Comic Discussion > QUESTIONABLE CONTENT
WCDT Strips 3191-3195 (4th to 8th April 2016)
jheartney:
--- Quote from: danuis on 04 Apr 2016, 20:05 ---
--- Quote from: SomeCanadianWeirdo on 04 Apr 2016, 19:59 ---Comic. Bubbles unfortunately passes by creeps, although I'm not sure whether the girl with dyed hair is actually anti-AI. And is that Sweet Tits in the first panel?
--- End quote ---
It looks like -from their positioning and the speech bubbles thereof - that the guy not smoking said the worst, the guy smoking laughs along, while the girl wit the dyed hair was telling the discriminatory dude to shut up.
--- End quote ---
Someone should introduce them to May. She'd fit right in with them, and maybe convince them AI's are people too.
President Peaches:
Hey, as long as there are no cryptic messages like "ALL THESE WORLDS ARE YOURS—EXCEPT EUROPA
ATTEMPT NO LANDING THERE" being sent on all frequencies I assume it's safe to travel around.
cesium133:
"ALL THESE WORLDS ARE YOURS—EXCEPT EARTH / ATTEMPT NO LANDING THERE"
"But we're from Earth..."
"AWKWARD."
Is it cold in here?:
Welcome, new person with bird and squirrel feeders!
danuis:
--- Quote from: jheartney on 04 Apr 2016, 20:16 ---
--- Quote from: danuis on 04 Apr 2016, 19:49 ---As sad as it is, you'll be surprised how many scifi tropes or cliques actually exist already, and in the comic, would only be more so.... Just the other day someone legitimately said if there was ONE microbe on Mars, or Venus, we should not settle there, because apparently we have no right to interfere, or some silly bull like that. And discrimination against Cyborgs is already a thing - some can go securely far placing it as an extension of discrimination against disabilities and - I can only imagine that discrimination and hate towards sapient AI walking around would be, too, especially if there's a lot of angry workers and unemployment issues laying about for a politician or a group to tack onto the AI, and so on and so on.
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I doubt we need to worry about microbes on Venus, as the surface is a lead-melting high pressure acidic hellhole. Mars is nearly airless, though once it had liquid water on the surface. If you read Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy, part of it is the conflict between the "Red Mars" faction (who want to keep the place as much as possible as-is) and the "Green Mars" faction (full speed ahead with terraforming). We'll have to see if the issue ever comes up, since there's a whole lot of irradiated distance from Earth to Mars, and it's not clear we could get anybody there alive.
--- End quote ---
Of course we can get anyone there alive. The radiation dosage is pitiful, and even in events such as solar flares there's a reason why 'storm cellars' are part of spacecraft concepts to get to Mars - protected rooms to bunker down in rad-flare ups.
The readings performed by the Curiosity rover on the way to Mars show that the astronauts would be exposed to a total of 1.8 milllisieverts per day, with surface levels being about 0.64 mSv per day. Assuming a 500 day surface stay and 360 days in space, the total radiation dose the crew would be exposed to is roughly 1.01 Sievert over the total duration of the trip. This is associated with a total death risk by cancer of... five percentage points. It would go up from 21% to 26%. The radiation limit for ESA astronauts is 1 Sievert, which means that ESA astronauts would be only barely out of the limit, even if provided only with the thin metal shielding on Curiosity. Only a relatively small amount of radiation protection would be required to get the mission dose under the acceptable limit. According to an ESA study from 2004, only 9 grams per square centimeter of radiation protection is required to get within the acceptable limit, which actually is no additional shielding at all for their habitat design. The NASA limit of 2/3rds of a Sv are more problematic, however. From
https://www.reddit.com/r/space/comments/2ok6zv/radiation_on_the_way_to_mars_and_why_it_isnt_such/
And that's with a long trip with barely new tech - Nuclear Thermal Rockets, VASIMIR, and Nuclear Gas Core Open Cycle rockets can decrease travel time to around 30, 40, 80 days either way, with all the radiation cutting - and needed food stores, water stores, and mental stress - that entitles. For some reason, the ESA didn't TOUCH electric or nuclear propulsion in their study, maybe for political and social reasons, but it's sadly self-castrating not to, but even so, Chemical rocketry and the technology is, apparently, well enough for the mission. Still, I'm pro-nuclear propulsion in space. All Chemical rocketry should do is help lift it up from here to there, and be discarded thereof on such journeys save for RCS needs.
As for the Mars trilogy - I know about it. The Red Mars faction was so cliche I could never get into it, though the whole universe he built up - and the book 2312* as well - was very illustrative, though in my own eyes very....optimistic. Expansion in a relative sense will occur, but every rock, every Laragarian point might very well stay empty, not to even begin with the genetic engineering, the fusion drives, the meta-nats, etc.* Of course, I'm biased towards space expansion in general, as you can possibly tell - It's hard for me to imagine anyone who would halt our species just on the offhand chance of another species existed. We've always expanded, we'll always continue to expand, until we drop dead as a species.
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