idlewords

The model I cite in the article is calibrated to rDNA specifically.

Man, I broke a lot of nerds' hearts today. Sorry for rug-pulling you with questions on the nature and origin of life, rather than something deep and philosophical!

What would a better title have been, on a substack that is exclusively about space exploration?

"Hey lonely HN nerds, wipe the tear from your eye and come read about microbe survival times in salt, permafrost, and open space"? Something else? I'm open to suggestions.

I recommend being entombed in salt

Use Pinboard

This has occurred to people! But if you run the numbers, they are still not good enough in that early (~100 My) window when stars in the parent nebula are close together, you get something like 1 chance in 1000 of possible panspermia events (based on modeling lumps of rock flying back and forth). Not terrible odds, but nothing like the Mars -> Earth odds.

It's more likely he'll merge Tesla with SpaceX.

It was an engineering break something, for sure.

Counterpoint: I live off-grid and am thankful I can just power my house with batteries instead of a massive car that looks like a Dumpster

It's spelled "populace". I learned that by reading newspapers!

Thanks to global warming someday your people will be able to move 60 km north.

This is a vastly clearer explanation than the linked page. Thank you!

That is a category error, though. You can't entirely separate money from state power because ultimately all money represents a claim on resources within some political structure. And the place where you exchange money for those resources is always going to be within reach of the state, kind of by definition.

Until the SHTF lever was hacked to divert all hot wallets into somebody else's cold wallet

Internet infrastructure companies using '5' as their private key are sweating bullets. They know they are next.

Or they can put thick mitts on Zuckerberg's hands for a couple of years so he can't sign any checks.

That penalty is almost 1/3 of a Metaverse. That's got to sting!

I guess the future is people arguing in comments whether a high-severity vulnerability is the one under embargo, or one of various unrelated devastating bugs discovered when people got wind of the embargo and pointed their AI agents at the codebase.

It's demoralizing that we live in 2026 and a modest level of traffic is still enough to take down half the web.

Probably not with any technology; it's unlikely that fetal development and growth can happen properly in gravity much lower than 1 g.

Human colonies are not sustainable anywhere offworld.

Amazing discussion thread; thank you to all who shined a great white edifying light on the topic here.

Both were known to be Kuiper Belt objects, so it was expected there would at least be a family resemblance. I don't think anyone expected Pluto to be more active than Triton; that was certainly a surprise.

If there are planetologists reading the thread, I'd love to hear a more authorative perspective than mine!

No shade on New Horizons intended, but I was talking about the early 2000's revolution in understanding of ice moons/ocean worlds, and that preceded the Pluto flyby by a lot.

It was a valuable piece of corroborating evidence, but not shocking and unexpected in the way results from those three missions were. We had good reason to believe Pluto would look a lot like Triton, and it does.

Not true at all, the daily dose on Ganymede (which has a magnetic field of its own) is ~70 mSv/day, and Callisto is 0.1 mSv/day.

Io, meanwhile, is 35 Sv/day. Location really matters among the four Galilean moons.

Right. I said mountain to stress the importance of topography in the NM accident. The parent commenter may pat himself on the back for never flying into terrain during GPS outages in Florida, but there are factors in play in addition to his superior skills.

The highest mountain summit in Florida is 105 meters above sea level.

Location: New Mexico

Remote: Yes

Willing to relocate: to NYC only

Technologies: Yes, but you'd probably want to hire me as a writer/analyst.

Résumé/CV: https://idlewords.com/cv.htm

Email: see CV

Looking for paid engagements working on technical due diligence for investors, written communications for exec teams, privacy/trust advisory roles, and anything to do with social impacts of AI. I've run a small SaaS business for 17 years and have a long track record as a writer and speaker on topics around social media and privacy (https://idlewords.com/talks).

My core skill is making esoteric and technical things readable and engaging to the audience of your choice, but if pressed I can code.

Thank you! I realize people have subscription fatigue, and that on this site in particular there's a culture of expecting to read the full text of everything for free. So I try to make the previews substantive enough for people to participate in discussion whether or not they sign up.

I do feel like the free sample guy at Costco, confident that once people try the cube of summer sausage on a toothpick, they'll want to buy the whole thing. But I sure appreciate someone else saying it!

I am trying to be friendly with the paywall.