Recent content by Coinneach

Well, it's not April 1st, so who's going to kick off the xenomorph jokes?

Was it like the smell of a new car?

They've started trying to communicate with whales, which is good. I bet orcas have one helluva sense of humour.

Are bats too small for xenomorphs to breed from?

This: https://planetplanet.net/2022/06/23/the-solar-systems-story/ might help. There is a guide half way down the page.

My mother, who is in her nineties, wondered if a cat had got into the spacecraft! :eek:

Has somebody sent them up a practical joke?

Canada's TSR2 ?

You see these artists impressions of proposed early Mars settlements which look like a string of portacabins. It sounds as if anyone trying to live in these will soon end up looking like something out of a Ready Brek advert. ("Do you want your kids to glow in the dark?!") Reality seems more...

Cheers! In my next life I will study more physics.

Thanks for your reply I had read that water and polythene are the least bad materials for radiation protection. Something to do with the bound hydrogen. Could a Martian colony be protected by an artificial, local magnetic field; or would that require phenomenal amounts of energy? Sorry if...

You do wonder if settlers on Mars are going to spend a lot of time hiding from radiation. Won't it also affect crops? Maybe the farm chambers will have radiation proof shutters which can be quickly closed, but I can't think of what they'd be made of.

They say that your taste in sci-fi reflects your personality. I have the impression that how you envisage aliens does too.

Used to use it on Redmond. Don't know if it would run on Wine.

Well, there is this website: https://planetplanet.net/2018/06/01/the-million-earth-solar-system/ but I don't know enough about the subject to be able to vouch for its accuracy.