> The presence of terrestrial microorganism within a sample of Ryugu underlines that microorganisms are the world's greatest colonizers and adept at circumventing contamination controls. The presence of microorganisms within space-returned samples, even those subject to stringent contamination controls is, therefore, not necessarily evidence of an extraterrestrial origin.
Basically that preventing terrestrial contamination of extraterrestrial samples is super tough, and in the specific case of Ryugu the study concludes that contamination did occur.
Basically microorganisms were able to grow in a sterile asteroid sample faster than previously anticipated. So just because there are signs of life in a recently fallen meteorite is less likely to mean there are space bacteria on it.
they got asteriod samples, and turns out that Earth bacteria grow great on them. It's a problem because from now on, if a evidence of life is discovered on sapce samples there is always a suspicion it could be contamination.
The samples mined from the Ryugu asteroid were contaminated by earth microorganisms some time between sampling and analysis. That makes it hard to tell the difference between potentially alien microorganisms and just regular earth microorganisms
You can still tell the difference through dna evidence. In this case it would be like a ship returning with an alien book, a worker left an earth based book, you have no clue what book is which but one book shares 99% textual similarity with the king james bible. That one probably originated on earth.
Which is why I'd just as soon we waited a few extra decades before landing people on Mars. We're chock full of bacteria and they will surely get out. Unlike robots we can't be sterilized.
Once we can be certain that there is no native life, go nuts. Until then it's an irreplaceable bit of data.
Even robots cannot be sterilized; we've likely already infected Mars with some form of life. (Although, it's not likely that it's gonna spread far - it's a wildly hostile world.)
Agreed. And Mars isn't even a good target for colonisation. Venus and even Mercury are better, but constructing space habitats is even better.
On Venus, the surface is crazy hostile, but the atmosphere is so dense big balloons filled with a nitrogen / oxygen mixture, aka breathable air would float rather nicely, and at a height with pretty liveable temperatures.
Mercury's surface has extreme temperature variations between night and day. But if you dig underground---which you would want to do anyway for meteor protection---you'll find that the variations average out, because large amounts of rock are a good heat buffer. Models suggest that near the poles there are underground regions with nice and liveable average temperatures.
Solar energy is obviously much stronger at Venus's distance from the sun than for Mars.
On Mercury, thanks to the consistent temperature variations, you could probably set up your standard issue steam turbine power plant fairly easily, just your sources of heat and cold would be a bit more interesting than on earth.
What's the point of all that effort if those habs are going to be one-way trips for the people going there? What are they going to accomplish in their floating or underground habitats? They're not getting back to anywhere useful from either place. They're not going to survive without frequent Earth resupply[1]. Whether habs could exist is an interesting thought experiment, but that's all it is for the foreseeable future.
Even a sizable Mars colony probably won't survive without frequent Earth assistance. The Mark Watney fantasy of growing food in Martian dirt with a little added fertilizer: mostly debunked[2]. The most sustainable case—for the foreseeable future—is probably a Biosphere2-like environment, where everyone hopes there's no accident, sabotage, or environment-caused damage. How many Starship missions would it take to get enough materials to Mars to build one Biosphere2 to support 8 people?
I agree with you that meaningful colonization of Mars is not serious. I just think the prospects on the inner inner planets are even more absurd than on Mars. In a floating Venusian hab, you could generate breathable air and not much else. Underground on Mercury, getting breathable air might be a problem, but you can import—at great cost, that delta-v is brutal—anything you can fit on a suitable rocket.
There's no point to any of this except as research stations or jump-off ports, and for that Mars is the obvious choice: we can make hydrocarbon fuel there, and the surface isn't equipment-melting. But where would we be jumping off to? We have nothing planned, and no particular reason, to send humans to Europa or anywhere else.
[1] How do you resupply a floating habitat on Venus? Even if you could, the constraints and resource limitations of a floating hab would be even more severe than for an underground, resource-poor Mercury hab.
I've been saying this for ages - if you want to see if humans can survive in a completely sealed underground habitat(and it would have to be underground on Mars), just try building one at the bottom of the ocean.
And if you want a permanently occupied base in space....put one on the moon first?
There are zillions of Mars-like planemos in the galaxy - hell, there are 4 pretty similar ones just in our solar system. But Mars is the only one close enough to colonise. And if we don't colonise Mars, we'll probably never get far enough to study any of the others.
I have a lot of praise for using Memray as part of working out some memory kinks in a codebase I’m working on. It allowed me to quickly iterate on some hunches and then enshrine the resulting memory savings in tests via pytest-memray.
Other spreadsheets solve this by updating references if you need to add more columns and rows (or at least they try). Is the additional complexity of the infinite grid something that customers actually need?
Updating references accross python scripts seems tricky. For example there would be no way to figure out how this code snippet should be updated if a row was added:
i = get(url).json()['index']
r = avar + offset
out = cell(r, i)
As to the question do customers need an infinite grid... I am asking myself the same question.
To combat this scenario, we only had build servers populate the cache. Clients were readonly to the cache, so they would benefit from anything that build servers had already built, which covered 95%+ of what clients usually had to rebuild.
Also release builds were excluded from caching, to prevent any form of poisoning there.
The threat is not that the cache contains builds of untrusted code but that it contains builds that do not match the code that they are associated with.
It uses a cryptographic hash of the _inputs_ to the compiler, but there is no way to verify that the cached artifact matches the _output_ of the compiler without actually compiling it yourself.
Let’s say you have 15 engineers and they each have their own laptop computer. Each of these engineers generates a pair of cryptographic keys, one public and one private.
Each engineer then gives their public key to the trusted authority that operates the ccache server. Only code that is submitted and signed by a respective private key is built and then distributed to the rest of the engineers.
For a public project you would only want the builds to be propagated out to other developers once the changes had been approved and then merged into a branch that triggers the CI.
My parents just had the radio hooked up to the same circuit that was driving the bathroom lights. You enter the room, turn on the lights and there was instant audio. Makes sense to put this into a product.
It's amazing how we are repeatedly going full circle: we managed to stigmatize a completely natural farting sound (you are in a bathroom so the smell is contained), and then come up with "solutions" to feel free to produce the same sounds.
It took me a while, but I've convinced my wife that farting is ok, and that you should only worry about subjecting others to lousy odours, and even that only when you are visiting someone or some place (indoors). Closing the door usually resolves this. The stigma is especially bothersome with a naturally shy toddler who wouldn't take a dump anywhere but home.
FWIW, music does not stop people walking into smelly toilets, but to each their own. :)
The product likely even makes sense, I just find the phenomena curious and sometimes infuriating (like with my toddler).
Well, the bathroom hasn’t always been existing in our own homes. We used to do our business in privacy away from the living quarters.
So it’s great we can use technology to help us be comfortable again in the modern world.
My room was next to said bathroom with rather thin walls, so I always appreciated the sound at least be a bit played down by the music.
Another side effect was that you always knew when the bathroom was in use (aside from someone forgetting to turn the light off, which you now had radio playing to remind you off).
Oh, I am not disputing the fact it was likely helpful (and I only replied to your comment since it was one of the examples of "solutions" yet to get a reply; if anything, that one is pretty neat).
But why and how did we become bothered by the _sounds_ of it? Are you bothered by the coo-coos of birds, or morning rooster calls. Cats purring, screeching cat calls or dogs barking? All of these can be similarly annoying, but we are not "solving" them.
It's weird how our association of sounds with smells and dirtiness of taking a dump has made sounds which are rarely that bad in objective sense (loudness, pitch...) so unpleasant.
It's also how it's considered impolite to slurp a soup, and some people are outright disgusted by hearing it being done.
Yeah I wanted to do that but I was scared of playing with electricity so I built the first prototype with a raspberry Pi and soldered on a PIR-sensor to it.
