For what it’s worth, they totally work.

I have a friend with a cabin by a lake in the woods, it’s lovely, but the mosquito situation there is no joke. She has a few of these and when she goes to empty them periodically, it’s just a trap full of mosquitos… It’s not other critters, it’s just like a pint of dead mosquitos.

This is a cool solution, I’d never heard of this.

It reminds me of how they deal with mosquitos on an industrial scale, releasing millions of infertile males into the wild to prevent a next generation.

You first.

I mean, no it’s not.

Kessler syndrome is about a chain reaction that destroys everything in orbit and keeps us from accessing space for years.

Ruining your view is not “nearly as bad”. That makes you sound like one of those folks on Martha’s Vineyard, opposing offshore wind turbines that local communities desperately need, because they’ll “ruin the view”.

I’m not sure that works, like on a purely game theory level. If gamers start to apply pressure, threaten to stop buying games, the stores need to make a choice:

A. Risk facing the wrath of the gamers, sales are likely to drop. Possibly by a lot, perhaps 15-20%. That could keep up for months before stabilizing.

B. Risk facing the wrath of the payment processors, credit card sales will stop immediately, only alternative payment types get through. Sales drop by 80% overnight, over time some users will seek alternative payment methods, possibly resulting in only 50% less revenue than expected…

While both of those options are bad, one of them is totally fatal to their business.

Those numbers are of course only speculation, but that’s my best guess.

This will never go away. Payment processors make life easy for most consumers, people like them. And as long as we have them, they hold all the power around how money can be used. And they will always be limited by governments and local laws.

If you don’t like the situation, use cash. If that’s too inconvenient Bitcoin is essentially your only other option.

There are ways to be sure of authenticity, ways that can’t be faked.

Oh come on, you’re gonna do that in two years anyway.

Nowhere, not once, have I stated we shouldn’t.

I mean, there’s the post I initially responded to:

It’s almost like we should stop destroying this perfect insanely unique and suitable planet we live on until we’ve reached a level of bioengineering that allows us to artificially adapt to the significant environmental challenges of interplanetary travel…

You’re not saying we shouldn’t explore space, just that we should wait until we can genetically engineer ourselves to live in that environment. But is that not the same as saying “we should stop for now”? My entire response to that post was simply to say that it wasn’t too early to start, and you seem to have taken offense to the sentiment.

So that makes this, what, an attempt at gaslighting? But perhaps I’m deranged, surely that would explain your faulty logic.

You see insane engineering challenges as just easy because thousands of very clever engineers have already spent billions and their lifetimes working it out for you

Close, I see engineering challenges as possible and potentially already solved exactly because thousands of very clever engineers have already spent billions and their lifetimes working it out for us. It looks to me like the issue is that you refuse to differentiate between “hard” and “impossible”. Obviously space is hard, but there’s a lot we have the ability to do right now. All we need is the will to fund it, we already have the experts ready to do it.

your theoretical radiation shielding has not been proven nor is it just as easy as “surround yourself with your water supply”.

You act like this is my theory, this is generally considered the plan for interplanetary missions and long term space stations going forward. It’s an old idea, I couldn’t even tell you when it was first proposed. And as for “unproven”, water is the primary material used to shield nuclear reactors, the methodology could not be more proven.

Even the iss you mention is being deorbited in 2027 because it’s not long-term sustainable and has developed untraceable leaks.

The ISS is only the second space station NASA has built, space station version 2.0, still sort of a prototype. We built it in the 90s and we’ve learned an incredible amount in the process, but of course it wasn’t going to last forever. But with proper funding it stands to reason that we could build something better today using everything we’ve learned so far. To say we shouldn’t because it’s hard… well that’s just not how progress is made.

Yes I disagree… Your argument was:

Space is uninhabitable

Which is a weird stance, as humans have been living in space continually for the last 25 years… (With zero gaps btw). But the word “uninhabitable” implies more, it suggests that it can’t be done. But I think it’s clear that this is a limitation of funding and priorities. If we wanted to build larger habitats in space, we could, we have the know-how.

And again… While this appears to be an article about serious complications to living in space, it’s almost certainly about serious complications to living in zero G. If that sounds like a minor distinction, know that it really isn’t. Because all that stuff you mentioned, heart issues, bone density, etc, those are all 0G issues. And do I think it’s safe to have a baby in orbit, in 1G? Yeah, I think it is.

Radiation and shielding really aren’t a huge problem or a huge challenge either, there are clear ways to mitigate the issue. Specifically, you can use your water supply as shielding. Also, the problem scales well with size, as your habitat gets larger, shielding requirements become a lower and lower percentage of the habitat’s mass.

it’s not as easy as just “slap some solar panels up” are you even familiar with the failure rate of solar panels due to space debris?

Oh so you must know that the original solar arrays installed on the ISS 25 years ago are still running then? We’ve added additional arrays over the years and recently put in much more efficient rollout arrays to account for increased power usage. Yeah, occasionally debris will knock out individual cells, but that doesn’t lead to the whole array going down. So yes solar arrays degrade over time, especially in low earth orbit, but it’s not like the original ones have been blasted to bits, they still work 25 years later.

And yeah you need radiators for heat management. This is not an enormous cost or engineering challenge.

Too sum up, there are a few extra considerations for developing radiation resistant panels and providing adequate cooling, but when you figure that out (and we have) it really is as simple as “slapping some solar panels up”.

space is not currently habitable

I disagree completely. There are many problems associated with living in low gravity or freefall, but I don’t advocate living like that. Rotating habitats are not that hard.

That’s before we get into the bevy of other problems in medical, manufacturing, and energy

Medical problems there may still be, it’s true. But I would argue that for every challenge we face in manufacturing, we’ll see just as many advantages. And energy is a completely different story, energy is just easier in space than on earth. Certainly for space around Erath, Mars, or anything closer to the sun, solar is the obvious choice. It’s cheap, steady and runs 24/7 with no weather or nights.

It doesn’t mean don’t do it, it means have your priorities straight

I would argue that having our priorities straight would mean providing NASA with 20x their current annual budget. We could easily account for that cost but adjusting our spending on tax breaks for the wealthy and new military programs. As it is, we’re mostly ignoring space rather than investing in it.

Don’t get me wrong, earth is great, biologically it’s perfect for us. But societally, it’s limiting, and we’ll never achieve more if we don’t actually reach for it.

Well, I understand the struggle. I’ll look at that shiny new thing (let’s say a video card for instance) and I’ll think “well, the old works well enough, and I’ll just be throwing the old one out, or it will sit in my drawer for a decade and then I’ll throw it out”.

Or, when something breaks, I’ll think, well I could replace it, but I can probably just fix it. Surely it’s not a waste of time to spend 5 hours and $30 at the hardware store to fix a 20 year old toaster. Surely.

And I’m really quite good at fixing stuff, so the temptation is always there. And part of it is the environmental side, it just feels wrong to throw something that mostly works into a landfill. Like if that toaster won’t turn on at all, it’s probably just the power button that broke, or a thermal fuse that blew. In those cases, that’s a device that is 99% fine and the fix isn’t all that hard. I can’t bring myself to just buy a new one and unnecessarily add to my carbon footprint.

On the other hand, sometimes you just need to eat your pride. For instance, we ended up with some very difficult kids, so life has gotten challenging. And given the everyday challenges, sometimes I just need an immediate solution for things. Sure, I could fix this, sure I could probably get this media server working, sure we’re perfectly capable of cleaning up after ourselves… But right now that feels too hard so screw it, let’s just buy a new one, and to hell with the media server, we’ll just pay for Netflix and Disney+, and you know what, let’s get someone to help clean our house once a month. Sometimes it’s just about doing the things that you need to do to take care of yourself.

And yes, I needed that video card for my personal sanity.

What if the core problem is elbow room. What if what we really need is room to expand, “space” if you will.

And why does it have to be about solving problems? Why can’t it be expanding into space for the opportunity it represents. Space habitats aren’t for escaping earth, that’s not the point. It’s more like expanding earth, until earth is more of an idea than a single place.

I think the problem I have is with the word “first”. If we do that, we’ll all be miserable for the next several millennia, and then we all die. If we try to make earth work “first”, it will never actually be time to focus on space.

We can do them both at the same time, and that time is now.

Also, what about interplanetary habitation wouldn’t be possible? You just create an earth-like environment in space. Yes, that’s a monumental task, but it’s also a fairly straightforward task. If you can build a park or seed a forest on earth, you can do the same on a large spinning habitat in space.

In some ways doing it at a smaller scale is really more complicated. When you can simply recreate a whole biome, that certainly makes things simple. But when you need to pack everything necessary for sustainable living into a small station, that’s quite complicated and results in a delicate ecosystem with a lot of failure conditions which could end in total ecological collapse. But again, to master those techniques, we need to start doing it.

I’m just venting about the people (who I’ve talked to irl) who hype space so hard they disregard how important it is to look back towards our mother planet before we set our dreams on the next.

I hear what you’re saying. To be fair though, it’s never too soon to start thinking about the future. And from my perspective, the future in space looks very bright indeed.

I’d argue we need to advance spaceflight technology at as fast a pace as possible. Yes it does add CO2 to the atmosphere, but we’ve also gained some great advances through our exploration of space.

We’re doing a lot of things wrong on this planet, a whole fucking lot. But rocketry is one of the few things we’re starting to do right and the bottom line is this, the situation on earth is not great, and it could get worse. Ultimately, the situation on earth will get a lot worse when a huge, life ending, continent obliterating asteroid hits the planet (and not if it hits earth, but when it hits earth). We should absolutely continue living on earth and striving to make it a good place to live, but we also, desperately need to get a foothold off of earth. When the next global calamity occurs (and it will), I would prefer if it didn’t end all known intelligent life in the galaxy.

My understanding is that quantum computing has been taken into account for some modern cryptography. And that memory-hard cryptography basically defeats quantum computing solutions. There are a few methods, but one of them is just very long keys, it’s trivial to make a cryptographic key longer.

So sure, you could defeat some of that with a machine operating with 1024 entangled qbits, (which is… oh man… not an easy task), in which case, wow, congratulations. But what if I increase my key length to 100k? It might take an extra 3 seconds to check the key and log in, but it’ll take an extra 25 years for quantum computing to catch up.

True, but honestly look at that lock, you can open that with a paperclip.

I still like it.

My mom had a nice little notebook for passwords. But when she passed, we couldn’t find it anywhere… We went through the whole apartment, everything.

Not having her passwords made a lot of things harder, closing her accounts, accessing her laptop, phone, etc. So while you shouldn’t advertise it, do tell a few people where to find it if they need to.