interolivary @ interolivary @beehaw.org

Currently between olives

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2 yr. ago

Stupid sexy emergency medical hologram

Ihme etteivät syyttäneet sitä kuuluisaa ja ilmeisesti näkymättömyyteen kykenevää äÄrIvAsEmMiStOa tästäkin. Jotain tyyliin "juutalaishomonatsiantifa yritti liata kansallismielisten maineen lavastamalla terrori-iskun"

Tuntuu että tän uuden linjan suurin ongelma on, että autoilijat on siinä määrin puusilmiä, ettei heidän tikapuuhermostonsa pysty käsittelemään minkäänlaisia liikenneinfran muutoksia.

No no, just repeat after me: "I can say I tOlD YoU So!" You don't want to be caught using anything resembling logic when it comes to pharmaceutical companies.

To be fair, incest is like weirdly common in many myths; for example the gods of the Greek pantheon got up to some really freaky shit that makes the light sister-fucking in the Kalevala seem practically wholesome.

Interestingly the story of Kullervo's sister-fucking (which I think was accidental, but I'm too lazy to read the article to check) leading to terrible consequences was intended as a warning against the practice, because there was a heavy taboo on incest – and that's a bit hilarious considering the fact that that we were such prodigious sister/cousin/etc-fuckers for such a long time that our gene pool now has turds floating in it.

Those amateurs in Alabama doesn't have anything on us yet; we can reassess the situation once they have as many ridiculously rare hereditiary diseases as we do per capita.

Ah, I see you're extra virgin as well

It's a flork

As a programmer and Linux user, I have some ideas as to what an extra virgin is

PS biosphear had problems way beyond technical ones. Its science and repurarion was ruined by a number of issues. Some fair most media atracks. These prevented the project gaininf funding to resolve the issues. The summation of it though was. They did not sell the idea thar an experiment is really not a solution. So were attacked when they had to introduce new input.)

Oh yeah I was just saying that I vaguely remember one of their problems being that they had some sort of… uh, was it algae or fungus that tended to grow a bit out of control.

But in any case I didn't mean to come across as saying we shouldn't try; we absolutely should, because we can't know if it's actually possible if we don't even try.

My point was more that there are a lot of significant problems related to space colonization and many of them much bigger than many people assume, and some fairly credible people who are actually either in the aerospace field or are researchers etc. have said that it might be that the problems are big enough to make self-sustaining space colonies nearly impossible for a long, long time. But like you said as well, that should be a reason to start learning and not limit whether we try

Ah, that does sound irritating. I wonder if my adblocker keeps those at bay since I'm not sure I've seen any

For all their talk about how they're the freest country in the world etc, the US is honestly weirdly rule-oriented and there's a lot of surprising restrictions in different aspects of life – at least from this particular Finn's perspective.

High school is an interesting example. I did an exchange year in South Carolina, and I was really struck by how strictly regulated school was. So things like needing a pass to go to the bathroom during class, or needing yet another pass that you have to get from an office if you're even a minute late from class, not being allowed to be in the hallways between classes, not being allowed to leave school grounds, and so on. And don't get me started on the whole pledge of allegiance thing.

Work seems to also be more regulated, with some companies having stricter controls on how employees spend their time, and for example policies on appearance (and I don't mean just the service sector) and apparently some even have "fraternization policies" that forbid romantic or sexual relationships between coworkers.

Then there's the Homeowners' Associations – HOAs – which seem to have surprising amounts of power to regulate things about eg. the appearance of houses, or what you can and can't have in your yard.

Varying levels of censorship in movies and TV has also been common through the years, some of it official and some just "this is how we do things". Censorship of cursing and nudity is somehow especially odd since often violence is totally OK in the same contexts, but somehow showing a nipple or saying "fuck" will lead to the degradation of the moral fiber of everyone who's exposed to that smut. I still remember the moral panic caused by a few hundred milliseconds of Janet Jackson's nipple during some Superb Owl (🦉) thing or another.

And just as some background, on top of that exchange year I've spent probably a half a year if not more in the US, from vacations to eg. a zillion work trips I had to do at least once a month when I worked for a company headquartered in SF. Haven't been to all that many states though, but more than just one anyhow; off the top of my head I'd say New York, Michigan, California, Florida, South & North Carolina, and Georgia.

You don't say?

I mean, reich-wingers think that even telling kids about the existence of gay, trans etc. people will turn them into huge flaming queers, soooo…

Funny how seeing representations of cis-het people & relationships as a kid didn't turn me cis or hetero.

But the thing with self-sustainability, especially for space stations, is that you need a lot of resources besides just water and oxygen to support long-term habitation. Soil is actually one of those things that's actually much trickier to produce off-planet than one would generally assume, because it requires a pretty intricate ecosystem of bacteria, fungi and such; composting won't help since you need all that for composting to work in the first place. Then there's the minerals we need for our diets, and while other planets may have them, it's a big problem for space stations even with very diligent recycling (including recycling dead bodies).

Then there's the question of hydrocarbons, which aren't only used for fuel and plastics but also for eg. producing pharmaceuticals and many other applications which people generally don't think to associate with oil.

An additional problem with space stations is that they're closed and pretty sterile systems, so there's a huge risk that some random bacteria or fungus will start "colonizing" it because whatever keeps it in check in a natural ecosystem just doesn't exist there, and this can cause everything from health problems to degradation of materials etc. (Kim Stanley Robinson's book about a "generation ship" had something about this). I think Biosphere 2, the experimental closed ecosystem thing from the late 80's / early 90's, also ran into this. Our immune systems also don't develop properly in sterile environments, and it's turned out that there seems to be a link between autoimmune diseases and allergies, and lack of childhood exposure to bacteria and even eg. intestinal parasites.

So while I'm not saying it's completely impossible to build self-sustaining colonies, the problems that we'd have to solve to make them a reality are a lot more complex and numerous than many people assume, and honestly I'm not convinced we have enough time left to solve all of them before our globalized industrial society more or less collapses due to climate change, at which point we'll be dealing with so many problems "down here" that building experimental space habitats will be very low on our TODO list

Huh, how so? I don't use it all that much so I don't really have an opinion in one direction or another

Not going to say the thing

WHY DIDN'T YOU SAY THE THING‽

On a more serious note, I've seen a lot of comments on eg. !risa@startrek.website echoing the same sentiment, and many people who haven't really watched any of the Treks seem to enjoy the memery. I think it's somehow, I don't know, cute? Something about it just makes me go "aww" a bit, like here's us nerds making our nerdy little memes about our nerdy utopian space opera, and then even lots non-fans find something fun in those memes.

Ah, that's a good point about the Moon being useful as a sort of waystation, I'd forgotten about that particular idea.

But still, I'm not sure colonizing other planets or moons in our solar system would solve the problem of the Earth being a single point of failure. Any colonies outside of the Earth would likely be reliant on resupply from Earth for a wide variety of things we take for granted, and apparently it's not all that clear whether truly self-sufficient colonies are even possible.

Well actually… 🤓

According to this Stackexchange answer to a similar question there's a sort of semi-official Starfleed Academy Training Manual that had "extensive involvement" from the production staff but is ultimately fan-made, and it has this to say about facial hair:

Starfleet uniform regulations require that men keep faces shaven, except that a short, neat moustache/beard is permitted. No unusual beards or moustaches are permitted. Men must keep their hair neatly and closely trimmed, length not to exceed seven centimetres. Women must keep their hair neatly arranged, with back hair touching but not falling below the collar. Side hair must be trimmed to show a close contour.

And I mean, considering that Starfleet is essentially a military organization (or paramilitary at best), I'd be really surprised if they didn't have grooming standards.

But why would we want to colonize the Moon?

Setting up a colony would be fantastically expensive, living there would be tough, the low gravity might cause health issues similar to what microgravity or weightlessness cause, and the colony would be completely reliant for resupplies from Earth which would also be very expensive.

Colonizing it "just 'cause" doesn't seem like it'd make sense. Habitats for research might, but it'd be on a much smaller scale so it's unclear whether roads would be needed.

Edit: I'm not saying research like this is useless though. Might be useful one day, might not be, that's the nature of things and increasing the sum total of human knowledge is never useless

Why are you being an ass about this?

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