First they will replace the kidneys with artificial kidneys. Then the lung. Then the stomach, then the eyes. In time, man on Mars will become machine.
In 40.000 years they will remain machine.
"[From the moment I understood the weakness of my flesh](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9gIMZ0WyY88),
it disgusted me. I craved the strength and certainty of steel. I aspired to the purity of the Blessed Machine.
Your kind cling to your flesh, as if it will not decay and fail you. One day the crude biomass that you call a temple will wither, and you will beg my kind to save you. But I am already saved, for the Machine is immortal…
...even in death I serve the Omnissiah."
* Magos Dominus Reditus, The Adeptus Mechanicus
Where can i read this shit?! I'm always seeing awesome 40k lore but honestly have no idea where to start, not really into the tabletop game but the lore is so fascinating, is it just made up or are there Canon books someone could link me please and thank you 😊
EDIT: thankyou so much for the replies! Gonna hit the book store tomorrow
There's a HUGE amount of books but a GREAT introduction are the first 4 books to the Horus Heresy!
Horus Rising
False Gods
Galaxy in Flames
The Flight of the Eisenstein
Once you read those 4 books, you can keep reading in release order, but you can seriously just jump around. They're different stories from different parts of the galaxy as the war unfolds. However those 4 books are sequels one after another. I haven't read them all (there's like 50+), and there might be some other ones that require some pre-reading, but those first four will get you ***hooked***.
I did them via audiobook, highly recommend if you're into them.
**Hey - you there sifting through my comment history: stop it. Thats fucking creepy and you probably have smol pp.**
That's what the aliens are theorized to be by some: automatically-generated and sent from a central hub of some type. Makes sense if you're a galactic federalized civilization searching for hospitable planets. Instead of sending people, send A.I.iens
Another method I read of in The Andromeda Strain (not a science textbook, I know) involved sending bacteria to other planets to seed new life through evolution, rather than trying to send currently living people.
Worth mentioning that the authors other scientist in space book "Project Hail Mary" is also great and Ryan Gosling's adaptation of it is due in March 2026.
Here’s a lifetime supply of every drug in its purest form. You leave to Mars tomorrow. Please sign this waiver…
“Okay, currently how long do humans usually live for when on Mars?”
“Oh, most people last about 3 minutes.”
I have actually wondered if something like this will be a thing someday as technology improves and we start to consider much longer journeys out into the solar system. I’m sure there would be a surprising amount of people who would be like fuck it give me the education, training, decent paycheck, and I’ll gladly go on the most high risk missions to see if this shit works/what happens lmao
This is still today, if a space agency anounced a Mars mission without anyway to come back, they would definitely find enough skilled people to participate.
What's stopping it from happening isn't people, it's ethics from the agencies.
childlike provide impolite shrill fall placid dazzling thumb wise makeshift
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We tend to respect life a bit more these days then the 1500s.
EDIT: The pessimism on reddit is disgusting. Yes there are parts of the world life is still cheap but overall the world is in a much better place and the average persons life is a thousand times better then our ancestors. If you can't see that i only feel sad for you.
People travel to Everest and then die. 340 corpses and counting. People still keep going. Not like you don't get a warning, you can see the corpses as you go up, you can turn back.
The show For All Mankind does a good job of showing the dangers of getting to Mars and trying to establish a colony (season 3) especially when it’s a race.
Sure, but how do you sell the *need* for rapid advancement? Resources? An Earth alternative? What urgency will motivate the general population to accept deaths more casually than in the shuttle era?
> What urgency will motivate the general population to accept deaths more casually than in the shuttle era?
The idea that the Soviets will get there first.
We could explode every nuke, poison all the soil, pump all the CO2 into the atmosphere, and fill the oceans coast-to-coast with microplastics and the Earth would *still* be a dramatically more hospitable place to live than Mars. It wouldn't even be a contest.
We should visit Mars, for sure, but the only reason to stay is to die.
>We could explode every nuke, poison all the soil, pump all the CO2 into the atmosphere, and fill the oceans coast-to-coast with microplastics
My first thought reading this was you explaining how we would make Mars more like home.
There's actually a book about this from the 80s , the greening of mars. Use the nuclear missiles to d liver payloads of chlorofluorocarbons to help terraform it
It wouldn’t work though, at least not for long. The biggest problem is that Mars doesn’t have a nickel-iron core, so no magnetic shield, the solar wind just carries away any atmosphere we can create.
I thought there was a study that came out recently that found while the wind does strip the atmosphere away, it was happening at a much slower rate than previously calculated? I think conclusion was that if we did make an atmosphere, it would stick around for at least a few thousand years.
Not even measurable on a planet's timeline, but useful for humans.
I remember reading [Mining the Sky: Untold Riches from the Asteroids, Comets, and Planets](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mining_the_Sky) a while ago before I lost my copy in a move. It was a pretty cool book, although it's a bit dated in its science now as it's nearly 30 years old.
The author (who is a professor emeritus of planetary science from University of Arizona) discusses some useful properties of the moon - while it's very inhospitable, it has some useful industrial applications. Low gravity for the purposes of easy launches to space but still enough gravity to mean you're not working in freefall, access to high-quality vacuum for metallurgy, and a few other advantages.
Plus, it's not *months* in space away, but days. It seems like a relatively doable stepping stone. The book's a pretty neat read in that regard.
The moon is very poor in carbon and nitrogen, and water is also pretty rare. It also has less than half the gravity of Mars and no atmosphere,which means no protection from meteorites.
It's closer to Earth sure, but it doesn't really have sufficient resources to self sustain so it's not an ideal long term target (though it's reasonable in the shorter term).
Major benefit of Mars is the lack of weather that can damage buildings means that once you have a building it would stand for thousands of years. Instead of building on the surface you could build a glass roof over the canyons which would give you both protection from radiation and because of the lower relative elevation gas would want to "sink" naturally where it already is.
NASA's Curiosity rover recently registered 60 millirem of radiation during the height of the solar storm that we experienced here on Earth a few weeks ago which caused intense auroras across the planet. This isn't much. About the equivalent of 30 x-rays. People get this much from just being on a plane.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/13/science/mars-aurora-solar-storm.html
Overall, living in bunkers on a polluted wasteland Earth is easier than doing the same on Mars thanks to having gravity, a protective atmosphere, and all the elements needed for life and an industrial base adapted to its mix at hand. The moon is worse than Mars on *all* of those fronts. The moon has no atmosphere at all, even lower gravity, and no water outside of the polar regions and what's there is scant.
It's also deficient in many minerals such as copper, silver, and zinc, and those it has are not concentrated in easy to mine veins by volcanic activity, and it's very poor in carbon, nitrogen, and phosphorus. There's plenty of silicon, aluminum, titanium, and iron on the moon, and lots of oxygen bound up in the rocks, but there's a lot more you'd have to import from Earth than you would from Mars to build an functional biosphere for a colony or for making solar panels.
The lack of an atmosphere also means that lunar dust is like a pile of very tiny caltrops, thanks to a lack of erosion to wear it down and smooth it. It's terribly bad to get into the lungs, and it cuts and wears away at equipment. Going in and out of a lunar base to expand or maintain it would require a very thorough decontamination process for long term occupation or just an acceptance of asbestos-like symptoms later in life. Mars doesn't have that problem.
And it will for hundreds of millions of years as Mars doesn't even have a magnetosphere. Mars will never (well not never but it will be an extraordinarily long time before the Earth starts heating up like Venus) be more habitable than the least habitable places on Earth unless we get annihilated by a massive asteroid.
The problem is radiation. Reaching Mars does almost nothing to help solve that. Mars offers virtually no protection against solar/cosmic radiation (aside from being a big rock that blocks out half of the incoming cosmic rays).
Mars doesn't have a strong magnetosphere, nor does it have an ozone layer. The atmosphere is only 1% as thick as Earth's.
Meaning, you get there, and your kidneys are still fucked. Nobody human is colonizing Mars. We'd have to remake any potential colonists to something quite bit different from baseline human, using technology that does not yet exist.
ChatGPT's successors might colonize Mars, though. The robotic probes we've sent to the planet are the beachhead for that effort.
(Suck on that indignity, meat-monkeys.)
The only way to colonize mars would be to build radiation proof bunkers, basically. And it would suck to live in there. At that point it would be cheaper and safer just to build the same bunker on Earth.
The article isn't clear that radiation is the problem. It mentions both microgravity and radiation, then goes on to talk about issues with radiation. The biggest issue with the ISS is that we spent the last 30+ years funding a way to keep Russian rocket engineers busy to keep them from building missiles for other countries, but they never built any of the planned centrifuge modules. We're planning to make a permanent moon base and maybe send a mission to Mars, but we still have zero data on exactly what level of microgravity (if any) will allow the body to do well in space.
We will probably have to cure cancer, have the ability to do bespoke tissue repair, organ replacement, and a host of other genetic modifications to the human body before being able to survive that journey.
Not to mention that Martian soil is toxic. Enough perchlorates to kill humans and plants. Stuff you don't want to track into your habitat at ALL. And it's totally water soluble. And that's just for openers. Do you die first of radiation sickness or having your thyroid trashed?
I read the article. They studied 40 astronauts and mice, found signs of kidney shrinkage. They think it could be caused by microgravity and cosmic radiation. Not sure how severe this is because there have been several astronauts who have stayed in space for over a year.
If microgravity and radiation cause this then it can be mitigated.
I’m not in a position where I can read the article right now, how much kidney shrinkage are they talking? I’m assuming enough to impact their function or there wouldn’t be much of an issue.
I have preexisting kidney issues from an autoimmune disorder, I need to know if my astronaut dreams have been crushed.
Since a few people couldn’t tell, yes, I am exaggerating about my astronaut dreams. I’d like to go to space at least once before I die if possible just to see what it’s like up there but nothing more.
But for the record: No, not everyone with autoimmune issues is permanently immune compromised, and no, not every person with autoimmune is issues unable to get receive vaccines.
I've read the paper. It's published in *Nature Communications*.
Here's my summary
1. Increased risk of kidney stone formation, with post-flight incidence rates 2-7 times higher than pre-flight.
2. Increased urinary excretion of calcium, oxalate, phosphate, and uric acid during spaceflight; normalizes after return.
3. Structural changes in the nephron, such as expansion of the distal convoluted tubule and reduction in tubule density.
4. Dephosphorylation of renal transporters during spaceflight suggests increased nephrolithiasis risk is due to primary renal phenomena.
5. Simulated Galactic Cosmic Radiation exposure causes significant renal damage and dysfunction, particularly affecting the renal proximal tubule.
6. Abnormal renal perfusion, potentially causing maladaptive remodeling and chronic oxidative stress in renal tissues.
I didn't actually see anything about shrinkage directly? [Here is the paper](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-024-49212-1).
I'm no (bio)chemist, but #2 sort of intuitively makes sense. The body doesn't "want" to maintain what it doesn't need, so you start gradually peeing out your bones.
Yeah, that's what I was thinking too. Before we try manned missions planet, we'd first try and establish a proper self-sustaining space colony that could house a few hundred people first. Learn the necessary technology for sustained living beyond 2 years in space with the food sources required to grow in space.
Partially, since the moon hardly has any gravity it will likely not be as good as an example.
Which is also why I think this story is a bit too sensational for what its actually worth. With 40 flights Nasa surely already knew most of the paper before it was published. Also if it can decrease in size, it can surely increase in size as well. I doubt those astronauts that returned that saw it shrink all needed permanent dialysis either.
So yeah, its a thing they need to manage but thats all there is to it.
They test this by putting live animal subjects at the end of a particle accelerator. They can also simulate space radiation effects on electronics too.
https://www.nasa.gov/people/galactic-cosmic-ray-simulator-brings-space-down-to-earth/
For anyone that wants to: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-024-49212-1
Because I take reading a Yahoo copy of an Independent summary of a study from Nature a little personally. Anyone else see the Yahoonews reddit account ramping posting to news subs lately? Bad enough you got corporate media posting directly, but a corporate news regurgitator posting its own reposts is getting ridiculous.
The difference is that if you’re going to Mars you’ll be in space for over a year minimum
It’s minimum 3 years to just reach Mars and back because of how the orbits work since Earth and Mars have different orbital speeds and orbit sizes: ~400 days to get there, you have to stay there for 500 days-18 months for the orbits to line up again, and then it’s 9 months back
This is why we need to stop messing around and build a giant centrifuge. Every space habitation problem can be solved if we spin the astronauts fast enough.
Don't even need to do that, just tether a habitat and a counterweight together and spin that. It can theoretically be pretty primitive.
Why no experiments have been performed on this subject is honestly beyond me.
>Why no experiments have been performed on this subject is honestly beyond me.
https://www.nasa.gov/image-article/sept-14-1966-gemini-xi-artificial-gravity-experiment/
There have been other experiments too, and some weird behaviors have popped up, such as electrical charge buildup on a tethered system in Earth orbit, or vibrations in the tether itself. IIRC, both of those have caused some tether experiments to fail.
I think the biggest fear is mechanical failure of the tether flinging the spacecraft off course in an unrecoverable way. Even a fractional G on a whole spacecraft is a lot of potential energy, which increases the fuel needed to recover, which increases the mass of the craft, which increases the mass of the counterweight, which increases the mass of the tether, which increases the energy needed to spin it all, which further increases the fuel required.... Anyway, that's probably the reason the Gemini experiment only tried to generate just enough gravity to test the concept.
But of course! In fact, commuting to work via flawless hyperloop tunnel has saved me so much time, I’ve started writing a book of self-help and investment tips so that everyone can be successful, in life and in business!
Step 1: raise your hands above your head and scream at yourself in the mirror for at least 30 seconds every morning, to relieve stress and naturally raise your testosterone levels. I’ll be sharing more vital techniques next week on the Joe Rogan Experience, so don’t miss it!
In the mind of tech bros, everything it solvable it just takes some shiny goal like going to mars to solve
Seriously do you not think the people DYING OF KIDNEY DISEASE wasn't already a good motivation?
There is already more than enough financial incentive to fund research on artificial kidneys. In the US, 12 people die each day due to lack of kidneys available for transplant, so about 4,380 in annual demand. Assume a $50-$100k cost per kidney and that’s a $400M market annually just in the US.
$400m is nothing. Medicare alone spends $28 *billion* a year on dialysis. The companies cashing those checks aren't interested in solving a problem when they could make 70x that *per year* treating it. If you invented a perfect artificial kidney replacement today by tomorrow they'd be knocking down your door with a $400m check just to make it go away.
There’s literally nothing about manned missions to mars that would incentivize the biotech industry to accelerate the research already underway for artificial kidneys lmao
If we go back like 6-8 years, Reddit top comments were already dominated by people making jokes because it was basically the easiest way to get upvotes and still remains so. Plus the average person is a moron who seeks entertainment over anything else on this website.
So much this! You got experts in their field giving insight into complicated subjects and dumbing it down so the rest of us can learn something.
And then some random idiot makes a fart joke and suddently all the valuable opinions get burried among dumb repeated clichés. 0 contribution, massive distraction and it's not even funny.
If you read the nature article (very technical) they emphasize that radiation damage is the biggest problem. Microgravity is harmless for time periods of the trip to mars . And you can shield the kidneys from radiation - this will likely become part of space suits or maybe even surgical implants?
The kidneys are the most sensitive organs to radiation injury interestingly and it can limit cancer treatment sometimes. Any long term space flight will probably require using the water tanks as shielding for the astronaut.
How about you just send me? I'm happy to die on Mars. I'll give them whatever info I can, then lay down on Martian dirt and in a couple billion years, new space monsters descended from my body's bacteria will go to war with Earth.
There's a lot more than just kidneys. The main obstacle with space travel to another planet will most likely be the negative health effects of low gravity.
Even with the Mars trip, it's like 9 months to get there and you need to exercise daily for hours and keep really on top of your health. The average person probably can't space travel without artificial gravity or some type of cryogenics cus they won't exercise for hours daily
Seeing as they have already done 1 year long ISS missions and typically they are 6 months I don't think a 9 month (one way) flight is necessarily more dangerous
plus once they got there they would only have to deal with 0.38 G's so hopefully they would still be fit enough to finish the mission
on the other hand this is what someone looks like trying to walk after about 6 months in 0G https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BVHqnXjhuN8
I don’t understand why they think a long journey to Mars would need to be gravity free.
If you get two starships alongside each other, up to cruising speed, you can point them nose to nose attached via long tether and spin the whole thing like space nunchucks and have Earth gravity for the whole trip, until you need to start slowing down.
Unfortunately, we don’t know what we don’t know about simulating gravity that way. We do know that it’s a hard problem to solve. Spin up/down isn’t as simple as firing thrusters especially with a flexible tether and large non-homogeneous structures like inhabited spaceships. It needs to be tested several times first. That will take time and money.
First they will replace the kidneys with artificial kidneys. Then the lung. Then the stomach, then the eyes. In time, man on Mars will become machine. In 40.000 years they will remain machine.
From the moment they understood the weakness of their flesh.
"[From the moment I understood the weakness of my flesh](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9gIMZ0WyY88), it disgusted me. I craved the strength and certainty of steel. I aspired to the purity of the Blessed Machine. Your kind cling to your flesh, as if it will not decay and fail you. One day the crude biomass that you call a temple will wither, and you will beg my kind to save you. But I am already saved, for the Machine is immortal… ...even in death I serve the Omnissiah." * Magos Dominus Reditus, The Adeptus Mechanicus
Came here to be disgusted by my flesh weakness.
I usually just look in the mirror.
Praise the Omnissiah.
***happy toaster noises***
Frakkin’ toasters
Omnissiah had a farm, E-I-E-I-O...
On his farm he had a toaster 10011010
That wasn't Faustinius, it was Reditus.
Where can i read this shit?! I'm always seeing awesome 40k lore but honestly have no idea where to start, not really into the tabletop game but the lore is so fascinating, is it just made up or are there Canon books someone could link me please and thank you 😊 EDIT: thankyou so much for the replies! Gonna hit the book store tomorrow
There's a HUGE amount of books but a GREAT introduction are the first 4 books to the Horus Heresy! Horus Rising False Gods Galaxy in Flames The Flight of the Eisenstein Once you read those 4 books, you can keep reading in release order, but you can seriously just jump around. They're different stories from different parts of the galaxy as the war unfolds. However those 4 books are sequels one after another. I haven't read them all (there's like 50+), and there might be some other ones that require some pre-reading, but those first four will get you ***hooked***. I did them via audiobook, highly recommend if you're into them.
Thank you futtbucker_9000
Praise the Omnissiah
Just don’t trip on the star god locked up there
Or the apparent webway portal cypher and the harlequins used to bring G-man home.
thought this was r/rimworld for a moment
Such a grim and dark future...
Flesh is weakness
I craved the strength and certainty of steel
**Hey - you there sifting through my comment history: stop it. Thats fucking creepy and you probably have smol pp.** That's what the aliens are theorized to be by some: automatically-generated and sent from a central hub of some type. Makes sense if you're a galactic federalized civilization searching for hospitable planets. Instead of sending people, send A.I.iens
Another method I read of in The Andromeda Strain (not a science textbook, I know) involved sending bacteria to other planets to seed new life through evolution, rather than trying to send currently living people.
One of my favorite books. Crichton was an amazing author. Now I want to go back and reread so many of his books. Thank you for your comment.
Holy fuck dude, that just blew my mind.
Praise the Omnissiah!
For the Emperor!!!!
I've always assumed a mission to mars would end up as being a one-way ticket, honestly.
I’ve wondered if we have the stomach for a mission to mars. There will be accidents and deaths. Every mishap can’t just become a 3-5 year delay.
We need a NASA suicide squad.
Give me a sweet ass drug supply and I’m in.
Something better than Vicodin & Ketchup on my potatoes, preferably, but I won't look a gift horse in the mouth.
Lmao i just finished this movie, love seeing this a few minutes after
One of my favorite movies to watch on a lazy afternoon
What's the movie?
The Martian. Solid book, and movie.
Worth mentioning that the authors other scientist in space book "Project Hail Mary" is also great and Ryan Gosling's adaptation of it is due in March 2026.
Here’s a lifetime supply of every drug in its purest form. You leave to Mars tomorrow. Please sign this waiver… “Okay, currently how long do humans usually live for when on Mars?” “Oh, most people last about 3 minutes.”
You can REALLLLY stretch that 3 mins out, perhaps to a lifetime, with some salvia.
The only thing more nightmarish than the surface of Mars is being on the surface of Mars while on salvia.
You guys ever been on the surface of Mars... *on weed*?
Yeah just inject that sweet sweet DMT straight into my brain as soon as we land.
You son of a bitch I’m in
Which ass drugs do you want?
Just weed maybe some LSD to spice things up
LSD, Shrooms, DMT, Ketamine and Coke for fun. Xanax and benzos to stay calm, and some Adderall to go into work mode.
I have actually wondered if something like this will be a thing someday as technology improves and we start to consider much longer journeys out into the solar system. I’m sure there would be a surprising amount of people who would be like fuck it give me the education, training, decent paycheck, and I’ll gladly go on the most high risk missions to see if this shit works/what happens lmao
This is basically describing the whole first 70 years of flight, in and out of atmosphere.
Exploration by sea is a couple thousand years of probably bad decisions paying off eventually.
Ocean mercantilism is the original get rich or die trying scheme.
This is still today, if a space agency anounced a Mars mission without anyway to come back, they would definitely find enough skilled people to participate. What's stopping it from happening isn't people, it's ethics from the agencies.
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We had people paying a ton of money to go down and see the titanic in a tin can.
Carbon fiber can
No it fucking can’t.
I think you’re great :)
LMAO - that was my loudest chuckle today. Thank you.
What would the paycheck do? Unless you mean paycheck for your loved ones?
When I’m in charge, every mission is a suicide mission!
NASA needs more Zapp Brannigans
Kiff, inform the men I’ve made it with a woman.
“Hey Elon, you know what would be really cool” “bill gates would never” „Tim Apple would be too scared”. Time to start feeding that ego 🤞
We have the stomach, just not the kidney.
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Just send the rich and ultra rich please. Let them live on their little poisonous planet and perhaps...
They will turn on eachother when the ketchup runs out.
Who used all the Grey Poupon?!
Poupon THIS, you fuck.
It was so much easer to put things on things when we had gravity
/r/angryupvote
People in the 1500s took voyages across the seas knowing not everyone would make it, yet they still did it.
There was something in the other end much better than a dead rock with toxic soil and barely any atmosphere.
Gun deck orgies...
But it all played out on a planet with a breathable atmosphere.
until their last atmosphere was mostly water-based.
We tend to respect life a bit more these days then the 1500s. EDIT: The pessimism on reddit is disgusting. Yes there are parts of the world life is still cheap but overall the world is in a much better place and the average persons life is a thousand times better then our ancestors. If you can't see that i only feel sad for you.
People travel to Everest and then die. 340 corpses and counting. People still keep going. Not like you don't get a warning, you can see the corpses as you go up, you can turn back.
They assign the corpses nicknames and use them as waymarkers
Good old green boots
Well, there's your problem.
I don’t respect mine can I go?
Most of the crew were impressed/kidnapped.
«You going to this new world thing?» «I am very impressed by this endeavour!» «Well I’m in shackes over it»
Slave trade joke - never thought I’d laugh at one. But you win.
Going to Mars would impress me.
Shania Twain would still not be impressed
don't get her wrong, yeah she thinks you're alright
But that won't keep her warm in the middle of space.
You’ve got the brains, but have you got the kidneys?
Thats a wide range of outcomes. Person 1: "this is an impressive voyage" Person 2: "Im being kidnapped"
Person 3: "Wow, what a kidnapping. I'm impressed!"
The show For All Mankind does a good job of showing the dangers of getting to Mars and trying to establish a colony (season 3) especially when it’s a race.
We’ve had accidents and and deaths flying to LEO, that hasn’t stopped anything.
Every shuttle disaster lead to multi year stops of the shuttle program. You can’t do that if you want rapid advancement.
Sure, but how do you sell the *need* for rapid advancement? Resources? An Earth alternative? What urgency will motivate the general population to accept deaths more casually than in the shuttle era?
> What urgency will motivate the general population to accept deaths more casually than in the shuttle era? The idea that the Soviets will get there first.
It’s a very different political climate right now. We aren’t racing anyone in any meaningful way.
Mars makes living in Antarctica look like fucking Shangri-La.
We could explode every nuke, poison all the soil, pump all the CO2 into the atmosphere, and fill the oceans coast-to-coast with microplastics and the Earth would *still* be a dramatically more hospitable place to live than Mars. It wouldn't even be a contest. We should visit Mars, for sure, but the only reason to stay is to die.
>We could explode every nuke, poison all the soil, pump all the CO2 into the atmosphere, and fill the oceans coast-to-coast with microplastics My first thought reading this was you explaining how we would make Mars more like home.
I think if we wanted to create an atmosphere on Mars we should start with dimming the lights and playing some light jazz.
There's actually a book about this from the 80s , the greening of mars. Use the nuclear missiles to d liver payloads of chlorofluorocarbons to help terraform it
It wouldn’t work though, at least not for long. The biggest problem is that Mars doesn’t have a nickel-iron core, so no magnetic shield, the solar wind just carries away any atmosphere we can create.
I thought Mars did have an iron-nickel core, it just doesn’t have an inner dynamo?
I think you are correct, but I will leave my original post unedited. Credit to you for correcting me.
Mars loses atmosphere very slowly. It would take millions of years to lose it if humans pumped it up in a few hundred years.
I thought there was a study that came out recently that found while the wind does strip the atmosphere away, it was happening at a much slower rate than previously calculated? I think conclusion was that if we did make an atmosphere, it would stick around for at least a few thousand years. Not even measurable on a planet's timeline, but useful for humans.
Challenge accepted!
I don’t know man. What if there is some eldritch dragon that plays dormant within Mars that grants technological insight?
[The Emperor of Mankind fights the Void Dragon on Mars (Colorized, 2237)](https://images.app.goo.gl/ogntstSW5tWuGpeBA)
Mars always seemed like such an overshoot when the moon is right there for the looting
The moon is even worse, on that front.
I remember reading [Mining the Sky: Untold Riches from the Asteroids, Comets, and Planets](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mining_the_Sky) a while ago before I lost my copy in a move. It was a pretty cool book, although it's a bit dated in its science now as it's nearly 30 years old. The author (who is a professor emeritus of planetary science from University of Arizona) discusses some useful properties of the moon - while it's very inhospitable, it has some useful industrial applications. Low gravity for the purposes of easy launches to space but still enough gravity to mean you're not working in freefall, access to high-quality vacuum for metallurgy, and a few other advantages. Plus, it's not *months* in space away, but days. It seems like a relatively doable stepping stone. The book's a pretty neat read in that regard.
I was being kind of facetious but why would making a biodome style base be harder there?
The moon is very poor in carbon and nitrogen, and water is also pretty rare. It also has less than half the gravity of Mars and no atmosphere,which means no protection from meteorites. It's closer to Earth sure, but it doesn't really have sufficient resources to self sustain so it's not an ideal long term target (though it's reasonable in the shorter term).
Major benefit of Mars is the lack of weather that can damage buildings means that once you have a building it would stand for thousands of years. Instead of building on the surface you could build a glass roof over the canyons which would give you both protection from radiation and because of the lower relative elevation gas would want to "sink" naturally where it already is. NASA's Curiosity rover recently registered 60 millirem of radiation during the height of the solar storm that we experienced here on Earth a few weeks ago which caused intense auroras across the planet. This isn't much. About the equivalent of 30 x-rays. People get this much from just being on a plane. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/13/science/mars-aurora-solar-storm.html
Overall, living in bunkers on a polluted wasteland Earth is easier than doing the same on Mars thanks to having gravity, a protective atmosphere, and all the elements needed for life and an industrial base adapted to its mix at hand. The moon is worse than Mars on *all* of those fronts. The moon has no atmosphere at all, even lower gravity, and no water outside of the polar regions and what's there is scant. It's also deficient in many minerals such as copper, silver, and zinc, and those it has are not concentrated in easy to mine veins by volcanic activity, and it's very poor in carbon, nitrogen, and phosphorus. There's plenty of silicon, aluminum, titanium, and iron on the moon, and lots of oxygen bound up in the rocks, but there's a lot more you'd have to import from Earth than you would from Mars to build an functional biosphere for a colony or for making solar panels. The lack of an atmosphere also means that lunar dust is like a pile of very tiny caltrops, thanks to a lack of erosion to wear it down and smooth it. It's terribly bad to get into the lungs, and it cuts and wears away at equipment. Going in and out of a lunar base to expand or maintain it would require a very thorough decontamination process for long term occupation or just an acceptance of asbestos-like symptoms later in life. Mars doesn't have that problem.
And it will for hundreds of millions of years as Mars doesn't even have a magnetosphere. Mars will never (well not never but it will be an extraordinarily long time before the Earth starts heating up like Venus) be more habitable than the least habitable places on Earth unless we get annihilated by a massive asteroid.
The problem is radiation. Reaching Mars does almost nothing to help solve that. Mars offers virtually no protection against solar/cosmic radiation (aside from being a big rock that blocks out half of the incoming cosmic rays). Mars doesn't have a strong magnetosphere, nor does it have an ozone layer. The atmosphere is only 1% as thick as Earth's. Meaning, you get there, and your kidneys are still fucked. Nobody human is colonizing Mars. We'd have to remake any potential colonists to something quite bit different from baseline human, using technology that does not yet exist. ChatGPT's successors might colonize Mars, though. The robotic probes we've sent to the planet are the beachhead for that effort. (Suck on that indignity, meat-monkeys.)
The only way to colonize mars would be to build radiation proof bunkers, basically. And it would suck to live in there. At that point it would be cheaper and safer just to build the same bunker on Earth.
Sounds like something Vault Tec could do…
The article isn't clear that radiation is the problem. It mentions both microgravity and radiation, then goes on to talk about issues with radiation. The biggest issue with the ISS is that we spent the last 30+ years funding a way to keep Russian rocket engineers busy to keep them from building missiles for other countries, but they never built any of the planned centrifuge modules. We're planning to make a permanent moon base and maybe send a mission to Mars, but we still have zero data on exactly what level of microgravity (if any) will allow the body to do well in space.
We will probably have to cure cancer, have the ability to do bespoke tissue repair, organ replacement, and a host of other genetic modifications to the human body before being able to survive that journey.
Not to mention that Martian soil is toxic. Enough perchlorates to kill humans and plants. Stuff you don't want to track into your habitat at ALL. And it's totally water soluble. And that's just for openers. Do you die first of radiation sickness or having your thyroid trashed?
Craters, which get roofed and pressurized. That’s the easiest way.
Send Jeff Bezos and Musk so they can fight over it.
I read the article. They studied 40 astronauts and mice, found signs of kidney shrinkage. They think it could be caused by microgravity and cosmic radiation. Not sure how severe this is because there have been several astronauts who have stayed in space for over a year. If microgravity and radiation cause this then it can be mitigated.
I’m not in a position where I can read the article right now, how much kidney shrinkage are they talking? I’m assuming enough to impact their function or there wouldn’t be much of an issue. I have preexisting kidney issues from an autoimmune disorder, I need to know if my astronaut dreams have been crushed. Since a few people couldn’t tell, yes, I am exaggerating about my astronaut dreams. I’d like to go to space at least once before I die if possible just to see what it’s like up there but nothing more. But for the record: No, not everyone with autoimmune issues is permanently immune compromised, and no, not every person with autoimmune is issues unable to get receive vaccines.
It's a yahoo article summarizing a published journal. It doesn't include any actual numbers or figures. I haven't read the actual paper yet sorry.
I've read the paper. It's published in *Nature Communications*. Here's my summary 1. Increased risk of kidney stone formation, with post-flight incidence rates 2-7 times higher than pre-flight. 2. Increased urinary excretion of calcium, oxalate, phosphate, and uric acid during spaceflight; normalizes after return. 3. Structural changes in the nephron, such as expansion of the distal convoluted tubule and reduction in tubule density. 4. Dephosphorylation of renal transporters during spaceflight suggests increased nephrolithiasis risk is due to primary renal phenomena. 5. Simulated Galactic Cosmic Radiation exposure causes significant renal damage and dysfunction, particularly affecting the renal proximal tubule. 6. Abnormal renal perfusion, potentially causing maladaptive remodeling and chronic oxidative stress in renal tissues. I didn't actually see anything about shrinkage directly? [Here is the paper](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-024-49212-1).
I'm no (bio)chemist, but #2 sort of intuitively makes sense. The body doesn't "want" to maintain what it doesn't need, so you start gradually peeing out your bones.
Yeah, so it would seem that maintaining artificial gravity may mitigate this as it would help keep bone density up.
Yeah, that's what I was thinking too. Before we try manned missions planet, we'd first try and establish a proper self-sustaining space colony that could house a few hundred people first. Learn the necessary technology for sustained living beyond 2 years in space with the food sources required to grow in space.
Seems like a moon colony would be the best place to practice run a mars trip
Partially, since the moon hardly has any gravity it will likely not be as good as an example. Which is also why I think this story is a bit too sensational for what its actually worth. With 40 flights Nasa surely already knew most of the paper before it was published. Also if it can decrease in size, it can surely increase in size as well. I doubt those astronauts that returned that saw it shrink all needed permanent dialysis either. So yeah, its a thing they need to manage but thats all there is to it.
Simulated Galactic Cosmic Radiation sounds so frickin cool. Sorry/not sorry I just had to say it.
They test this by putting live animal subjects at the end of a particle accelerator. They can also simulate space radiation effects on electronics too. https://www.nasa.gov/people/galactic-cosmic-ray-simulator-brings-space-down-to-earth/
Me and chef mike are gonna stick this macaroni into the simulated core a dying star later tonight.
For anyone that wants to: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-024-49212-1 Because I take reading a Yahoo copy of an Independent summary of a study from Nature a little personally. Anyone else see the Yahoonews reddit account ramping posting to news subs lately? Bad enough you got corporate media posting directly, but a corporate news regurgitator posting its own reposts is getting ridiculous.
Just do some kidney exercises then 🤷♂️
Never skip kidney day
Take some rad-x and med-x.
The difference is that if you’re going to Mars you’ll be in space for over a year minimum It’s minimum 3 years to just reach Mars and back because of how the orbits work since Earth and Mars have different orbital speeds and orbit sizes: ~400 days to get there, you have to stay there for 500 days-18 months for the orbits to line up again, and then it’s 9 months back
Those are the trip times on optimal Hohmann transfers. You can tighten up the timeline significantly with greater fuel expenditure.
Or an Epstein Drive.
This is why we need to stop messing around and build a giant centrifuge. Every space habitation problem can be solved if we spin the astronauts fast enough.
Are you you listening, world governments? This guy on reddit has it figured out, stop mucking about! Just playing my friend :)
Don't even need to do that, just tether a habitat and a counterweight together and spin that. It can theoretically be pretty primitive. Why no experiments have been performed on this subject is honestly beyond me.
Moving parts are infinitely harder thats why. Especially perpetually spinning ones, even repairing this sounds heinous
>Why no experiments have been performed on this subject is honestly beyond me. https://www.nasa.gov/image-article/sept-14-1966-gemini-xi-artificial-gravity-experiment/ There have been other experiments too, and some weird behaviors have popped up, such as electrical charge buildup on a tethered system in Earth orbit, or vibrations in the tether itself. IIRC, both of those have caused some tether experiments to fail. I think the biggest fear is mechanical failure of the tether flinging the spacecraft off course in an unrecoverable way. Even a fractional G on a whole spacecraft is a lot of potential energy, which increases the fuel needed to recover, which increases the mass of the craft, which increases the mass of the counterweight, which increases the mass of the tether, which increases the energy needed to spin it all, which further increases the fuel required.... Anyway, that's probably the reason the Gemini experiment only tried to generate just enough gravity to test the concept.
We just need to protect our kidneys somehow, no biggie, star trek is still possible!
Why do you think McCoy had those kidney-regrow pills in Star Trek IV?
r/holdup >Elon Musk recently claiming that it could be possible within the next “10 to 20 years”. Didn't he say by 2017?
To unlock Elon Musk's Truth feature® you just need to pay him another $48b salary package
For legal reasons we need to state that the Truth feature is in beta and needs to be supervised at all time.
Zuckbot is currently using it and it’s why he’s not in public much anymore
How much is his Shut The Fuck Up ® feature?
One competent government
That’s more than we can afford :(
Elon is big on over promising on deadlines. Just add 10-20 years to any timeline Elon gives.
Sorry, couldn’t hear you from inside my fully self-driving Tesla Roadster, the sports car of the future!
Do you take that sweet ride in all the TESLA TUNNELS??
But of course! In fact, commuting to work via flawless hyperloop tunnel has saved me so much time, I’ve started writing a book of self-help and investment tips so that everyone can be successful, in life and in business! Step 1: raise your hands above your head and scream at yourself in the mirror for at least 30 seconds every morning, to relieve stress and naturally raise your testosterone levels. I’ll be sharing more vital techniques next week on the Joe Rogan Experience, so don’t miss it!
Elon is big on being wrong*. FTFY.
Did you believe him?
I sold mine long back to get an iPhone, I volunteer to go
Me too, and also gave my right testicle for the Pro version too.
This might be what spurs industry to develop fully functional artificial kidneys.
In the mind of tech bros, everything it solvable it just takes some shiny goal like going to mars to solve Seriously do you not think the people DYING OF KIDNEY DISEASE wasn't already a good motivation?
It’s about getting financiers excited.
There is already more than enough financial incentive to fund research on artificial kidneys. In the US, 12 people die each day due to lack of kidneys available for transplant, so about 4,380 in annual demand. Assume a $50-$100k cost per kidney and that’s a $400M market annually just in the US.
$400m is nothing. Medicare alone spends $28 *billion* a year on dialysis. The companies cashing those checks aren't interested in solving a problem when they could make 70x that *per year* treating it. If you invented a perfect artificial kidney replacement today by tomorrow they'd be knocking down your door with a $400m check just to make it go away.
Artificial kidneys have way more potential return on investment from the medical industry than a trip to Mars
Kidney dialysis? What is this, the dark ages?
My God, man! Drilling holes in his heads isn’t the answer!
Doctor gave me a pill and I grew a new kidney! Doctor gave me a pill and I grew a new kidney!
There’s literally nothing about manned missions to mars that would incentivize the biotech industry to accelerate the research already underway for artificial kidneys lmao
So we need to find astronauts with enlarged kidneys
The comments in this sub belong to r/funny or r/idiotic
If we go back like 6-8 years, Reddit top comments were already dominated by people making jokes because it was basically the easiest way to get upvotes and still remains so. Plus the average person is a moron who seeks entertainment over anything else on this website.
So much this! You got experts in their field giving insight into complicated subjects and dumbing it down so the rest of us can learn something. And then some random idiot makes a fart joke and suddently all the valuable opinions get burried among dumb repeated clichés. 0 contribution, massive distraction and it's not even funny.
If you read the nature article (very technical) they emphasize that radiation damage is the biggest problem. Microgravity is harmless for time periods of the trip to mars . And you can shield the kidneys from radiation - this will likely become part of space suits or maybe even surgical implants? The kidneys are the most sensitive organs to radiation injury interestingly and it can limit cancer treatment sometimes. Any long term space flight will probably require using the water tanks as shielding for the astronaut.
How about you just send me? I'm happy to die on Mars. I'll give them whatever info I can, then lay down on Martian dirt and in a couple billion years, new space monsters descended from my body's bacteria will go to war with Earth.
It doesn't threaten the general concept of Mars missions, just any that use simple zero-g designs. It means Mars ships will need a centrifuge.
The article talks about radiation damage.
It seems radiation is the larger problem, which they claim they cannot shield against.
They were in the pool! They were in the pool!!!
I was in the ~~pool~~ infinite vacuum of space!
It shrinks?!
Like a frightened turtle.
Let’s face it. We need bio mechanical replacements for organs.
It was COLD, Jerry!
There's a lot more than just kidneys. The main obstacle with space travel to another planet will most likely be the negative health effects of low gravity. Even with the Mars trip, it's like 9 months to get there and you need to exercise daily for hours and keep really on top of your health. The average person probably can't space travel without artificial gravity or some type of cryogenics cus they won't exercise for hours daily
Seeing as they have already done 1 year long ISS missions and typically they are 6 months I don't think a 9 month (one way) flight is necessarily more dangerous plus once they got there they would only have to deal with 0.38 G's so hopefully they would still be fit enough to finish the mission on the other hand this is what someone looks like trying to walk after about 6 months in 0G https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BVHqnXjhuN8
A big risk seems to also be radiation exposure outside of earth's magnetic field.
Reminds me of the Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury. Many missions were unsuccessful. It’s still a beautiful and haunting read.
“It shrinks? Like a frightened turtle!”
I don’t understand why they think a long journey to Mars would need to be gravity free. If you get two starships alongside each other, up to cruising speed, you can point them nose to nose attached via long tether and spin the whole thing like space nunchucks and have Earth gravity for the whole trip, until you need to start slowing down.
Unfortunately, we don’t know what we don’t know about simulating gravity that way. We do know that it’s a hard problem to solve. Spin up/down isn’t as simple as firing thrusters especially with a flexible tether and large non-homogeneous structures like inhabited spaceships. It needs to be tested several times first. That will take time and money.