Paul Niles

@SpaceKoala @SRamirez68083 Water plays an important role in driving partial melting and creating Si-rich magmas. This might help create continental crust which might initiate subduction. But plate tectonics is more about rejecting heat. Mars is small and has lost most of its heat so convection is not poss.

@SRamirez68083 Doesn't really change anything. Plate tectonics isn't likely to resume with the addition of water just due to mantle cooling.

I don’t know why I hadn’t considered this before but how does covering Mars with water play with the fact it doesn’t have plate tectonics?

@DKThomp @jbarro Wouldn't change that much. I live in Houston exurbs. Nobody is sending kids to ivy League. Kids and parents WANT to play sports. Private coaches and leagues have figured out how to cash in on the demand.

something i wonder: on Earth-2, where the entire Ivy League is taken over by a bunch of nerd presidents who don't like sports and just want their institutions to focus on traditional reading/writing/studying/scholarship, what happens to these leagues? which is another way of asking: if parents and kids were suddenly made to think that youth sports had NO relationship to college acceptance and the only reason to play was either (a) have fun or (b) become a professional athlete, what would happen to these leagues?

I have never heard any parent speak positively about this travel-team private-league sports stuff. So why do they have their kids participate in it? (The answer is rarely "my kid is headed for D1") Don't schools have teams anymore? theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/05/…

@jbarro If the school is big enough it is serious.

Getting contradictory responses here -- some people saying the school-based teams are not serious and you need the club to have real competition; other people saying your kid can't get on a school team if he hasn't played club sports.

@jbarro Basically if you want your kid to participate in HS sports, they need to be playing competitive club sports in 6th to 8th grade. And in order to make the club teams they need private lessons before that. It's an insane cycle of escalation.

CLPS 2.0 RFP is out! SAM.gov

@rocketrepreneur @SpaceKoala Tbf we haven't really looked for it yet. So you never know!

@SpaceKoala Not a lot of Nitrogen and Carbon though, which definitely complicates things (and I'm saying that as a lunar settlement fan).

Something I love about the Moon is that there's so much oxygen in the regolith that you could build cavernous spaces filled with the oxygen extracted from the regolith for the metal and glass building materials. You could go crazy with human powered flight in there.

@mikenelson586 @thedispatch Isn't that #2?

As I said on @thedispatch podcast yesterday (link below), the President has three choices 1. Accept he didn't achieve what he said he would 2. Settle in for long term economic pain with the mutual blockade 3. Escalate the military effort He wants to choose "none of the above."

Beautiful piece of writing from @elenasb_ about spending two weeks at a Mars camp. Not sure why, but reading about the various characters, past and present, who have been obsessed with getting to Mars just made me very happy. harpers.org/archive/2026/0…

@MattZeitlin Isn't that what Knish basically does? Grinding?

this is my "picking nits" for rounders....why don't they just play in AC all the time taking money off tourists instead of losing money to the russian mob

@ramit @gregmberry X axis starts in March 2025.... Fires were in January . Santa Monica rents no doubt skyrocketed right after the fires... misleading graph

@gregmberry smdp.com/santa-monica-p…

Santa Monica rents have gone down for 3 years in a row, down 8.1% in the last year LA rents also down Remember: Rents go up and down

@Noahpinion Most "moral" behavior might be argued to be largely self interested behavior, just with a long time horizon. Intelligence is the key to appreciating the long term benefits.

Yes. This is one reason why the Orthogonality Thesis (the idea that intelligence and morality are unrelated) is wrong. If there is any benefit to moral behavior, it takes a more intelligent system to fully realize that benefit. So smarter systems (weakly) tend toward morality.

@Liamjsm @mattyglesias It's 'Liturgy-Lite'.

@mattyglesias The classic wasp religion—Episcopalian—is liturgical brother

BREAKING: @NASA has selected @Int_Machines for the next Commercial Lunar Payloads Services mission. This is IM's 5th CLPS contract. Their first two flights, IM-1 and IM-2, both tipped over after landing. Their third flight, IM-3, is scheduled for later this year. 📷 @NASA_Marshall | @Int_Machines

We'll host a live event Tuesday, March 24, at 9am ET (1300 UTC) to provide an update on implementation of the National Space Policy and preparation for returning to the Moon's surface by 2028. A press conference will follow. How to watch: go.nasa.gov/4bGQv2q

@PrimeauGilles @elonmusk @DrPhiltill Dude... human civilization operates on 1,000 year timescales. Atmospheric loss on Mars operates on million year time scales. That means that once you've terraformed Mars the atmosphere will be stable for several million years. Much smarter critique of Elon is the lack of N2.

@elonmusk @DrPhiltill 🤣 Finally I get the Grand Charlatan himself to react to one of my tweets Do the math Mine is standing by By the way do you maintain Mars can be terraformed whilst it has no magnetosphere?

Ever since this bizarre debate started I’ve wondered why so many think cooling in space is a problem. My guess is they don’t understand conservation of energy. They think computers magically create heat, lots of magic heat, so they ignore that this was solved long ago.🙃😅

LLM based AI is NOT conscious. I co-founded a company literally called Sentient, we're building reasoning systems for AGI, so believe me when I say this. I keep seeing smart people, people I genuinely respect, come out and say that AI has crossed into some kind of awareness. That it feels things, that we should worry about it going rogue. And i think this whole conversation tells us way more about ourselves than it does about AI. These models are wild, i won't pretend otherwise. But feeling human and actually having inner experience are completely different things and we're confusing the two because our brains literally can't help it. We evolved to see minds everywhere and now that wiring is misfiring on language models. I grew up in a philosophical tradition that has thought about consciousness longer than almost any other, and this is the part that really frustrates me about the current conversation. The entire framing of "does AI have consciousness?" assumes consciousness is something you build up to by adding more layers of complexity. In Vedantic philosophy it's the opposite. You don't build toward consciousness. Consciousness is already there, more fundamental than matter or energy. Everything else, including computation, is downstream of it. When someone tells me AI is "waking up" because it generated a paragraph that felt real, what they're telling me is how thin our understanding of consciousness has gotten. We've reduced a question humans have wrestled with for thousands of years to "did the output sound like it had feelings?" It's math that has gotten really good at predicting what a conscious being would say and do next. Calling that consciousness cheapens something that Vedantic, Buddhist, Greek and Sufi thinkers spent millennia actually sitting with. We didn't build something that thinks. We built a mirror and right now a lot of very smart people are mistaking the reflection for something looking back.

For the interior scenes of Barry Lyndon (1975), Stanley Kubrick insisted they be lit only by candles. Cinematographer John Alcott pulled it off using ultra-rare NASA Zeiss lenses originally designed to photograph the dark side of the Moon.

The Fifth Element (1997) is pure visual personality. Jean-Paul Gaultier’s costumes, Méliès level sets, Luc Besson’s operatic pacing, and Gary Oldman in full chaos mode. Every frame is loud, strange, and handmade in a way blockbusters barely attempt anymore.

It’s kind of wild to think that, unless something changes, NASA won’t launch another scientific payload to Mars this decade.

It’s an outrage that @jkbjournalist has never won the Pulitzer Prize for her trailblazing, courageous work. A question for everyone serving on the Pulitzer board: Why?