Of course, with R&D currently on the chopping block, we'll see if the same people that complain about NSF/NIH start coming for DARPA also...
If they refuse to leave they get fired?
>>Part of the DARPA ethos also is that it’s lean and mean. Program managers have a ton of discretion, but they’re not lifers.
Curious what kind of people are hired? Without overarching long term leadership its hard to chart out a continuous direction.
>NASA had taken on the project grudgingly after having been "shamed" by its very public success under the direction of the SDIO.[citation needed] Its continued success was cause for considerable political in-fighting within NASA due to it competing with their "home grown" Lockheed Martin X-33/VentureStar project. Pete Conrad priced a new DC-X at $50 million, cheap by NASA standards, but NASA decided not to rebuild the craft in light of budget constraints.[16] Instead, NASA focused development on the Lockheed Martin VentureStar which it felt answered some criticisms of the DC-X, specifically the airplane-like landing of the VentureStar, which many NASA engineers preferred over the vertical landing of the DC-X. Just a few years later, the repeated failure of the Venturestar project, especially the composite LH2 (liquid hydrogen) tank, led to program cancellation.[19]
Most republicans don't believe in defense or anything like that, they believe in returning money to their investors...I mean campaign contributors who are defense contractors. A contractor makes money selling contracts, whether they affect the actual defense capabilities of the country or not.
I think DARPA projects often are not what they say they are. Admittedly this project is quite out there.
> P(Success) = 0.2
They themselves admit it's lower than this, which is not 'success' but successful outcomes to limited specs.
Currently most of the ocean is a lifeless desert, with most of life concentrated in the places where upwelling occurs. This kind of floating trees would add enough biomass to compensate for all of the human produced CO2 and even more.
The more refined version of this are intentionally created algal blooms, ala the red tide. Then you would somehow capture the CO2 dissolved in ocean water that the algae concentrates.
In this way you'd use the ocean itself as your carbon capture "filter" and "clean the filter".
The issue is that since there just isn't enough nutrients for life, and adding fertilizers costs more carbon than it sequesters. The deep ocean usually gets its nitrogen from life dying above, decaying downwards then getting pushed upwards again. I don't know of any deep ocean reserves of nitrogen that just needs brought to the surface.
But having real trees above the water is much more useful than simple carbon capture, they would serve as wavebreakers for seasteading settlements too.
Where can I read more about that? My understanding was that it is teaming with microorganisms or near-microorganisms, and of course there are many fauna and flora and protista and other life forms.
For water to team with life, you need materials for building cells in the same place where the light is, and in most cases there is not enough iron on the surface
People really will pretend to believe any old nonsense rather than accept we have to cut fossil fuel use.
you can have that belief, that everyone should give up what oil gives us and live in a pre-modern way that most people would, today, consider poverty, because the alternative is (I assume you believe) extinction.
But you should be honest about it.
Using some genes from mangroves it should be possible to develop a plant that would grow in open sea.
The program director has a background in planetary science [1] and I assume they will evaluate proposals.
PMs are typically experts in their field and often come from an academic, industry, military, or government research lab. DARPA gives them a budget for grants, autonomy, and 3-5 years to fund interesting work. Many fail, many have mixed success, and a small number revolutionize their field.
(Source: worked on a few DARPA-funded projects decades ago.)
We're literally talking moonshot projects here and nowhere does the brief mention specifically trees, or aerobic respiration/processes, there is plenty of room for using Chitin, Spider silk, keratin or a combination of biopolymers to form resilient composite structures.
There's already been videos of people using these as doping agents or additives for bulletproof armor, to middling success. The synthesis via yeast or e.coli for most of these are partially solved problems, its more texturing them or using bio-mechanical processing to form thread or ply or load bearing panels that seems to be the major hurdle. Also, being able to reliably source component and materials from near vacuum or whatever asteroid that happens to wander by that makes this a much more difficult problem to even define.
I for one love things like this. I wish we used a little more of our colossal production power to try manifesting the wilder things from our imagination. Maybe they can contract out how to make society have a better handle on balancing compassion for self and others. Or we could be realistic and get back to making a philosopher stone. ;)
Hope I live long enough to go on a modestly priced moon vacation up the H.R. Geiger space tentacle
But this isn't a matter of "let's spend more" because the pool of people that can see an absolutely insane idea, and ones that can actually work on them, are the vanishingly small number of nearly eccentrics. So there is an upper limit on how much money can be spent if you're at the absolute tip of the iceberg.
> If aerobic organisms or mechanisms are required (grown in space and then desiccated by exposure to vacuum when growth is complete), the methods and support equipment required to preserve key aerobic variables (e.g., atmosphere, pressure, temperature) must be part of the biomechanical assembly system design. Anaerobic organisms or mechanisms may allow for less support hardware but may require other controls to support continued growth in the space environment (e.g. pressure, temperature, humidity)
My company was pitching holographic cameras, and we weren't scifi enough. The investigator wanted to know if we could do hyperspectral 3D imaging from something the size of a sugar cube. ("Uh, no?" was our response.)
* Defense Sciences Organization: https://www.darpa.mil/about/offices/dso
I'm reading this as a soft signal that there's still a market for marinating wizards in salty brine.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stargate_Project_(U.S._Army_un...
I’d like to imagine solar reactors mimicking primordial goo to synthesise the essentials for these materials.
Lots of nuanced details around your question in the doc! EDIT: I stupidly copy and pasted my local link to the PDF -- it appears this listing has been removed since posted. Here's another link to it https://govtribe.com/file/government-file/darpa-sn-25-51-dot...
Seems they're interested in precisely the question you pose, but coming at it from a few different directions
https://astrobiology.nasa.gov/news/life-in-the-extreme-radia...
https://www.navy.mil/Press-Office/News-Stories/Article/31420...
Without some sort of easy orbital exit/entry, it's unlikely that being "in space" will be a feasible permanent option.
FYI, hydrogels were part of the "recent vaccine" components.
