Although curiously, most processes theoretically capable of exposing large amounts of lunar mantle would likely generate a decent fraction of that heat just on their own merit.
It does feel disingenuous, but its also nothing new. Military research has always been the one of the primary driving forces behind critical technology.
Commercial tech is vulnerable to all sorts of disruptions, regulations, and setbacks. If you make something that will make killing a whole bunch of people easier, rest assured theres a global market for it.
Cotton also shrinks when wet and has poor thermal properties - polymer blend fabrics perform better in the cold, and are lighter and cheaper than wool. Goretex is wonderful stuff, but its also made of '"forever-plastics" and is known to slowly leach into runoff. Finding a polymer that can be cleanly manufactured for a competitive price with similar properties would be wonderful, as long as theres also a method for it to degrade safely when discarded.
Sure, but ensuring all mechanics everywhere have access to use PPE, and then enforcing its correct use is way less effective in practice than removing the hazardous material from the workplace entirely. Being exposed to any fine particulate matter over long periods will be detrimental to health (we aren't evolved to breath large amounts of dust), but not every particulate is an acute carcinogen.
> we aren't evolved to breath large amounts of dust
We are doing that evolution at present!
The best way to do evolution is something that kills children before they breed. Second best for evolution is killing adults before they breed. Mostly ineffective is killing adults after they breed: although in theory loss of an adult can affect the population breeding chances downwards for children.
Just a reminder that evolution is about breeding children and not so much about death.
I'm just spitballing here, but I'd wager that the human toll required to evolve effective resistance to regular and prolonged asbestos exposure is more than most of us would be willing to pay.
We already evolved these massive craniums filled with (to date) the most intricate and powerful general computers in the world - it seems like the solution to asbestos exposure is simply engineering a way to avoid it. No evolution necessary.
We can play whack a mole getting every source of particulate out of the garage (can we even do that? consider sanding, grinding, painting, etc, not just the brakes are making this), or we can use our existing workplace safety enforcement mechanisms to enforce ppe in this industry like they've enforced ppe in many other industries.
Or, and hear me out because I know this is crazy... we can do both! By trying to get rid of the bad stuff from the workplace and get better at enforcing ppe use.
Since the cycle of stellar observation repeats each solar year, the observation would itself be a method of time keeping. One would need only to track the azimuth of a series of regularly positioned star constellations to determine time, and from there one could then ascertain location.
im not sure I want a lithe hunter stalking through my house, marking every surface and attacking everything that breathes. I much prefer my dopey dander machines that sleep on my chest, flop around on the ground chasing the pocket lint they dug out of my trashcan, and superhero-leaping off their tree onto the couch to wake the other one with a screech.
If I owned a farm and needed a ratter, I'd likely feel different.
I got an iPod for christmas. The ipodlinux project was one of the main reasons for my choice and so I started exploring the iPod as far as I was able to. I patched the bootloader and got some basic code to run but there was no way to access any hardware other than the two CPUs yet. To get the LCD, Clickwheel and the harddisk working we needed to reverse engineer the bootloader in the flashrom. But to do that we first had to find a way to get that code. Seems quite impossible without any knowlegde about the IO-Hardware but I found a solution...
Not an expert, but my read of the article was that he had code execution already, but needed to dump the bootloader so he could gain access to peripherals. You could no doubt pull the chip and read it out with a programmer: this has been done for many other devices, i have no trouble believing you could do the same with an iPod. The method he developed is noninvasive, though, simply requiring a soundproof box and some analysis software. Thats what makes it cool, to me.
