space settlement

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Halo: first contact, power armor, and how does master chief poop? w/ Daniel Barker

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Importance

Nostalgia: wow Halo has really been around for a minute. Hundreds of hours of that one level of local multiplayer but never playing the story. Turning an RTS into a TPS and then an FPS and then getting that Microsoft money. Figuring out the importance of Halo CE in the history of gaming. PC gaming master race. Tank-controlled console FPS games. Unseating Goldeneye. Establishing a timeline of FPS quality on consoles and PC.

First Contact

Humanity honing its warfare skills by just being jerks to other humans. Settling 800+ planets! “Glassing” enemy alien planets.

Put a ring on it

Ringworlds! But less a ring “world” and more a ring “weapons platofrm that also is fairly liveable.” The Drake Equation and the Fermi Paradox through the lens of Halo.

Armor

Master Chief vs Doom Guy. Measuring Hell energy. Mjolnir armor – a half ton and costs as much as a destroyer to produce. “Smart” and “dumb” AI delineations. Neural exoskeleton integration. PRedictive algorithms. Relating Master Chief to Upgrade. What about just putting an AI and some batteries inside of the Mjolnir armor? Falling from space.

Halo Foward Unto Dawn: Amazon
Uncertainty Principle: UncertaintyPrincipleThePodcast.com

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Ad Astra: nuclear spaceships, the edge of the solar system, and space monkeys

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Science…?!

Some things are more art than science sometimes.

Structures anchored to geostationary orbit

“Space antennas” but what kind of signal would benefit from this design? X-Rays? Why would this not be better off in orbit? The structure sure looks a lot like a space elevator. Space elevators and geostationary orbital masses.

Falling from space

It’s hard to steer without sufficient atmospheric density. Felix Baumgartner’s jump “from space.”

High energy blasting

Antimatter nonsense. Our increasing fragility in the face of an unlucky coronal mass ejection. Protecting infrastructure both inside and increasingly outside our atmosphere.

Moon settlement

Moon surface settlements vs moon gateways vs embarking to The Moon from low Earth orbit. Awesome moon buggy chases. Pirates!

Mars settlement

Communicating with and from Mars. Interplanetary distance and comms speed. Building settlements within Martian or Lunar lava tubes.

The heliopause

Finding the “edge” of our star system. Difference in concentration of high energy particles.

SETI

Looking for signs of life around other stars. Taking pictures of black holes. Planet-sized telescopes. The absurd distances from Earth to other stars. Vegemite in Australia. Absent of evidence is not evidence of absence.

Nuclear spaceships

Project Orion. Blowing up your spaceship because it doesn’t have a nuclear bomb-ready push plate.

Ad Astra: iTunes | Amazon

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The Expanse Season 3: low-g gardening, high-g deceleration, and more poop potatoes w/ Fraser Cain

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Featuring guest co-host
Fraser Cain headshotFraser Cain of Universe Today

Past coverage

We like this show lots! Thus, our continuing coverage:
* Language & The Expanse w/ Nick Farmer, Linguist
* The Expanse VFX w/ Cailin Munroe
* The Expanse Season 2 (feat Fraser Cain)

Difficulties

The oft-overlooked actual difficulties of space settlement. Not technology and logistics, but like, how hard it will likely be for the humans doing the job at first. And second. And then for a while after, too.

Plants in spaaaaaaaace

Growing fresh food in space habitats. Poop-potatoes. Wide-spectrum LEDs. Self-contained hydroponics/aeroponics.

Low-g situations

People in spaaaaaaaaace. Dealing with microgravity. Bro, do you even lift in space? Eyeball un-squishing. Figuring out how to burp. Fluid-pooling and major injury.

High-g situations.

Turning people into jelly. Differing human sensitivity to sustained g-forces in different directions. The wonderful engineering concept of the ship with omnidirectional seating that reconfigures on-the-fly for optimal g-resistance (The Razorback).

High-speed space impact

Turning into jelly and then having your jelly explode your ship, because physics. Relativistic baseballs. Long-haul space-racing and how to be your own butt-wiping pit crew.

Kinetic weapon diplomacy

Nuclear non-proliferation treaties in space. Orbital kinetic weapons and cloaked nuke-ships playing the role of the submarine as deterrent.

Interstellar highway program

Minimum viable star system bootstrap answering machine. The Fermi paradox. The odds that most of the signs of alien civilization that we might discover would be past.

Links

The Universe Today Ultimate Guide to Viewing The Cosmos: Everything You Need to Know to Become an Amateur Astronomer by David Dickinson & Fraser Cain: Amazon
The Expanse Season 3: Prime Video
Guide to Space by Fraser Cain: YouTube

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Total Recall – top-notch Arnold, muscle memory, and how not to settle Mars w/ Josh Effengee

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Featuring guest co-host
Josh from LSG Media headshotJosh from LSG Media

Man meat

Ahhhhnold! Your average Joe, working construction just like any other regular guy who is a giant bodybuilding monster-person. We really missed this in our coverage of Total Recall 2012.

Memory

Memory “insertion” and memory “deletion” or “blocking” in mouse studies. The great distance from where we are now to trivial memory “vacations” a la Recall. Semantic memory, autobiographical memory, and muscle memory.

Tracking devices

Ideal tracking-implantation locations. The incredible utility of the anus for tracker storage, weighed against the small time window.

Mars

Building Martian settlements with as much radiation exposure as possible: glass! glass everywhere! Radiation exposure on the Martian surface. Burying your dead on Mars: a tasteful resource-wasting mausoleum indoors, a giant pile of bleached-out mummies outside the door, or arrange them in awesome poses?

Space Resources

Natural resources in space. Calculating mining cost vs cost to get it where it will be useful. Mining and transporting Helium-3 for fusion energy. Harvesting oxygen from frozen water and getting rocket fuel as a bonus. NASA’s Moxie and inventing trees for spaaaaace. Making your Martian habitat smell like a dirty fish tank, for science.

Links:

Josh’s shows on LSG Media: The X-Files Podcast (always) | Science Fiction Film Podcast (sometimes)

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Pacific Rim Uprising: drone jamming, the aircraft boneyard, and cerebral organoids

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Robot police

Keeping the peace when independent operations can make their own giant robots. Staying somewhat prepared for returning existential threats.

Jaeger graveyard

Stowing expensive purpose-built machinery. Aircraft graveyards. The economics of storing and securing out-of-production technology for later use.

Robotics

Avoiding trouble with the square-cube law by building smaller robots. Boston Dynamics and the inevitable impression of the coming robot apocalypse. Parkour Atlas. Robot kumite.

Drones

Securing mobile war machines. EMPs. Resistance to signal-jamming. Broad attack surfaces.

Brain in a jar

IRL progress towards a brain in a jar: human brain organoids implanted on a mouse brain. Sensory apparatus and feeling pain. Getting (ethically) hairy.

Rare earth elements

Actually: not so rare! But a pain in the ass to extract. The Japanese rare earth ocean-bottom treasure trove and how it will be difficult to access. Mining rare earth elements from spaaaaaaaace and how we probably need a new colloquial name for these materials. Underwater volcanoes.

Jaeger blood rocket fuel

Magical Jaeger blood rocker fuel. Gravity gun space race. Keeping Earth as a farm for kaiju blood, fueling our expansion into the entire solar system. Throwing rocks at things for fun and profit.

Links

Pacific Rim: square cube law, giant death robot, and Earth terraforming w/ Stephen Granade
Atlas Parkour: YouTube
Rayguns and Robots (Curly Phil): Instagram
Batch 25 Comics (Andy P): Instagram

Doom 2005 movie poster

Doom: moons of Mars, space marines, and telefragging w/ Josh Effengee of LSG Media

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Featuring guest co-host
Josh from LSG Media headshotJosh from LSG Media

Doom

Doom! Nostalgia.

The Martian moons

Crappy moons that can barely form a potato. Phobos and Deimos. Delineating between moons, planets, and all the other stuff. The likely origin of the Martian moons.

Space marines

Corporate space settlement and operations. Space Force. Josh reviews space marines; again. Martian weaponry.

Settling mars

Where to build? The cost of scratch settlement construction. Caves and lava tubes. Teleporting resources changes the game.

Ancient aliens

The Prometheus Problem, again. Doom humans-on-mars hypotheses: aliens developed humans on Mars vs humans originated on Mars. Species resurrection. Gene therapy. Chromosomal addition and subtraction.

Martian miscellany

Nano walls! Water on Mars! Telefragging!

Links:

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The 100 (Pilot) : Episode 106

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Stream the show:
iTunes | Netflix | Amazon

The 100 (Pilot episode)

What: The 100 descend for teenage drama on earth 97 years post-nuclear-apocalypse. Also there are grownups on a space settlement with simulated gravity.
Produced by: Jason Rothenberg
Starring: Eliza Taylor, Bob Morley, Marie Avgeropoulos

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Seveneves (feat. Daniel Mann, Software Pro) : Episode 50

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Read the book:
iTunes | Amazon

Seveneves

What: Breaking with the format for this episode, we’re covering a book! Seveneves, by Neal Stephenson. Here is the first paragraph:

The moon blew up without warning and for no apparent reason. It was waxing, only one day short of full. The time was 05:03:12 UTC. Later it would be designated A+0.0.0, or simply Zero.

Written by: Neal Stephenson
Starring: Fictional characters, in a book

With guest co-host:
Daniel Mann
Daniel Mann

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Elysium

Elysium (feat. Liam Ginty of Voices from L5) : Episode 17

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Stream the movie:
iTunes | Amazon
Get the Blu-ray:
Amazon
Get the DVD:
Amazon

Elysium

What: Matt Damon gets desperate and tries to bring equality to a world divided into the haves (in the space station Elysium) and the have-nots (on Earth).
Directed by: Neill Blomkamp
Starring: Matt Damon, Jodie Foster, Sharlto Copley

Featuring guest co-host
Liam Ginty
Liam Ginty, host of Voices From L5

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