New answers tagged space
2
Plantlife may be the source of your planet's oxygen, but their production is only very loosely coupled to the total oxygen levels in the air.
For example, if all plantlife on Earth were to die, immediately, including all ocean plankton etc. Zero remaining oxygen producers.
.
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We would all die of old age before we ran out of oxygen to breathe. Assuming an ...
8
Oxygen production and forest levels need not corelate!
Net oxygen production by forests on Earth is basically zero. Forests have microbes (and animals) which consume almost all the oxygen the forest creates.
(In case it needs to be said This is not a reason to cut the rainforests down)
So answers to your question:
The ocean is responsible for most of the ...
6
Larger Oxygen Sinks, like dissolved iron in oceans
In earth's history, the amount of oxygen in the atmosphere has not been constant, in fact there was a mass extinction event that corresponded to the drastic increase in oxygen (which was toxic to many of the existing life forms at the time). During this period there were a few sources of oxygen, one of which ...
0
The same as on our planet Earth
As other answers note, because the star is red, the red and yellow in your rainbow will be brighter than some of the other colours.
But it takes a while to travel to and from this planet. Nobody ever just drops by. So if you are on Planet Red, you are either:
a newcomer, and attest that the colours seem weird on this new ...
3
More reds and yellows, not as much blues and greens.
of course, its not going to be exclusively red, just brighter red. The star emits all wavelengths (of visible light at least) and as such a rainbow will have all of the wavelengths as well. Think of it like adding more red paint to a paint mixture, the other paint is still there, theres just more red now.
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You'd get a rainbow with brighter red and yellow, and dimmer green and blue.
What is often missed in discussion of "red stars" (like M class red dwarves) is that the surface temperature of those stars is similar to that of the tungsten filament in an old-style incandescent light bulb -- which, though fairly yellow when compared to a truly white ...
2
I mean it just depends on what you are looking for. Or what the Station is suppose to do, besides keeping everyone alive.
Food
To make it simple, there is no point in investing into any kind of on Board food Production. The Avg American eats 900kg of Food each Year. So even with a very unhealty diet and a bit of extra on top of that, you would not even reach ...
3
About the same size as the current ISS (915 cubic meters)
Lets start with food
It takes 6-8 weeks to grow lettuce in hydroponics. One head of lettuce gives 120 calories, which in useful energy units is 500kj. You need ~6600kj to keep your bodies critical systems running if you sleep/watch TV all day, ~9000kj a day for a mostly idle human moving around a bit ...
5
Living Compartment:
For this you can look at underground bunker floor plans to get an idea of what space limited people need. A floor plan similar to this 10x30ft (600 sqft) bunker could easily accommodate a 2-3 person crew's living space needs.
Life Support Needs:
In general, any mission as short as 5 years is better off using stored food than trying to ...
1
The electroweak star is a very brief (on cosmological scale) transient state.
It results from a supernova explosion, for a very limited range of star sizes.
It lasts only about 10 million years.
It is about 8km radius.
Core temperature is 10^15K, but only for a very small region of the core that actually produces energy.
The extreme vast bulk of this energy ...
1
According to the electroweak star wikipedia article, the star has a temperature of $10^{15}$ degrees Kelvin. This article provides a little more information, that the star is about 8.2 kilometers in diameter.
The power being radiated from the electroweak star is, then, $P = A \epsilon \sigma T^4$ watts per meter squared. $\epsilon$ can be simplified as 1.0 ...
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I think @Helena's answer above is wonderful, it's what I would say (20 year IT industry veteran, mainly as a Network Engineer, and a fair chunk was supporting a long-distance microwave WAN link between two cities)
I'd like to add two bits to the conversation though, first, this:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/newsround/54611342
...so the answer will be IRL at some ...
-1
Invest in photonic (laser, photon q-bit) quantum links. China already demonstrated "quantum teleportation" (of information, not matter) in LEO, using photon qubits. However, such decent evil mogul as yourself, should think bigger and get into phosphorus-exciton qubits. When Phoshorus atom is "pierced" with properly set laser pulse, an ...
2
How much of the internet becomes inaccessible with Lunar ping times?
Technically there is nothing that will be inaccessible, just a bunch that is going to be frustratingly slow. Slower than most people think because of how the internet works, but not completely broken.
To reduce the latency impact you'll need a few things...
Orbit To Ground communication ...
3
Video streaming generally won't work
Most video streaming systems split videos into 2-10 second segments, usually 6, and the client is responsible for downloading each segment in order using HTTPS (See HLS and DASH). Which means:
A TCP handshake (3 round trips, i.e. 6 seconds, could maybe send acknowledgements before receiving the packets to short-circuit ...
3
An evil villain, who can manage two-way transport for himself, hordes of yellow minions, and construction of facilities, can surely manage the installation of a sizable data farm.
Your evil villain can further boost his ego by making a local copy of the internet (a giant internet mirror for the moon) that automatically synchronizes with the Earth-based ...
8
A lot of websites would work just fine. Its just that they would be really slow.
Having myself written a lot of networking code for custom systems, I know a little about this problem.
You are correct that TCP (which is the backbone of most internet communications) would have to wait a minimum of 2s for the acknowledge on each data segment. This would slow ...
3
Latency and bandwidth for a one-way link are independent (like a fiber-optic cable, or a giant frickin' laser ... modulated and pointed at a receiver, probably on a relay satellite). A long high-bandwidth link simply has a large "latency x bandwidth product" aka BDP (Bandwidth Delay Product) = amount of data that can be "in flight" over ...
3
Two-second ping times are not an issue outside of interactive applications which require reactions in real-time, such as telerobotics or most online games.
TCP, as a general rule, doesn't care about latency, and RFC 1149, "A Standard for the Transmission of IP Datagrams on Avian Carriers", has been successfully implemented with ping times in the 3 ...
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Invite Big Tech
Instead of solving the problem by yourself, which is basically impossible for many jibbly bits of the internet that you and your minions care about, do what Big Tech does, and push the hard work onto someone else. Tell them you are building an open community on the moon, and naturally, your moonie citizens will want internet access. Wave ...
51
I'll claim expertise on this issue since I live in the Arctic in a remote community where all telecommunication is via satellite and, based on the quick test I just ran, I have about a 750 millisecond ping. And that's vastly improved over what I had to deal with just a few years ago.
It's entirely not an issue so long as, as some people have mentioned, ...
22
Without modifications you would have a multiple of these 2 seconds, since you need to make a DNS request and a three-way handshake to make TCP connections.
But even with 10 seconds the delay isn't that big. User experience would suck, and competitive online game would be out of the question, but from a technical point of view latency should not be a big ...
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Web browsing will be slow but work out of the box
Most modern web content authoring implicitly assumes latency is much lower. So a lot of code is written that does some computation locally, then based on the result, contacts a server and requests additional info.
Google shows different results depending on who you're logged in as. Many site designs now use ...
7
As per my answer to How can invading aliens access the Internet to find out all about us?, the threshold for proper communication in TCP/IP should be a handful of minutes (3 for many servers). UDP on the other hand doesn't care by design, though some applications(i.e.: Skype, Zoom) are programmed to care and may drop connections that have high latency.
Your ...
11
Since you have the funds to build a moonbase, you should be able to cache a vast majority of the Internet for comparatively little cost.
Google says the Internet is about 1.2 million Terrabytes, but you can get a 2TB hard drive for about 70 USD. So you could store a local copy of the entire Internet for about 84 million USD. Considering NASA was throwing ...
1
Weekly on/off stacking alternating cycle
The problem with Ash's answer is that it's not as simple as it can be. Think about it, you have to deal with a full day one way or another every time you skip for any reason. So you might as well pick nice, round numbers as much as possible. Might give yourself a 10% buffer or so to be more flexible.
Here's my ...
0
Running the Maths, I think this is how it works:
A Martian Day is 88,642 seconds. An Earth Day is 86,400 seconds.
Over the course of 365.25 Days, Mars will have an excess of 818,890.5 seconds to lose, which equates to 9.24 Mars Days.
So they can skip 1 day a month for 3 months out of every 4, and then they can mirror Leap Years on Earth for the other 0.24 of ...
2
Frame Challenge: Syncing weekends would not happen
The reason everyone here on Earth likes to sync up their weekends is so that normal people can predict when service businesses will be open or closed. These are things like restaurants, doctor's offices, tech support hotlines, etc. But between Earth and Mars, there can be no exchange of services, because ...
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Spin up Mars! (so it comes to sync with Earth)
As a part of the teraforming process they need to haul large masses of water and other volatile substances. Think about Asimov's martians that bring a kilometers-sized piece of Saturn's rings. To bring them down to the surface, instead of landing them softly, an acretion-like process may be used.
This will ...
3
"Layers have to be added until enough precision is achieved."
What's wrong with that? It's not like every schoolchild has to do the math on their own.
Think leap years and leap seconds on Earth. Only one institution with a handful of super-smart, super-knowledgeable time nerds has to do the math. It publishes the results with a very high lead time. ...
12
Frame Challenge: When asked why you responded with this comment.
I think it could reduce surprises for the people who need to interact with Earthlings. Sending an email on a Tuesday on Mars could reasonably take a day for a response, but if you don't realize that's their Saturday at the time, you end up having to wait 2-3 days for a response. Obviously, it'...
1
Only one rule: Every month that is single digits starts a weekday skipped. (The rule does not apply to october, november, december as those are double-digit months, but any mechanism to pick 9 months per year works.)
This will keep martian weekends pretty well aligned with earth weekends for a long time.
Example:
August 31 is a Monday -> September 1 is a ...
-2
The solution could perhaps be to work at a lower level and modify the smaller time increments, rather than trying to fit a martion day into an earth one,
If martian timekeeping used a slightly extended length of time for a second (or minute if preferred) then hours and days would stay in sync with their earth counterparts. Devices on mars would need to be ...
18
If it works with your general scenario, they could just have a regular week, but switch the Earth timezone they sync with West every ~2 days. They would drop a day when they cross the date border, but would always have someone on Earth that shares their weekday and roughly time of day.
Of course the would not work if ground control is based in one or few ...
16
Since the lack of a magnetic field would pretty much force any large scale habitation to be done underground and any time spent outside being expensive and needing shielding it wouldn't be at all difficult to use Earth time.
They could use Earth time underground and translate to Martian on the rare occasions they go out which would mostly just be specialists ...
34
The solution for this is intercalendary days, like you suggested. This is needed any time something doesn't divide neatly. Our day doesn't divide neatly into our year so the rule is:
February 29th exists when the year is divisible by 4
Unless the year is divisible by 100
Unless the year is also divisible by 400.
So 2000 and 1600 are leap years, 1900 wasn't....
0
First off, assume faster-than-light communication exists
If FTL communication exists, then backwards-in-time communication can be achieved. Dedicate your effort to that. When you're finished, ask the Martians when the meeting would have been convenient, and schedule it for then.
1
The problem here is that the Martian Sol is 37 minutes longer than it is on Earth.
It's extremely commonplace in sci-fi stories/worlds that, humans just ignore the local "rotation time of the body they are living on" and adopt usual Earth time.**
I would point out to you that IF you have the Martian dwellers for some reason decide to suffer ...
1
Similar to a current potential Cold War with China and the United States, have both sides depend on each other for some degree of resources and economic support. The Soviet Union had a Marxist socialist command economy unlike the United States' market economy, but both nations could theoretically, and for the most part actually, attack each other in covert ...
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The same way meetings are scheduled now: whenever the boss wants to have it. Doesn't matter if you're a night owl and work until after midnight, if the boss isn't, s/he will still schedule breakfast meetings. (Don't ask me how I know this, as I will be unable to resist the temptation to use impolite language.)
Things can get even worse when you're running ...
45
The same way we do now.
I work for a multinational company, with colleagues distributed across a dozen time zones. When I need to schedule a meeting with many people, I simply open Outlook, and look at their calendar to find a free time that is within normal working hours for everyone. I don't need to do any mental calculation of what time it is where, the ...
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Don't. At least, not more than you strictly have to.
For day to day operations, your input should not be necessary. If it is, fire the person at the head of the Martian org chart and get someone more reliable. If you're a large enough company to consider opening a satellite office on another planet you're large enough to find someone competent to put in ...
-1
We all die.
There is no easy way to say it. Discussion of underground habitats and power requirements are moot... we don't know how to make closed environment systems which actually work. Even with planning and preparation and decent conditions, our best sealed biosphere experiments have lasted months, not years. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biosphere_2
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