[Q&A+] Boots on Mars When? What's on The Dark Side? Why Colonize the Moon? | Q&A 374

Oh, come on now we know that’s Pac-Man facing the wrong way. Even Evan will get this one.

Fraser, there is no such thing as the “dark side of the moon.” It’s called the “far side,” colloquially.

Fraser, check out Sean Carroll Nov 2025 AMA, at minute 22:15, or close. He explains a bit your reasons for thinking we are alone in the universe. https://www.patreon.com/posts/ama-november-143729826?utm_campaign=patron_engagement&utm_source=post_link&post_id=143729826&token=eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJyZWRpc19rZXkiOiJpYTI6ZTNkNmZkZmUtZjM0OS00MWJlLTgzNjUtMGM1Mzg5M2I4NTY5IiwicG9zdF9pZCI6MTQzNzI5ODI2LCJwYXRyb25faWQiOjIyNjM1NTk4fQ.6Y8K7We-8FyOGHjgZ7yErUmj

so what telescope is better/ cheaper the dwarf or the see star?

Those Russian parachutes definitely shed some living cells into the Venetian atmosphere on their way down. We've already colonized/seeded Venus. Womp womp.

I agree Angela Collier's video is very insightful, but also very long. And she's very good at passing the wrong message unless you watch to the end. I watched 75% of the video thinking she was making fun of Freeman Dyson, and only at the end did I understand she was actually praising him!

Sadly plans for Moon or Mars are not solid at this time for predicting much. Thus far we have ended up with loony tunes governments toward spaceflight as well as private companies. Any other options than government or private to push us forward?

Fraser, a question, maybe for a future episode: I've seen many videos with Penrose or Susskind where they discuss the fact that quantum theory is wrong, and that GR cannot coexist with QM, not to mention other physicists who are stating that string theory is a dead end. It's been too long since I studied physics, and I cannot form an opinion on these controversies. What's your take?

Harvesting hydrogen from the sun to burn it in fusion reactors wouldn't be much more efficient? The only reason why human fusion reactors are more power dense than the sun is because they are using rare isotopes of hydrogen and helium that already have neutrons, most of the mass of the sun cannot be used that way, for the simple reason that fusing regular hydrogen is *slow*. In order to form a stable helium atom from regular hydrogen, whose nucleus is just a lone proton, you need to have multiple protons join together, and simultaneously have one of those protons be transmuted into a neutron. The probability of both of those things happening simultaneously in the brief instant before the protons fly apart is miniscule, which is why even in the incredibly high temperatures and pressures in the centers of stars the reaction proceeds so incredibly slowly that it takes hundreds of millions to trillions of years for a significant fraction of the fuel to be used. We can make reactors that replicate the temperatures inside stars, but getting anywhere close to the pressures inside stars, which is needed to fuse plain hydrogen, would be an astronomical undertaking. And even that would still only give you a reactor with a pitiful power density, taking billions of years to process the fuel you feed it. To actually get power levels that are useful on human time scales you either need the reactor to be enormous (like a star already is, completely for free) or crank up the power density by replicating conditions closer to a *supernova*. And still, even if you managed a feat that extreme and got a power dense pure hydrogen reactor, at the end of the day you would be left with a device that still produces the same amount of energy per kilo of hydrogen as the sun does, the fusion reaction itself still releases the same amount of energy weather it happens in the sun or in a man made reactor. The only advantage the smaller reactor would have is that its more portable.

If only Patreon worked on their mobile app… 🥹

Was Mars potentially the RNA World? Could transpermia explain why we don't see free living RNA organisms on Earth?