careful in
| cleaning up as you want to, but it just sort of inhabits every
| nook and cranny in the spacecraft and every pore in your skin
| [...]" Eugene Cernan, Apollo 17 debrief[1]
|
| An interactive microscope of regolith.[2] Like tiny broken glass,
| hard as rock, and sticking to everything like static-charged
| packing peanuts.
|
| An old tech memo and paper.[3][4]
|
| [1]
| https://an.rsl.wustl.edu/apollo/data/A17/resources/a17-techd...
| page "27-28" 258, 50 in pdf. Lots of other mentions of dust. [2]
| interactive microscope of regolith
| https://virtualmicroscope.org/sites/default/files/html5Asset...
| [3] The Effects of Lunar Dust on EVA Systems During the Apollo
| Missions
| https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/20050160460/downloads/20...
| [4] IMPACT OF DUST ON LUNAR EXPLORATION
| https://adsabs.harvard.edu/pdf/2007ESASP.643..239S
| alex_be wrote:
| "In addition the Moon has no atmosphere and is constantly
| bombarded by radiation from the Sun that causes the soil to
| become electrostatically charged." - You can use a magnetic or
| electric field to push the soil away
| consumer451 wrote:
| As a huge space nerd, I would like to point out that space, and
| other planetary bodies appear to really suck.
|
| It seems to be under-reported that the Earth is pretty nice.
| gcbirzan wrote:
| Sadly, it's populated.
| consumer451 wrote:
| My friend, misanthropy is giving last year energy. Don't get
| so down. In other under-reported news: until the Earth
| reaches 100% de-population, it can in-fact get worse.
| Therefore, it's currently not that bad!
|
| Let's take a moment to appreciate that we live on a populated
| planetary body. The Peter Thiel has not yet achieved its
| ultimate goal. Good times.
| i_love_retros wrote:
| > My friend, misanthropy is giving last year energy. Don't
| get so down.
|
| Have you read the news lately?
| aerhardt wrote:
| No - that's my secret.
| yubblegum wrote:
| Our Earth is like a blue angel in the solar system.
| youknownothing wrote:
| To be fair, considering that there are minerals in the Moon that
| don't exist on Earth, it's normal that the human body experiments
| an allergic reaction to a set of substances that it hasn't ever
| been exposed to during thousands of years of evolution.
| hellopineapple wrote:
| Hourly cost doesn't seems the right metrics, instead the cost
| should be tied to productivity or difficulty of problem solved
| bsza wrote:
| I'm guessing this comment was intended on a different post or
| on someone else's comment.
| nvader wrote:
| Lunar dust is Kiki while earth dust is bouba.
| tasoeur wrote:
| I'm assuming your comment is a reference to this?
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bouba/kiki_effect
| nvader wrote:
| Correct, thanks for linking to context. Kiki/Bouba became
| something of a meme recently.
| tyrowvgt wrote:
| Unbelievable, billions spent on sending few to moon while
| millions are dying homeless here
| notepad0x90 wrote:
| sounds like you're focusing on the wrong billions, the war on
| iran alone could provide housing to all homeless in the US.
|
| It's not for a lack of money people are homeless in the US
| (which is launching this). it's for a lack of political will,
| because voters don't want to provide free housing to homeless
| people. They're more concerned about being able to buy instead
| of rent a house (less apartments, more houses) or protect the
| value of their house ("no homeless people near me, and
| certainly an abundance of housing reduces prices for my house
| investment").
|
| Hey, at least those issues won't be a problem, if homeless
| people can charter a flight to Mars, if these efforts pan out.
| kryptiskt wrote:
| Unbelievable, literally trillions upon trillions spent on all
| other kind of shit like warfare and utter corruption. And some
| people just can't get over that people fifty years ago spent a
| minuscule fraction of that to go to the moon.
| alex1138 wrote:
| It wasn't just lunar dust, all(?) the crews also reported
| smelling burning in the tunnel (tunnel connecting CM and LM),
| might be something to do with the docking latches
| shevy-java wrote:
| This sounds as if walking on the moon led to some symptoms. But
| if you know Chris Hadfield, he said "space has a rusty burn
| smell" even elsewhere. How can they conclude that moonwalking
| specifically led to what was described? The article has "The
| toxic side of the Moon", but IMO it would be more reasonable to
| assume that space in general is toxic, not "only" the moon. It
| also means that the space suits are not well-equipped - people in
| 50 years from now will shake their heads about that, how naive we
| may have been.
| emsign wrote:
| Moon dust is really nasty and actually a bigger problem for
| astronauts and equipment than radiation which can simply be
| avoided by settling in magma tunnels.
| cineticdaffodil wrote:
| Cave Johnson here..
| elnatro wrote:
| Couldn't they just avoid touching the ground by building on top?
| Or just create a concrete floor?
| OutOfHere wrote:
| Terraforming Luna or Mars is a stupid idea due to their toxic
| dust. It would be a lot easier to just mine them and construct a
| rotating habitat in space. The space mission I want to see is one
| that brings out a container full of rocks from the planetary body
| back to Earth or to a space station for processing and
| construction.
| cineticdaffodil wrote:
| Can this dust reach escape velocity with a meteor impact? Could a
| iss be floating in the equivalent of dpace Sahara dust?
| metalglot wrote:
| Any moonbase will seriously run into this problem. Nightmare!
| ButlerianJihad wrote:
| Anyone expecting to colonize Mars, or even send humans there,
| within the next 1,000 years is going to be sorely disappointed.
|
| I told my neighbor: we could send some humans to Mars, but not
| expect to get them back!
|
| Even if Mars were pre-terraformed, even if Mars were a perfect
| idyllic copy of Earth and a Garden of Eden just inviting humans
| to go there and set up bases, we could not send crews to Mars.
|
| The final nail in this coffin was, for me, when I heard an ISS
| Expedition astronaut explain what NASA prohibits when they return
| from a long stretch on the Space Station. The astronauts are not
| permitted to jog or lift weights. They can't drive a vehicle or
| fly aircraft(!) They mustn't jump or twist their head around too
| fast. They must re-learn how to brush their teeth and how to
| drink fluids. They may feel dizzy, nauseous, or have trouble with
| spatial judgement. They are, essentially, helpless toddlers
| confined to their quarters. I mean, it is quite obvious by the
| way that they must drag these national heroes onto a gurney from
| the capsule after splash-down that their physiques are no longer
| normal.
|
| The astronauts experience a lot of muscle atrophy and unique
| procedures in microgravity. If an astronaut can't even jog, or
| pass a roadside sobriety test, or go to the bathroom for
| themselves after an ISS mission, how, after 6 months' travel in
| deep space, will they accomplish _anything_ at a Mars base, even
| mere survival?
|
| Surely we could send up all supplies with autonomous vessels.
| Pre-stock water tanks and oxygen and air and have robots build a
| basic Mars-base there, before any astronaut arrives. But if the
| actual journey is practically incapacitating our actual human
| beings, the whole deal is off.
|
| So no, we'll never get to Mars in the way that Musk and NASA
| promise. We'll keep sending robots eager to find out more and
| explore the interesting parts. The robots can bring back all the
| samples they want. They'll send pictures and even audio and
| plenty of sensor data. But humans will be lucky if we get a
| stable colony on the Moon (I believe that Moon Bases have their
| own currently insurmountable obstacles.) I think that humankind
| should be really happy and satisfied that we've got orbital space
| stations with continuous habitation now.
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