My understanding is that Xi and the CCP he controls simply didn't prepare for this besides administering without mandates the PRC's two major indigenous vaccines which appear to be subpar in general. Although as inactivated whole virus ones in theory they could stand up better to variant mutations by presenting more proteins to our adaptive immune systems than the spike focused ones, see how in early testing Bharat Biotech's Covaxin showed activity against the nucleocapsid protein.
But building capacity in real hospitals or facilities that can do the basics of for medium serious cases that for example require supplemental oxygen? Nothing I've read of, just austere isolation facilities to support Xi's Zero COVID policy. Now we can be sure Xi and company are focusing on managing the fallout from the policy's end that was forced on them, which only tangentially will have anything to do with limiting the population's morbidity and mortality.
Based on the my reading of the situation, this is an accurate representation. Compounding this is that the older population in China is hesitant to get additional vaccination doses, so the CCP is stuck between a rock and a hard place. They can either slog along with their zero COVID policy (which reached a boiling over point with the citizenry) or they can rip the bandaid off and tolerate any loss of life that occurs. No good options, just different bad ones.
> The problem of under-vaccination is most acute among the elderly. The government announced a little over a week ago that around 30% of people aged 60 and up — or roughly 80 million people — were not vaccinated and boosted as of Nov. 11. Among those 80 or older, the ratio was closer to 60%.
I thought it was a post-WWII Czechoslovak Soviet thing but it turns out the history goes 1419 and the English word to an example in 1618 which per Wikipedia helped spark the catastrophic 30 Years War: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defenestrations_of_Prague
I run a desktop workstation with a UPS, its lead acid batteries are not infinite and don't like staying discharged, so at times shutting down quickly and cleanly is very important. The more I hear, the happier I am that I moved to Linux a decade and a half ago, and this general topic is a major reason I'm planning to go back to Debian after using Ubuntu LTS for my last two versions.
Quora always had reputation for being shit but I am impressed by how terrible that page is. I mean there are only two 2 types of answers there: "Window$ is BAD" and stuff that looks like generated by GPT-3( or straight up from those infamous "recipe sites" a.k.a. SEO farms).
I should have left a "sequence shortened" warning. Windows 10/11 offer you 4 options when an update is pending. "Update and shutdown", "Update and reboot", "Shutdown" and "Reboot".
And/or a threat to his or the CCP's power, which is their first and foremost concern.
thinkmcfly might as well ask why WWI started when it predictably going to impoverish the major combatants. Saw a factoid some time ago that world trade did not return to the prewar level until a long time after WWII.
We could also Goodwin this and ask why did Hitler take the fatal step of seizing half of Poland. There age is also a possible motivation, he was 50 in the pre-antibiotic and much of modern medicine era.
I phrased my question to mirror another person's question but with the opposite bias; they created a anti-taiwan response opportunity, so I made my post with a pro-taiwan response opportunity.
I believe Taiwan should remain free if that is what they want for themselves
And not just Google, or per the article Amazon and Apple. While I'm long out of the Windows ecosystem (my Year of the Linux Desktop was a decade and a a half ago), it's been noted it has partly changed from a product you use to get your stuff done to a platform to sell you more stuff from Microsoft, plus whatever they might be doing or will do with its build in advertising.
And not just Google, or per the article Amazon and Apple.
Of these, Google is by far the worst in my opinion. Mainly because they don't sell any other product. *You* are their primary product.
Amazon is eating an increasing chunk of Google's lunch. They promote advertising in about the only way it really makes sense to me --- on their web site --- where I go to express an interest in buying a specific product.
partly changed from a product you use to get your stuff done to a platform to sell you more stuff from Microsoft
Yes, a predictable response to competition in the form it has taken.
"Everything is trying to kill you and your hardware 100% of the time.
I was appalled when I learned about LEO atomic oxygen.
"Leave the protection of the magnetosphere and things get much worse."
Anything in the Orion to deal with the latter for the not rad hard humans? Or is this another Apollo Program timed with the solar cycle (which due to delays cut the latter short)?
> Anything in the Orion to deal with the latter for the not rad hard humans?
Well, GCR's (Galactic Cosmic Rays) will go through just-about anything. I think I remember an experiment that measured penetration in water to over half a mile (800 meters). As such, all you can do is manage exposure...you are not going to stop them. On the moon one of the ideas is to pile-up regolith (moon dirt) to create better protection. Without that you would need to transport more material out there than might be possible.
I am not aware of what long-term plans might look like today. I guess is that the ideal habitat will likely take the form of repurposing the rocket to become living quarters and bury it under as much regolith as it might be able to support. Of course, that implies suitable construction equipment to be available. I doubt astronauts are going to shovel the stuff at that scale.
In terms of electronics, you try to keep things powered down to the extent possible. Circuits can self-destruct very quickly if powered-up. An unpowered circuit is less likely to suffer the same kind of damage.
Beyond that, critical systems are typically designed to a fault-tolerance (FT) level. A single fault tolerant system can have one failure and still operate within mission parameters. You could have 2FT systems that will run after two failure. Because mass is important in going to space, FT doesn't necessarily fully duplicate a system (for example, triplicate copies of a system to be able to survive two failures). These days deeper analysis is possible and enhanced fault tolerance can be applied to selected functional units. At the end of the day, the most important thing is to test, test, test.
NASA has a lot of publicly-available resources about this and more. Chapter 3 of this one has an overview of protection from space radiation:
Thanks for the general info ... have we found any caves on or in the moon?? And the reference, just skimmed it but it appears to be written at a high and thorough level.
But I wasn't clear about my real question: is there a shield planned for the Orion spacecraft to keep astronauts alive during a sufficiently bad solar event on a trip to or from the moon? As I recall the lunar orbiting space station was going to be unmanned but I was wrong or they've changed their minds: https://www.nasa.gov/gateway So they've got to be thinking about this problem, and as the reference notes we'll need for example adequate space weather surveillance which I note we've been emplacing as of late.
I've never checked it out like running the numbers but I've heard for a long time Apollo was timed for a low part of the solar cycle and one reason Nixon cut it short was because delays put those canceled missions into the active part of the cycle.
> is there a shield planned for the Orion spacecraft
Not sure what they are using in Orion. The general answer is that, yes, there has to be a shield. Historically that has been aluminum. Mass is a huge problem in going to space. Because of this, you can't have the shield you really want.
Over the years we have learned that thick laminated (under heat and pressure) polyethylene is a better space radiation shield than aluminum and at a significant savings in weight.
"And then the status quo took root & reusable rocket proponens were no longer taken seriously because - what were they thinkig, this is how we have always been doing it!"
Disagree as someone who as a kid watched this happen in real time. The Saturn V follow on was always planed to be reusable, with a huge first stage booster that was something of a bigger brother of the stage that would make it to orbit. NASA was starved for capital after Apollo and this resulted in the horribly deadly and very expensive to operate kludge of the eventual Space Shuttle.
See https://gundam.fandom.com/wiki/Jupiter_Energy_Fleet from the late 1970s; people have been thinking about this problem for a long time. This SF TV series cheated with a new physics which allowed compact nuclear fusion reactors minus the ability to do anything with neutrons. We still don't have a good path to them for basic electrical power generation, seeing as how much we're still struggling with theoretical break even DT fusion, with the LLNL experiment per something I just read not counting the power input into the lasers.
So fiction showing people were thinking about X at such and so a time not evidence people were thinking about X at such and so a time???
All the "get to the moon" or beyond SF, which per Robert Heinlein was an explicit goal of his juveniles, to teach the attitudes and what you needed to learn to to get into space, which he was later told actually worked for a number of Apollo project people was ... what??
Can't make fusion reactors that interesting and the SF series never tried except when they didn't get a chance to shut down properly and went boom (actually a very beginning plot point), but I'm glad for all the fiction creators who inspired me into a STEM career when I was young.
I believe pfdietz's point is there's no need to go to the Moon (or Jupiter?!) to extract 3He when sufficient 3He can be generated on Earth, at lower cost, and be energy positive.
Your digression seems irrelevant to that point.
We didn't use Heinlein stories as a source of evidence about reality. We didn't use thorium rockets to get to the Moon. Nor did we develop monoatomic hydrogen ("Single-H") fuel.
Similarly, we don't use Gundam stories.
Also, Project Daedalus' proposal to mine the Jupiter atmosphere for 3He for fusion predates the first Gundam episode, and is likely what influenced the series. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Daedalus .
If we're going to mine someplace in the solar system for 3He, I'd like to see it done on a (currently hypothetical) "Planet X", a Mars to Earth sized planet 100+ AU from the Sun. It could be cold enough out there for a bit of helium to remain bound over the life of the solar system, but it would be much easier to take off from again than, say, Uranus. And presumably with D3He fusion one could get out there with a fusion rocket.
But building capacity in real hospitals or facilities that can do the basics of for medium serious cases that for example require supplemental oxygen? Nothing I've read of, just austere isolation facilities to support Xi's Zero COVID policy. Now we can be sure Xi and company are focusing on managing the fallout from the policy's end that was forced on them, which only tangentially will have anything to do with limiting the population's morbidity and mortality.