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Having dealt with the situation of death in my extended family, I've concluded that the most common thing following death is a garage sale.

Walter Sobchak: Say what you want about the tenets of National Socialism, Dude, at least it’s an ethos. /the dude abides

That makes sense and I’m glad you clarified, but even the idea of a book being “wrong” is just like… one opinion, man. /thedude

Georgia officials finally crack long-open hamburglar case. All abducted children previously ensnared to alphabetize stolen confidential documents have been safely returned to their families. This story and more tonight on Dateline.

No, my assumption is it isn't feasible. If it were close to feasible -and I do think the economics of it is indicative - maybe but it isn't anything like close. That thousand fold lowering of costs - more like 10,000 fold to get near across the planet ocean shipping costs underpinning global trade - makes a barrier that wishful thinking cannot overcome. That there are real extinction risks is why I support meteor defense as an enduring space program objective. If drastic cost reductions emerge then we can reassess where that line for feasible is. Space is not the place for depending on improvising or any go there then figure it out "bootstrapping" - everything needs foresight, planning and preparation. I don't think that is true, even leaving aside just how out of reach "once you conquer colonising space" is. Sure, you can throw a stone in space and it will keep going but getting it to reach a specific destination is a whole lot harder; getting to and from actual destination in space is still hugely energy expensive and technically challenging. Just going from low Earth orbit to Geostationary costs about 1/3 of the delta-v ie fuel requirements and wear and tear of what it took from ground to low orbit - that is still a LOT - and requires a lot of reaction mass as well as energy to do it. From low orbit to moon takes 2/3rd of what reaching orbit did. To Mars from Earth orbit it takes about as much as reaching Earth orbit, but without atmospheric braking to save fuel. Solar power does seem to offer some potential where low accelerations suffice - I'd suggest very high temperature vaporisation, maybe to plasma, of (probably) water rather than attempting to turn it into chemical fuel, but the reaction mass to payload ratio is still going to be very high. There are some useful resources in great abundance out there, with nickel-iron the pick of them, with 10's of ppm of platinum group metals included, if you can refine them, but not every resource is abundant. For example I struggle to see how fission rockets can be fueled in space without accessing fissionable materials from Earth - which may be in high demand. Fusion is still a work in progress. But even with such energy sources there is a lot of reaction mass needed. I'm not opposed per se - just think it is a lot harder than the optimists like to think.

I am more used to discussions that start off about the thermodynamics of steam engines and end up discussing toilets, than the other way round. But I fear we may have strayed a bit from the topic. We pipe water to our houses at fairly high purity, and chlorinated. That's not going to grow much biology. After we use it to flush toilets, it has more "biology" in it than seawater does. So the question of maintaining free flowing water when using sea water (if one set up a pipe system to deliver it) would only relate to the inlet- the outlet would be pretty much the same (I'm assuming the mix of bugs in the water treatment works would adjust to cope with the increased salinity). If we chlorinated the infeed sea water the problem would go away. But it would take more chlorine to "sterilise" sea water than drinking water. It might not be worth the effort.

Based on personal experience, the major technical challenge to pumped sea water systems is that it is considerably more nutritious than fresh water. Large channels rapidly attract colonies of mussels and oysters etc, and small channels (eg cistern fill valves, filters) get blocked by salps. Not insurmountable problems, but expensive to solve. Anding nitrogenous waste to the mix will escalate these biological issues even further.

Wonder what all that salt water is going to do to the metal components it comes in contact with. And we've now given the treatment plants the additional responsibility of desalination or risk killing freshwater plants and fish or fouling groundwater when the treated water is discharged.

There's a kernel of a good idea here, though. We need to massively invest in global desalination and transport of the fresh water which results to address the real issues of drought and crop failure which will drive suffering, poverty, and mass migration for many generations to come. Desalination can help with a lot of the risks we and our children are about to face, but it requires huge investment and policy support to achieve.

Video of an unidentified falling object An example of why eyewitness testimony is unreliable

It seems like a blatant waste of resources, to let government agencies and scientific establishments develop all of these techniques for taking samples on Mars and analysing the atmosphere of far distant exoplanets for any sign of biological gases, when our governments are well aware that the aliens have been coming to us. That's taking a cover up to rather ridiculous wasteful lengths.