Living on Mars, a pipe dream

Living on Mars, a pipe dream

Some ‘visionaries’ foresee the human race living on other planets. Sure, in principle nothing wrong with it.

However to really have any chance of survival in the long term that planet has to conform to very restricted parameters, as conditions found on earth since after millions of years having evolved as a species on earth our bodies are designed to live within the boundaries as set by the earth’s conditions.

Even a small relatively deviation in temperature is enough to make human life very hard reason why so few people live on the poles and why the human race had it’s origins nearer the equator.

We need a temperature within a narrow band to survive.

Now take for example the planet Mars.

It’s dead. It died long time ago, it’s atmosphere consists of for us unbreathable gases (mostly CO2) at about half earth’s pressure making surface life impossible.

It doesn’t have a revolving iron core so no magnetic field to deflect hard radiation making surface life impossible

The water content of the planet consists mostly of permafrost at <250 kelvin making the availability of liquid water near enough impossible.

The surface consists of oxidized rock and a good layer of micro particle dust making articulated earth like machines of any usable size a nearly impossible task to keep operational.

The same dust will enter into any construction made by us and in the long term cause any machine or living entity being perfused by that dust.

This dust is mostly iron oxide. Surface of Mars As an abrasive compound it really does the trick. It is toxic in the amounts found in Mars surface and atmosphere.

It is certainly a compound which will destroy any larger machine due to it destroying bearings and being and electric conductor short circuiting any electronic device, which cannot with our present or to be foreseen technology be totally sealed off.

Than the daily dose of radiation. Already the even the shortest Earth-Mars round trip would be about 0.66 sievert. This amount is like receiving a whole-body CT scan every five or six days. Conditions on Mars aren’t any better due to lack of dense atmosphere and magnetic field.  Radiation on Mars 

So only subsoil habitation is possible and than at great depth. In order to construct a habitat suitable to sustain multiple generations we need to excavate about the size of the current habited surface of earth which including the surface needed for agriculture (based on 2018 population) Earth has a land surface of 149 million km².

Which needs to be heated since the planet is at <250 kelvin. It also needs to have daylight lighting, earth like atmosphere and pressure. The energy needed to just begin to excavate a small colony, heat it, pressurize it and give it earth like atmosphere is beyond calculation. And how does one obtain this energy? Solar panels won’t work since the sun is to distant, windmills won’t work due to the low density of the atmosphere.

Only one energy source would be direct matter to energy conversion as in nuclear fission and/or fusion. But it would have to be a really huge reactor, or field of reactors to generate this energy. But how do you build that on Mars? How do you build the infrastructure? For that you need energy you don’t have yet.

In other words, to have a real self sustaining colony on Mars which won’t cause inbreeding within one generation you need to deplete all resources on Earth, send them to Mars, invent robots that will reliably prefabricate the living quarters and other infrastructure. After the decennia it takes to do that send at least 100.000 of humans of diverse populations to Mars and hope they won’t kill each other on the trip and the cosmic radiation doesn’t cause a significant mutation.

In conclusion the ‘visionary’ which proposes making Mars an alternative for Earth suffers from an overly active imagination and sincere lack of factual knowledge/comprehension thereof






selfreported ‘science’ proves alcohol changes mood

selfreported ‘science’ proves alcohol changes mood










Going by my personal experience self reporting in those fields is overwhelming



The ideological opposition to biological truth

The ideological opposition to biological truth

Facts? We Don’t Need No Stinking Facts.



Full Article

Dogs recognize dog and human emotions

Dogs recognize dog and human emotions


The perception of emotional expressions allows animals to evaluate the social intentions and motivations of each other. This usually takes place within species; however, in the case of domestic dogs, it might be advantageous to recognize the emotions of humans as well as other dogs. In this sense, the combination of visual and auditory cues to categorize others’ emotions facilitates the information processing and indicates high-level cognitive representations. Using a cross-modal preferential looking paradigm, we presented dogs with either human or dog faces with different emotional valences (happy/playful versus angry/aggressive) paired with a single vocalization from the same individual with either a positive or negative valence or Brownian noise. Dogs looked significantly longer at the face whose expression was congruent to the valence of vocalization, for both conspecifics and heterospecifics, an ability previously known only in humans. These results demonstrate that dogs can extract and integrate bimodal sensory emotional information, and discriminate between positive and negative emotions from both humans and dogs.

biology letters

How scientists fool themselves – and how they can stop

How scientists fool themselves – and how they can stop




Reflecting today on how it happened, Gelman traces his error back to the natural fallibility of the human brain: “The results seemed perfectly reasonable,” he says. “Lots of times with these kinds of coding errors you get results that are just ridiculous. So you know something’s got to be wrong and you go back and search until you find the problem. If nothing seems wrong, it’s easier to miss it.”

This is the big problem in science that no one is talking about: even an honest person is a master of self-deception. Our brains evolved long ago on the African savannah, where jumping to plausible conclusions about the location of ripe fruit or the presence of a predator was a matter of survival. But a smart strategy for evading lions does not necessarily translate well to a modern laboratory, where tenure may be riding on the analysis of terabytes of multidimensional data. In today’s environment, our talent for jumping to conclusions makes it all too easy to find false patterns in randomness, to ignore alternative explanations for a result or to accept ‘reasonable’ outcomes without question — that is, to ceaselessly lead ourselves astray without realizing it.

Failure to understand our own biases has helped to create a crisis of confidence about the reproducibility of published results, says statistician John Ioannidis, co-director of the Meta-Research Innovation Center at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California. The issue goes well beyond cases of fraud. Earlier this year, a large project that attempted to replicate 100 psychology studies managed to reproduce only slightly more than one-third2. In 2012, researchers at biotechnology firm Amgen in Thousand Oaks, California, reported that they could replicate only 6 out of 53 landmark studies in oncology and haematology3. And in 2009, Ioannidis and his colleagues described how they had been able to fully reproduce only 2 out of 18 microarray-based gene-expression studies4.

Nature Journal

Inceptionism: Going Deeper into Neural Networks

Inceptionism: Going Deeper into Neural Networks








Google Research

Even Eminent Scientists can get dementia

Even Eminent Scientists can get dementia


Humans will be extinct in 100 years says eminent scientist

Although i do agree homo sapiens is due for extinction being an error of evolution (99% of lifeforms went extinct over time) his reasons why are patently ridiculous as is the timeframe.