> Well, it suggests that our solar system is bigger than we thought.

I think that depends on what we consider to be the solar system. The heliopause is further out than this (about 123 AU), and that could be considered the edge of the solar system. However, of the Oort cloud exists, that really should be considered the…

I wonder how much is due to the images and how much of this is an artifact of the program itself. Remember, the software is designed to pick up on human face-like features.

Great... another one where they more or less slap a vagina on an already existing character.

It’s very difficult to remain truly anonymous. Tor is pretty good, but a compromised exit node can ruin things, to an extent. There are alternatives which have not been broken though.

Sharing will help, as well “open source research” but I think we’ll also have to include a lot of the opposite: extremely security of data, which can only be accessed after a certain amount of time, or if the author decides to release it earlier. This would entice those who are unwilling to give up their “private…

> Reproducibility is one of the cornerstones of science. Made popular by British scientist Robert Boyle in the 1660s, the idea is that a discovery should be reproducible before being accepted as scientific knowledge.

Technically true yet also not true. One of the reasons reproducibility was so important was because…

There’s also a great deal of nepotism involved. People hold onto information for a long time, and make sure that they are the only ones who can use it. It’s not as bad after publishing, but I’ve run into major concerns in the field of archaeology, where the original information is quite literally destroyed in the…

Rather than try to restore Mars’ “organic” magnetic field, it would be easier to create an artificial one. We still don’t completely understand how Mars’ magnetic field worked in the first place, as I mentioned in another link. They seem to think that it relied on a different process than the Earth (which has a solid…

So jealous of those archaeologists...

“Sorry. If the cup’s bottom fell out, I would say hell yeah. But if you are an idiot who puts hot coffee on your lap, it is your fault if it spills.”

You mean this? Yeah. I still say that she is an idiot for holding scolding hot coffee on her lap, and trying to open it ON HER LAP. Sorry if you disagree. However, you…

The inner core is solid, according to current theories, of the Earth’s geological configuration. Also, as I corrected myself, the core of Mars seems to still be at least partially molten.

It was never really the primary explanation being passed around between scientists, from what I could tell, but it was an answer which fit the data. Perhaps that’s an issue with trying to use inductive reasoning, rather than deductive falsification, but I digress.

Hopefully we do find a Dyson swarm at some point. Until…

Again, I am not just discussing the temperature of the core, but its constituent parts. Mercury has a large iron core. Mars does not. Mars probably has far less iron, as a percentage, overall than either Mercury or the Earth. That could explain why the magnetic field did not last the way it did on Earth.

I’m not sure what the rate of erosion is, but I suppose it could add some depth. Maybe about 100 meters, total?

Let’s take Olympus Mons, which is huge. It’s volume, assuming it were a perfect frustum of a cone (overestimation), would be... pi(25km)/3*((312.5km)^2+(312.5km*40km) + (40km)^2) or 702,000 cubic miles, which…

The cost-benefit analysis for that would be rather complex and would include a large number of assumptions. Here is a partial list of questions that would need to be answered:

How much CO2, nitrogen, etc are available for us to extract from Martian soil? And how much would we have to “import?”

How much would having Mars…

> ...beyond a bludgeon you like to use in attempts to make people feel small and less intelligent than yourself.

You are constantly attacking my intelligence and you make comments like that. Go figure. You keep describing your own actions.

I suppose it depends on how you define “god.” I’ve argued that those who practice Shinto are atheists, as the kami do not align with common ideas of what constitute gods. https://www.quora.com/Is-Shinto-athe…

I wrote a reply to my original post, which expanded on it. It does need a molten core, made of iron (or really just a ferromagnetic metal). On Earth, the magnetic field is due to the solid core, and the crystallization of iron around it (maybe). On Mars, the magnetic field seems to be caused by iron “snow (maybe).”…

It isn’t just the size. And I don’t mean that the heat received from the sun is the factor. The heavier elements, such as iron, are found closer to the sun, as the heavier elements gravitated in that direction, during planetary formation.

The dust would blow around, but not build up. There is nothing new being generated that would build it up. True, some of its earliest layers will be underground, as the planet was geologically active at one point, but it is the fact that everything is more or less on the surface that allows us to see what happened on…