I heard that in Sheldon Coopers voice.

This is why I may never be able to fully repair my relationship with my religious father after my own journey out, because I love him too much to undermine the belief that sustains him as an 87 year old.

My own journey out has been incredibly painful and challenging but that is MY life path, not his. He stuck with my mother for 25 years to the very end after her Parkinsons diagnosis and he got to watch her choke to death on some food at the end.

I really believe my father doesn’t need the religion to be that good and faithful, because he is just basically made of good stuff. But I will never attack his faith even though in my heart of hearts I find the foundations of that faith to be risible. What would be gained? What would it say about me if I did?

You sound like you mean well, but this is not helpful advice. You are essentially telling someone who is obviously a conscientious person and struggling that they have a character flaw.

This is sad news. He was deeply influential and at the same time a somewhat obscure author. At least, in my experience, he didn’t have the name recognition other - dare I say lesser - authors had.

One lesson I learned as a young person from reading A Fire Upon the Deep was to never believe anything just because it was on the internet. That alone makes his legacy worth remembering.

Move over bacon. Now there’s something meatier!

You are correct. People these days are idjits.

‘Shopkeeper’ implies you might actually own the shop you keep. Modern retail provides few such jobs.

For reference this is the Mormon Jesus. I see the resemblance

We do need to give them the Ma Bell treatment.

Nationalize Amazon.

This guy 👆🏻

NO! There isn’t, lemmy is one giant honeypot.

Double rubble is what the Hamburglar said, right? It’s enough to make a headline writers day.

This means we get to do more science. There’s surely a queue of groups who want to analyze the samples for various reasons. Hopefully this means more groups get access to some. I can’t wait for the studies to start coming out.

I don’t think thats a logically defensible position. That would make me guilty of speeding (and technically every other crime on the books) even if I never get in a car.

Without a finding of fact by a court, I have the presumption of innocence. Without that finding, I am NOT in fact breaking any laws. The alternative is a presumption of guilt which is the opposite of our entire legal system.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Azolla_event

So I think Azolla (a floating fern that fixes nitrogen) is the way to go to jumpstart an extraterrestrial soil. It’s insanely productive and makes amazing compost. The wikipedia link is just a cool thing I like to share.

No one said that blood-curdling cosmic horror had to be good to destroy the vestiges of your sanity.

Yes, I’d think that would be the goal. Long term habitation will need plants of many kinds. Just start listing all the ways people benefit from plants and you’ll see the list just goes on and on. At the huge price per kilogram of launched mass, making soil out of local materials and developing closed-loop systems just makes economic sense. Soil is a living thing after all, it doesn’t wear out or go away. (Older than dirt!) Learning how to make healthy functioning soil from native regolith is an important part of the whole in-situ resource utilization push from the major space agencies.

It’s like regular madness, but in spaaaaaaaaaaace, therefore very expensive.

Hydroponics requires biologically available nitrogen too and it has to come from somewhere. The point of these experiments is to explore a wide variety of scenarios. Hydroponics as a growing method has some drawbacks too. Any robust food production scheme in space will likely include a mix of hydro- and geo-ponics (fancy name for soil growing).

Also consider the non-food benefits of living plants and soil. Any long term habitat on the moon or Mars will need living plants for the psychological and air quality benefits. There is a massive body of research that shows the benefits of having trees around. There is even research that shows just smelling healthy soil can be antidepressant.

Let’s say we enclose a large lava tube, one seriously considered approach for long term habitats. Having some greenery would go a long way to staving off Space Madness.