listening to @astronomycast where it's mentioned that a certain scumbag billionaire is talking about skipping the Moon and landing humans on Mars.

Might I remind the world that Obama had us going to Mars. That got cut back because it was too risky and FAR too expensive. SLS, which is just enough to get a small capsule to and back from the Moon is considered way too expensive (yes, it's expensive. getting to the moon is expensive.)

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The Moon is a long ways away. You could fit EVERY SINGLE PLANET in between the Earth and the Moon. You might think it's a long ways to the local pharmacy, but that's just peanuts compared to space.

Mars is orders of magnitude further away. If somethign goes wrong on the Moon, it's 3 days away. If something goes wrong on Mars, you're a YEAR away. Due to orbits, you're also probably going to spend 3 years on the mission, 1 year to mars, 1 year on mars, 1 year back.

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This includes idiot billionaires. If you want to complain about government costs, shut up about manned Mars missions. Also, feel free to scrounge back all that money that NASA/Congress gave SpaceX, Blue Origin, and Boeing. That money will pay for the science. Let these PRIVATE companies capitalism their way through their budgets.

I guarentee that a $4 billion launch will be seen as super cheap when we start looking at manned Mars missions

</rant>

We have NO idea what damage a 3 year mission would do to the human body. The human body degrades a LOT in the 1 year missions we've done on the ISS. The ISS is still protected by the Earth's magnetic field. Mars astronauts won't be (neither would Lunar).

If we're complaining about the cost of Moon missions, Mars is going to be WAAAYAYYYYYYY more expensive and way more dangerous. NOBODY should be talking about manned mars missions until we can reliably get to the Moon.

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@jwildeboer if they're going off the price of a textbook, they're still on par.

To people who feel like there aren't many people on mastodon/fediverse, please actually try to be social. So often I see "there's nobody here, i'm going to bsky/threads/whatever" and then when I look at the account's profile on the home server (to make sure I can see all posts and replies), I almost always see very few posts in recent past and even fewer replies. The Fediverse's culture (and mastodon's software) is built around more traditional social networking, like we used to do before algos.

Work: "you should've called about this issue earlier"
Me: "my documentation says to call at <time>. Should we change that to be earlier?"
Work: "no, still call at <time>, but you should've called earlier at this specific instance."

Me: *throws hands up in exasperation*

The #FountainPen of Theseus: you replace the cap. Then you replace the nib. Then you replace the feed. Then you replace the fill mechanism.

Is it still the same fountain pen you fell in love with or is it a brand new pen that you get to fall in love with?

Everyone: omg, Hunter Biden is a convicted felon now. What does this mean for Joe Biden's election.

Me, very annoyed at these takes: HUNTER. BIDEN. IS. NOT. JOE. BIDEN.
HUNTER. BIDEN. IS. NOT. RUNNING. FOR. PRESIDENT.

@thomasfuchs Yeah, that's my issue. I don't know. I can probably make it out via context clues (what lane are they in, what direction is usually taken, etc), but when you want to know what someone is planning to do right away, those are very precious seconds. @TechConnectify

Trans people don't own gender. We stole it the same way Prometheus stole fire, so it would be available to everyone.

You're welcome.

#cdcsays it's ok to build around a Google product. They have a great track record of supporting projects they build.

#Google

#cdcsays we recommend seeing the Titanic in a submersible that hasn't been approved or tested by anyone. The glow stick is just mood lighting

#cdcsays why would you ever want to encrypt your web traffic?

@thomasfuchs new ai? You mean the last 5 years of 'policy' wasn't ai?

@ryanc this might just be the dumbest way to 2fa without actually doing 2fa that I have ever seen. Is it common in UK?

From XKCD
#climate #ClimateChange #ClimateCrisis

Bird site: *goes full Nazi*
everyone: *this is fine*

Bird site: *rate limiting*
everyone: *OMG IT"S THE END OF TWITTER*
me: it's about time.

@mastohost pardon my ignorance, does vanilla mastodon not support changing it in the env.production file like glitch-soc does? Or does that variable only work in modded code bases?

This is probably (hopefully?) my last instance move for awhile. Now on mastodon, on my own domain, and it's vanilla mastodon so I'm now stuck at the vanilla 500 character cap :( . @mastohost, is there a way to get an increased character cap? Plz? also, i hope glitch-soc support is possible some day (hopefully soon?)