>Drawing his own blood in zero gravity, for example, was a familiar routine. “I’ve had a couple spills in my time,” Mr. Kelly said. “You just reach out and grab the blobs of blood.”
That paragraph stopped me short. It reads like something from a Heinlein novel.
I absolutely love hearing stories from astronauts about how quickly they adapt to microgravity and how easy it is to forget when they come back.
Things like stories of them suddenly letting go of stuff they are holding on earth and expecting it to float there, or reaching out to grab on to a wall to stop themselves while walking down a hallway.
I've heard a couple of similar stories from people who spend a lot of time in VR and forget that the rules don't transfer back. One guy smacked his head into the fridge door trying to look inside it because he forgot that he would actually collide with the door.
Now that you mention that i've absolutely felt that from VR! In my case it was because I got so used to the ability to point at something, "grab" it in the distance, then float it to my hand, that I tried to do it at one point to a can of soda in real life and felt really dumb!
I heavily played GTA: Vice City during the time I learned how to drive. After I got my driver's licence, I remember one instance where I clearly noticed how my brain drifted into GTA mode while I was driving through town. I had to actively remember myself that this is a real environment and that I cannot just drive over the street lamp post without anything happening. I talked to a classmate about this and he had had a similar experience, but with Mafia (which had a very realistic car handling, you could even activate an expert mode where you had to shift manually iirc).
I crashed my car this way, but the game I was playing a lot was need for speed underground (I drove my exact car on the game). Was getting onto the freeway in Palo Alto, drifted right into the side of the onramp. As I was about to hit the wall my mind snapped out of it and I realized I can’t slide off the wall in real life, but it was also too late to stop.
This has been part of my concern with such things. I don't know that the alarmism about "violent videogames create young terrorist-wannabes" is correct, but it's hard (especially as games become increasingly photorealistic and physics become more and more accurate) to distinguish, I'm sure.
It's a little scary to think we might have a guy run someone else over, and plead insanity saying "I thought it was a videogame". This strikes me as another manifestation of the same problem we will have to deal with concerning things like Google Duplex: is it okay to have robots that can impersonate humans? Games that can impersonate the real world? There was a discussion the other day on how online dating apps are causing a large percentage of men to end up "involuntarily celibate"; some people proposed sex-bots as a solution. Can we really live with ourselves as people and as a society if these things come to pass?
That's the thing, though. It's not "I thought I was in a video game, officer." (In fact that's often used as a strawman.) It's "my reflexes were slightly perturbed by the amount of time I've spent practicing an activity that looks very similar to this activity but has very different rules in some circumstances."
I'm surprised you developed connections between the two - I've been playing computer games a longtime, and find the cognitive load and muscle memory of real world activities to be markedly different than something like GTA, but I only was playing Need for Speed 2 as I learned to drive, so maybe that didn't quite meet the realism requirements, not to say Vice City is some VR masterpiece, but it was credible in its day.
if you drive down a straight road in a quiet town at constant speed and don't have to shift, I don't think the cognitive load is much bigger than driving around in GTA. After all, you are basically just scanning the environment in front of you for obstacles. It also seems to go both ways: when I returned to playing GTA after a few months, I was driving much more carefully in the game.
For real, though, apparently there was a notable increase in young driver deaths when all the kids who grew up on Gran Turismo started driving for real. A whole generation had been trained on some level that crashing had no serious consequences.
I used to play a lot of emulated games with save states, and afterward, I kept getting small bouts of depression every time I realized I couldn't save the world and perfect something crazy.
Do what you got to do, but I'd like to take a moment to say I signed up for an online subscription. Journalism is important and I'm ok with a couple bucks a month to support it.
To each their own. I've found WSJ is fine, it gets a little simplistic at times where I find it a bit disingenuous. Too many "here's a one line bar graph that shows a thing going up 10 years after de/regulation" like that's not evidence of anything.... but that's hardly unique among news these days.
Outside of what I think are the obviously truly "biased" groups, I don't perceive it as just left or right all the time. I think there's a lot of room to cover a story various ways and not necessarily be "biased". But I certainly see how folks think that way, it does worry me though, even on HN you'll see "here's 3 negative sounding articles about this topic... that reporter is biased". Like that's not necessarily biased man...
I agree that WSJ isn't perfect, I just think it's good about breaking news and original reporting. The rest, I get from other sources (including far-left and far-right ones). It's part of a balanced news diet, so to speak.
I understand not everyone is biased, but the NYT is still not good about it. The top of their front page today is the Israeli election "through the eyes of a palestinian". Top of the page has an article called, "How Capitalism Betrayed Privacy". Also top is an article entitled, "How Big Business Is Hedging Against the Apocalypse", followed by an article about how the "digital world is not designed to keep women safe." that advocates for regulation (but seriously, why would we design the internet to keep one group safe? And how?).
I understand that doesn't make everything they report wrong, and I still read articles by them, but I'd rather support the WSJ if I've got to pick one.
Brave browser + anti-fingerprinting and blocking third party cookies gets rid of 90% of paywalls, including NYT. Blocking scripts gets rid of 9% more and then you're left with 1% that are quite onerous. All these settings are one-click options which can be saved on a per-site basis (if, for instance you'd prefer to allow device fingerprinting by default for some reason) using the lion icon in the top right.
It also now has things like one click instanced tor browsing (e.g. if its necessary to spoof your location for some site) and more. It started out as a nice idea, but has become leagues ahead of every other browser in terms of privacy. It's incidental, and I think poetic, that basic privacy protection ends up breaking paywalls as many are dependent upon tracking users.
Yeah, so far there were just estimations. Even this is still in a wayI mean my gf's father has a twin and they were mirror image of each other but then in less than 5 years both became so different that you can hardly even tell that they are related in any way. If there will be few more twins to repeat this project then a more generic result could be gathered.
Yea, it's pretty rare to find identical twins, and rarer still to have one of them enter a space program. Hopefully we'll see more volunteer for research like this in the future.
It is certainly a bad sample size, but it's a start.
Maybe the reality is that all the science fiction stories have got it wrong all these times: that we have to genetically engineer different humans to traverse interplanetary (and in the far future, interstellar) distances and to live in alien worlds, so that we have less in common with them, physiologically, than we have with, say, the Cro Magnons.
The Expanse series kinda touches on this. In those fictional books, those raised in space (Belters, Luna, etc.) are often taller being raised in lower gravity.
Kim Stanley Robinson also kinda hits on this describing people who are raised on Mars. I highly recommend the Mars trilogy; best Sci-Fi I've ever read.
I imagine interstellar travel with some kind of Matrix-like hibernation. But all the problems with interplanetary are just a matter of stinginess. Low gravity? Make a 2001 style ring. Radiation? Make a big ass ship with enough isolation.
Is that astronomically expensive? Of course. But avoid gravity well. Start building a Moon base with mining facilities, then move to Ceres, and son on.
Current Mars fever is a distraction. We have no idea what Mars gravity could do to babies born there. Do parents have the right to raise their children in Mars? Even if they're viable, they might want to come to Earth and find out their bodies won't resist the gravity. What about waiting for animal tests?
Yes, but it's a distraction from doing absolutely nothing at all with humans in space. I agree in a saner world we'd have built a Moon base first, and then moved on from there. But it's apparently not how we as a civilization operate.
Instead we set lofty and slightly impractical goals. If we meet those goals, we usually take two steps back and wait for a few generations. But if we are not successful, we usually never try again.
It's not ideal, but yes, I'd absolutely prefer an ambitious Mars program over nothing at all. And for decades, until recently, nothing at all was where we were comfortable.
> We have no idea what Mars gravity could do to babies born there. Do parents have the right to raise their children in Mars?
Historically, we have been very bad at predicting these things, and we usually mispredicted on the side of doom. Yes, there will be a physiological impact, not just on babies, on everybody living there. However, there is no reason as such to assume babies in particular would be unviable there.
Today, parents can and regularly do make decisions about their children's mental and physical health that are absolutely known to be detrimental. For better or worse, we generally accept that children are brought up completely powerless over their lifestyle, their healthcare, their economic situation, their education, their belief system... Compared to that settling on another world with unknown dangers seems at least on par.
I'd wager that a child born on Mars today is way more likely to die of things other than gravity or the lack thereof. We already have animal test data in microgravity.
>I agree in a saner world we'd have built a Moon base first, and then moved on from there.
Mars is more livable than the moon because it has atmospheric CO2, (more) water, and a better mineral story.
>Today, parents can and regularly do make decisions about their children's mental and physical health that are absolutely known to be detrimental.
After decades of parenting and diet fads followed by a replication crisis, it's clear that nothing which filters down to the parents could be called anything close to known (much less absolutely).
Mars is more livable than the moon because it has atmospheric CO2, (more) water, and a better mineral story.
The goal of a Moon base is not living there, it's building from a place near to Earth but outside the gravity well. Martian atmosphere and water are a pie in the sky. If we're unable to build a base in the Moon, how are we supposed to do it in Mars? If we can do it in the Moon, it would be incredibly useful for preparing a Mars base.
That's all pretty obvious and it was the plan half a century ago. The only reason Mars is getting so much attention is to captivate our imagination. But what's the real purpose of living in Mars? I can't see the reason. I do see why it would be useful to send humans to space in general.
Or, as I always say when this comes up, start with a base on the top of Mt Everest. Much more similar to Mars, and definitely cheaper to try. With all the challenges of no breathable air, storms, inhospitable rocky terrain, bleak environment.
If this seems ridiculous or impossible, then that's the state of our Mars colony ambitions as well.
There is already an undersea base for training astronauts for the ISS. There is also the ISS, which is already a significantly more challenging environment than Everest. Although it would be nice to have scientific outposts in all of these places, one must bear in mind that these things are very expensive, so the cost/benefit of the scientific value has to be weighed carefully. The cheapest option is not always the best value.
A lunar space station called LOP-G (lunar orbital platform gateway) is presently planned, and although it is a "smaller step" it is being widely attacked for not being useful.
So Everest would be possible? Am I hearing that? No launch costs, you can walk away if you need to (depending on the weather). Has to be cheaper by billions than an orbital station.
It would absolutely be possible to have a base on the peak of Everest. I think you can even get up there with helicopters. The only question is, what would be the scientific value? Astronauts do not go to the ISS just because they love living in cramped quarters for six months... ;)
Live for a year without resupply, generate own heat and power, prove you can survive. And do useful work. Before committing human beings to Mars. The topic of this discussion.
It seems a bit as if you're not reading my comment in the context it was intended for.
> Mars is more livable than the moon because it has atmospheric CO2, (more) water, and a better mineral story.
The post I was answering posited a Moon base first because it's a less ambitious test bed, and I think that is largely correct. I was not making the case for a self-sufficient Moon colony instead of colonizing Mars.
> it's clear that nothing which filters down to the parents could be called anything close to known (much less absolutely).
It is very hard to make that argument convincingly in the face of, say, honor killings. Yes, theoretically you could argue that parents who intentionally harm their child technically do not "know" any better. But if we are talking on that level, that is certainly not an argument in support of why giving birth to a baby on Mars is somehow worse.
For interstellar distances I'd go with Greg Egan's Diaspora and Accelerando by Charlie Stross and assume that interstellar distances could only be achieved with uploaded minds - bags of meat and fluid being far too big, slow and delicate for the energies and distances involved.
I think it's more likely that we would peruse spinning space habitats to simulate gravity regardless of whether zero gravity has long term and irreversible negative effects on the human body. I don't think it'll be quite necessary to genetically modify anyone.
The point is that it changed in ways different to his twin's body, and some of those changes even reverted once he was back on earth for a while. It's pretty unlikely that this is all just an anomaly and the regular changes of a body over the course of a year independent of the fact he was in space.
That paragraph stopped me short. It reads like something from a Heinlein novel.