>One thing that's never really been shown to the public, not even 50 year old 1970s era stuff, are photos/examples of the SIGINT systems that the NSA likely has in orbit.
See High Jump: the JUMPSEAT signals intelligence satellite
235 karma · joined December 21, 2020
See High Jump: the JUMPSEAT signals intelligence satellite
>The ex-head of news at Russia's largest internet company has advice for his former colleagues: quit.
>Lev Gershenzon worked at Yandex in various roles for four years, according to his LinkedIn profile. He took to Facebook early Tuesday morning to warn people still working at the company — which is one of the largest search engines in Russia — that it was contributing to the censorship of the country's invasion into Ukraine.
>"The fact that a significant part of the Russian population may believe that there is no war is the basis and driving force of this war," Gershenzon wrote, also tagging six of his former coworkers. "Today, Yandex is a key element in hiding information about war. Every day and hour of such "news" costs human lives. And you, my former colleagues, are also responsible for this."
2) https://techcrunch.com/2022/03/16/russia-yandex-news-vk/
>Yandex’s former head of news accused the company of being a ‘key element in hiding information’ from Russians about the war in Ukraine.
3) Result of Yandex's slower crawler and default display mode, although the effect is as described: https://twitter.com/maryilyushina/status/1510930537187319813...
https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/tech-news/2022-04-06/ty-...
I've forked out >$4k for a high-quality journal to make my research open-access. Or I could have paid $0 and it would be behind a paywall.
Some like Nature, publish largely open-access but it can cost >$8k to be published there.
This seems laughably short, even by the low bar countries like to set for their Mars rovers.
I used to have to be debriefed after ANY foreign travel because other people in my lab used image processing software that was covered under ITAR...
As I said elsewhere, I think the disconnect here is between potential and probable. Homo sapiens have twice come to the edge of nuclear oblivion already (being saved only by luck essentially), and I would wager we are are speeding much faster towards nuking each other than reaching the stars.
Let's say it takes ~8 minutes to get to LEO vs 4,380 minutes to get to the Moon. That's a factor of ~550x longer flight time for a distance 2000x further.
Alpha Centauri is 1500x further away than Mars. It currently takes ~7 months to go from Earth to Mars (at 25,000 mph), assuming similar scaling that comes out to only 400x the flight time, or just about 230 years.
I am not opposed to scientific exploration at all, (I work with several people who run Ops on MSL and Percy), but putting people on the surface requires much more infrastructure and expense. A sample return mission is already extremely complex and costly, and would be orders of magnitude more so if the mission also had to support human life.
Further, terraforming Mars so that people could go explore it seems completely backwards, since you would be altering the conditions you would be studying.
To your question:
>There must be so many questions you have about the planet that just won't be answered in your lifetime unless we go there and have a look around.
I'm not even sure what those would be. Almost any question we could want answered could be solved with a probe or a rover. Obviously there are questions we can't answer right now, but those are largely because we send rovers that are specialized in some areas, and totally ignorant of others. To answer those questions, it would be simpler, cheaper, and better for Mars to send more robots than to send people in my view.