From what I understand, one of the biggest hurdles of a sample return mission is how to keep anything that might be alive in the samples that way for the ~260 day journey. It’s hard to plan care for hypothetical life forms when you have no idea what their needs are.

Great article! Nice analysis of what’s going on, and great to read it from an author that knows what’s-what on the subject.

It’s refreshing to see an argument between a black man and a white guy with guns end without any casualties.

First thing I thought of when I saw “Rectenna”.

Nothing, that’s what. Finding life on another planet could very well be one of the most important scientific discoveries of the century.

“Of the black cone amid the polar waste;
Pushing above the ice-sheet lone and drearly,
By storm-crazed aeons battered and defaced.
Hither no living earth-shapes take their courses,
And only pale auroras and faint suns
Glow on that pitted rock, whose primal sources
Are guessed at dimly by the Elder Ones.”

Nah, it goes to show that people are more willing to look at the entire person if they’re inclined to like him or her, so you’re not condemning someone who is otherwise doing good based on one or a few errors. If we were to demonize anyone who made bad calls or behaved incorrectly even once, then there’d be no one…

I’m really tired of the “Bryce Harper is a DB” crowing. People were determined to hate him the second he came up in the bigs, but has he actually done anything to warrant that rep besides not being a smiley, happy-go-lucky guy?

How exactly is Bryce Harper a douchebag or not a decent human being?

C’mon... in a world of asshole baseball players, Bryce doesn’t even register. He’ll argue with an ump on occasion, but he never goes after other players, and he treats fans (particularly kids) better than just about anyone out there. He’s honestly about as good of a star as you could ask for.

It’s good tho that we have a fighter in the Senate. There’s a lot that a senator can do that a president can’t because the latter has such a wide range of responsibilities, foreign and domestic. I think Warren is at her best fighting for the people on issues that most directly impact us, and that’s a job that can be…

I was also hit by a deer right in that area a couple weeks ago on my bike and 2 motorcyclists stopped to help me. I was a little worried this article was going to be about me but unfortunately some other dude had the same fate. I even got to ride in the helicopter too! Timely article and thanks to the guys who stopped…

You’re good people, you and your buddies. You took it personally to help this guy and did it right.

If the referee had been armed this never would’ve happened.

Projectors. Soooo many projectors. These babies can project a 100” image from a distance of only 15 inches. I would blanket all of my walls with these, each powered by a dedicated small form factor low-TDP Core PCs.

A Tesla. That counts as a tech gadget, right? :)

lmao no. Just no. This guy is “big pharma.” Sure, the chemists may be working hard and helping people. But the pharmaceutical industry that employs them and prices the drugs they invented are not. They are in it to maximize profits and that is clear by how they price their drugs. The thing that kills me is that this…

I would agree that moving beyond 0 and 1 is integral to AI. If we give this technology another 20 years, it may well be reasonable to believe Ray Kurzweil’s correct in stating we could have actual AI in the 2040s.

Now this is a first step to making a true AI. The ability to take information and store its state on a continum instead of a binary (people —well, smart people — can actually think on a continum instead of on or off). The ability for memory to carry out computations on its own before shuffling to a processor (people…