Tag: tshirts

Making life multi-planetary

It is important that we take action now to make life multi-planetary, because this is really the first point in the 4B-year history of Earth that it has been possible. That window of possibility will hopefully be open for a long time, but it may only be open for a short time. That’s why I think urgent action is required on making life multi-planetary.

2012-11-12: This guy has more vision (and execution) than all the web 2.0 kiddies together.

Elon Musk wants to help establish a Mars colony of up to 80K people by ferrying explorers to the Red Planet for perhaps $500K a trip. In Musk’s vision, the ambitious Mars settlement program would start with a pioneering group of fewer than 10 people, who would journey to the Red Planet aboard a huge reusable rocket powered by liquid oxygen and methane.

2013-10-03: My latest toy to mess with tiny Luddite brains

2015-08-17: Long but worthwhile read

I’ve always envied everyone who was alive during the excitement of the moon landing in the late 60s. When I’ve thought about The Story of Humans and Space, the 1960s always seemed like a fluky 10 years of supreme excitement in the middle of an otherwise calm and steady trajectory: But now, I’m seeing the moon landing more as a precursor of something much bigger. Without realizing it, we may be standing on the precipice of one of the great leaps in biological history, and the moon landing may later be seen as the first labor contraction in the birth of an entirely new era for life on Earth. And somehow, we may actually be alive as that new era dawns.

2017-06-15: More details have been published

SpaceX is estimating they will be able to achieve $140K per ton for the trips to Mars. If a person plus their luggage is less than that, taking into account food consumption and life support, the cost of moving to Mars could ultimately drop below $100K. Cost will be brought down 5M % with fully reusable rocket, orbital refueling, propellent production on Mars, CH4 / O2 DEEP-CRYO Methalox fuel.

2018-08-31: Using Starship for habitation

SpaceX plans to live out of the BFS ships initially on Mars and then build out the facilities (habitation, power systems, mining and landing pads). The BFS would land on Mars with 100 tons including the ship.

T-shirt body armor

Researchers drastically increased the toughness of a T-shirt by combining the carbon in the shirt’s cotton with boron – the 3rd hardest material on earth. The result is a lightweight shirt reinforced with boron carbide, the same material used to protect tanks.

dipping in a boron solution results in a fabric that’s lightweight but tougher and stiffer than the original T-shirt, yet flexible enough that it can be bent.