>if you've already gone to the moon I think you've already solved the hardest engineering problems involved in going to Pluto.
You specifically mention "footprints" on Pluto. The life support requirements alone for a multi-decade journey will be orders of magnitude harder than anything we've done so far. Depending on the trajectory we'd be looking at ~20 - 46 years of spaceflight (with shorter ones generally using more delta-V). I was going to say you'd also need to bring fuel for a return trip, but your astronauts would die of old age by the time they got back!
Funnily enough, last night was the first time I did a manned moon landing in Kerbal Space Program with the Realism Overhaul mod (which adds things like realistic engine performance, life support, etc). Even as a veteran player it was no easy task. Landing on Pluto would be insane: you'd probably need to put somewhere on the order of 10,000 tons of mass in LEO, plus a way to keep your astronauts alive. By contrast a manned moon landing requires about 100 tons in LEO.
My response from a few days ago: https://x.com/Meta_Celsus/status/1973152477681012893
Basically this approach is scientifically interesting, but not going to work for healthy babies anytime soon because of massive problems with chromosome segregation and imprinting.
Agreed. Even if this tech gets working, it will be very hard to catch up to photovoltaics.
Yeah, if anyone is interested in learning more, this is called the phasing problem. For common enough variants, it's often possible to figure this out by looking at general patterns of co-inheritance if you have a large reference dataset for the population (see: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41588-023-01415-w). Long read sequencing which you mentioned is another approach. But you're right that these days it would just be cheapest to get the parental genomes (assuming that's an option).
Thank you!
I really liked the concert at LessOnline (especially "The Ninth Night of November" which is rather personal for me because FTX told me on November 3 2022 that they would fund me, and November 10 that they were in trouble, and November 14 that "the funds to support your work are gone with everything else".
So, this is just a reminder to please release the album (unless you already did and I just can't find it).
Specifically the CITES regulation makes it difficult to get nonhuman primate cell lines from researchers outside of the USA, or share our cell lines with them. There's not any good conservation reason for this.
Thanks for your support! I really think you're making a great impact here.
I'm sorry to break this to you, but cloning requires live cells, not just DNA. This is one of the reasons why it's so hard to bring back the woolly mammoth. (The other reason is that it's really hard to do IVF on elephants.)
So if you want to make a clone, you'll need to do something like what I did (take cells and preserve them in liquid nitrogen).
Agreed. You may be interested in my writings on herpesviruses:
https://denovo.substack.com/p/the-human-herpesviruses-much-more
https://denovo.substack.com/p/answering-your-burning-questions
https://denovo.substack.com/p/herpesvirus-treatment-and-prevention