Today, Sunday, May 30, 2021, at 1 p.m. Pacific Time, join us for a U.S. Transhumanist Party Virtual Enlightenment Salon with Ryan O’Shea, as we discuss the state of the transhumanist movement, life-extension advocacy, biohacking, Ryan’s Future Grind podcast, and more!
Watch on YouTube here:. You will be able to post questions and comments in the live YouTube chat.
The first total lunar eclipse in two years happened the week of May 20–26, along with a natural disaster in the DRC and a finding from 12 billion years ago.
Everything is weird on the Sun, where things are not where you’d expect.
This spike in temperature, despite the increased distance from the Sun’s main energy source, has been observed in most stars and represents a fundamental puzzle that astrophysicists have mulled over for decades.
Wednesday, May 26 at 8 pm ET, discover what we hope to learn about Saturn’s fascinating moon Titan, featuring planetary scientist Zibi Turtle. Register: https://s.si.edu/2Q58d9N
Saturn’s largest moon, Titan, is an ocean world with a dense atmosphere, abundant complex organic material on its icy surface, and a liquid-water ocean in its interior. The Cassini-Huygens mission revealed Titan to be surprisingly Earth-like, with active geological processes and opportunities for organic material to have mixed with liquid water on the surface in the past. These attributes make Titan a unique destination to seek answers to fundamental questions about what makes a planet or moon habitable and about the pre-biotic chemical processes that led to the development of life here on Earth. NASA’s upcoming Dragonfly New Frontiers mission is a rotorcraft lander designed to perform long-range in situ investigation of the chemistry and habitability of this fascinating extraterrestrial environment. In this program, Planetary scientist Zibi Turtle from the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory will discuss this fascinating new mission: Taking advantage of Titan’s dense atmosphere and low gravity, Dragonfly will fly from place to place, exploring diverse geological settings to measure the compositions of surface materials and observe Titan’s geology and meteorology. Dragonfly will make multidisciplinary science measurements at dozens of sites, traveling ~100 miles during a 3-year mission to characterize Titan’s habitability and to determine how far organic chemistry has progressed in environments that provide key ingredients for life.
On the 91st Martian day, or sol, of NASA’s Mars 2020 Perseverance rover mission, the Ingenuity Mars Helicopter performed its sixth flight. The flight was designed to expand the flight envelope and demonstrate aerial-imaging capabilities by taking stereo images of a region of interest to the west. Ingenuity was commanded to climb to an altitude of 33 feet (10 meters) before translating 492 feet (150 meters) to the southwest at a ground speed of 9 mph (4 meters per second). At that point, it was to translate 49 feet (15 meters) to the south while taking images toward the west, then fly another 164 feet (50 meters) northeast and land.
Let me start off by answering “Angry Astronaut’s” last question (@22:00 in) first: “Does this look like living at the top of Mount Everest to you?” Yes Angry it does. It ALSO looks like living on Mars because that interior in both cases is where you’re going to spend a lot of time so what’s happening on the INSIDE isn’t very different at all. That’s a problem (and an opportunity) for a LOT of the so-called “easy” concepts for living on Mars here people: Why don’t you put some money where your mouths are and “PROVE it” at least a little bit. Think the “Marsha” design is so hot? (I don’t btw) Then how about we BUILD some actual working “prototypes” (which the company did an indigogo on and failed to either raise enough money nor have they gone any further with the effort) someplace LIKE the ‘basecamp’ area of Everest. It will be vastly less difficult and expensive than building on Mars or the Moon but you know what, it would go a long way towards shutting up the ‘detractors’ with all their (arguably and often unanswered) questions wouldn’t it? Build on as a B&B on some expensive vacation land? Nah, how about building one out at the Mars Desert Research Station or Devon Island?
