Comments by "Tony Wilson" (@tonywilson4713) on "DEBUNKING THE ANGRY NON-ASTRONAUT" video.

  1.  @commonsenseskeptic  I agree with the basic premise ajr993 puts forward. Angry Astronaut gives way too much credence to Elon Musk's ambitions without critical scrutiny. But we all need to be careful on what we come back with. Your slide/powerpoint list at 10:45 has a fundamental mistake. For a Mars colony to be self sufficient DOES NOT require terraforming, it requires the capability of engineering self sustaining biologic systems. Anybody whos considered the terraforming issue honestly gets answers ranging from its impossible to it'll take many 1000s of years. So any Mars colony in the meantime will live in domes. So putting a terraforming requirement on a Mars colony isn't valid, but the bio-engineering is a must. As you pointed out on you vid in the Musk series (which I am binge watching) you went over the disaster that was bio-dome. I call it a disaster in that it totally failed to achieve any of its basic goals. What it did do was provide a mountain of information on how much WE DON'T KNOW and how far from being successful we actually are. As I mentioned in another comment in that series. Dr. Jonathan Trent one of the worlds leading brains on engineering complex bio-systems pointed that out just after he left NASA. He's coined a term call upcycling. Recycling is where you just take something back to its raw material state and remake the same or similar product. Upcycling is where you use processes to take the waste from the bottom and upcycle it back tot he top. Simple example is water. The rain and other processes are the down cycle as it moves down through process. The evaporation is the upcycle. The planet we live on does this naturally for everything all powered by the sun. What JT is working on is taking waste and using natural &/or modified natural processes to up cycle waste into useful things. There's also a 2nd 1/2 mistake in that list. If they were to terraform Mars the problem with an atmosphere starts with where is it coming from. After that that there's how are you going to hold it. For sure the lack of a magnetosphere is an issue, but the lack of gravity to hold an atmosphere down is a bigger issue. What gives the Earth a sea level pressure of 14.7lbs (101,325kpa) isn't the magnetosphere its the gravity. You do need the magnetosphere to help prevent the solar wind stripping it away but without the gravity its a lot easier to strip away. I told you in another comment about the Alumni from NASA who did a guest lecture when I was an undergrad. These are more of the things he told us about. He's a basic calc. Mars has a surface Area of 144,370,000 km^2. If you wanted an earth breathable layer just 1km thick on the surface you have to find 144,000,000 cubic kilometers of AIR. Fine we could crash some comets and make some water break it down and get some oxygen but air is ~80% nitrogen where's that coming from? Terraforming is a pointless argument because its such an unrealistic topic with no valid answers to ay of the problems. The real issue of ANY off-world colony (ANY WHERE) is how do you keep the people alive and that means water, oxygen, food, waste processing and THAT MEANS and engineered bio-logical upcycling systems. When the top guy on the subject says we can't do it, then all the other arguments are pointless.
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  2.  @AdrieKooijman  My bet would be they tried to do too much. In B2 they tried to create a complete micro world with all sorts of climates and conditions. My bet is we'll actually go with a much narrower focus on the environment and accept at the start it will need constant monitoring and maintenance. Think about a garden even a small one or somebody with a few plants. They need constant monitoring and maintenance. Evn on the most modern farm the farmer has to watch the crops and do maintenance as needed. In biosphere 2 they just expected things to work and nature to find its own balance. That's maybe its one great addition to out knowledge base. We need to be simpler and we need to maintain it.
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  3.  @timothyblazer1749  have you listened to any of Jonathon Trent's vids. He's quite likely the worlds best at these complex biological systems people are trying to develop. Having listened to him and chatted via LinkedIn I think the breakthrough IF IT COMES will be with systems that are not designed to be 100% self supporting, but simpler systems that can do what's needed. Sort unrelated are the vertical farming systems people have developed. They aren't meant to replace bulk farming and provide everything humanity needs, but they DO THE JOB they are designed for. When you consider what they tried to do with Biodome it was always going to fail. 🤷‍♀🤷‍♂🤷‍♀🤷‍♂ (edit) But it is good to here that someone else has picked it up and is making progress.
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  4.  @timothyblazer1749  I'm actually Australian but went to college in America on a sports scholarship and did aerospace engineering. One of my class mates is very high up in the ISS program. About 20 years ago she told me that NOBODY was going beyond LEO until 2 problems were solved - Life Support and Propulsion. In the last 20 years neither of those problems has been solved. YES ABSOLUETLY there have been people working their asses off working on these problems but none of it is ready to be used. One of the tragic outcomes of the shuttle and ISS programs was they starved other programs of resources of which the biggest resource was money, but it also starved those projects of people. Yes both the shuttle and ISS have been incredible technical achievements. They actually made a reusable spaceplane work. They made, launched and assembled an incredibly complex machine weighing hundreds of tons IN SPACE. BUT AT THE SAME TIME they starved other projects and that's hindered manned space flight. FYI - I met Harrison Schmitt (Apollo 17) back in 2002 and he told me to check out Helium-3. He was trying to get a mine built on the Moon. So I went off to the Australian mining sector to learn how mines got built and how they operated. Right now I have more practical hands on experience building and operating mines in remote places than all of NASA combined. Do you know it still comes back to the same 2 questions, but they're phrased differently? Transportation and Supplies (food, water, fuel, spare parts,....). The biggest 3 tasks are: 1) Getting people, their food, and what they need to and from the mines. People need food and water and a place to sleep. They also shit, shower and shave and all that has to be dealt with. 2) Getting the product from the mines. That might mean a few kilograms (like for gold) or millions of tons like iron ore. Either way it has to be done or what's the purpose of having the mine. 3) Maintenance as in how to you keep several billion dollars of stuff working in the middle of a hostile environment and there's not many places more hostile than the Australian desert. A lot of people think I have wasted my time. I haven't. When I ask them how are you going to do A, B, C,... none of them have answers because they've never asked the questions. They all assume its been done. This is the problem with people like Angry and Elon Musk and so many others. Their hearts are in the right place, but they all assume that some of the very basic things have been done and they haven't. All these clowns talking about mining asteroids have never been near a mine site. I can tell that immediately. I have the papers from a NASA conference (~180pages) on Moon operations and it had 1 and a bit pages on maintenance because they think maintenance will be done using remote robotics. THAT'S GARBAGE. If you ever want to be called an idiot just tell anyone who's ever done maintenance on a mine site that it can be done by remote controlled robots.
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  5.  @wyrmofvt  You pretty much have it nutted out, because it comes down to some very basic numbers and basic reality. I got bluntly put in my place about 20 years ago by a former classmate who was working on the ISS construction She's now a senior ISS manager and basically without her signature your stuff isn't going to the ISS. I had put it to her, as others had that we should use Shuttle-C and just get all the stuff up there. The whole thing was just dragging out and the shuttle itself was incredibly inefficient for bulk hardware launching. Just pack all the truss modules into 1 launch. She pointed out that I had no idea of the logistics involved in each of those modules and bluntly told me to shut it until I knew what I was talking about. I argued back that while the ISS plodded on we weren't moving forward with manned exploration. We'd been in college when Challenger happened. Up until that morning we all EXPECTED to build Space Station Freedom by the mid 90s and back on the moon circa 2001. That argument was happening circa 2002 and we weren't close to finishing the ISS and people were getting frustrated at the lack of progress. Then she hit me with the slap of slaps. Nobody was going anywhere until we solved the propulsion and life support issues. When I asked what? She said do the basic math and then ask how you get that done. The Apollo LM had 75 hours for 2 men of life support. That's 150 mh (man hours) of life support. A 4 man 14 day (as was the plan at one point) is 4 x 24 x 14 = 1344 mh (basically 9x) That can be basically halved with 3 man 10day lunar surface is 3 x 24 x 10 = 720mh. Irrespective of crew and duration, how do you get that much stuff there just to keep them alive. All that oxygen, food, CO2 filters, waste handling,... has to be lifted off mother earth, flown across the 384,400km gap and landed there on the moon AND THAT'S before you even begin to deal with anything else. Its part of why the Russian lunar program failed. The basic numbers drove them to the N-1 which was too complicated to work. This is what Elon Musk and his cadre of clowns don't get. Just the basics of keeping people alive is a giant task. Adding that 1 extra person and/or staying that bit longer can double that task in a blink and that compounds into a whole pile of other logistics issues which themselves keep compounding the problem. It was a blunt lesson I got from that classmate and yeah it sucked, but I needed it then and a lot of other people need it now.
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  6.  @wyrmofvt  On that ag issue its all a matter of what you are producing from that land. If its for direct human consumption its one set of numbers and if its for animal feed its another. There's actually a great lesson in complex systems and compounding effects and consequences regarding the Colorado River right now. The river plan that was put in place 100+years ago DELIBERATELY overestimated the amount of water available, because that was what certain politicians wanted. That was compounded with a "use it or lose it" clause. So a lot of farmers need to use their water allocation or lose it. Many grow alfalfa for animal feed BECAUSE its a high water usage crop. If they change to low water crops they can lose their water allocations. So the land and water usage issue is way more complex than most people realise and the causes of that complexity are some really basic stupid decisions. The bigger problem is that people are looking at the problem as "what do I lose" (as in my water rights) instead of "what do we gain" which is food (as in that stuff we all need to survive). And so you know water and land mismanagement is a major problem EVERYWHERE. Where China grows most of its food is where they have major climate change issues. They have also damaged or destroyed over 20,000 rivers and waterways. Or you can look at what the Russians did to the Aral Sea. Or you can come here to Australia and see what we have done with cotton, rice and nut farming.
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