It's been an issue for me. I wanted to make a battery-powered sensor that would only enable the wifi hardware when the sensor had changed (to maximise battery life) - but the closed-source firmware means that's not possible.
Also, some of the SSL support is in the closed-source firmware, and it's incompatible with Mozilla's 'Modern Compatibility' ciphersuite list.
I used the ESP8266 anyway - it's not ideal, but for my application it was the best thing available. There's room for improvement, though.
At humantimescales it's a non-issue. Any terraforming effort capable of generating an atmosphere over ~100 years or so could more than compensate for losses to space.
One great idea I heard to make mars more habitable in general is creating a large magnetic field at a Lagrange point between mars and the sun. A sort of "radiation sunshade"
It's important to realize that when it comes to terraforming you have a tradeoff between speed and cost. The notion of producing an atmosphere in a 100 years is borderline magical, but certainly staggeringly expensive in terms of energy input. Your "sunshade" is another example of a quick, but incredibly pricey option.
Most terraforming research tends to be more realistic, and therefore looks at scales of thousands of years for change to take effect, often driven by engineered single-celled organisms in stages.
I discovered his channel a few weeks ago, and was blown away. He has tons of videos that cover all aspects of humanity's potential future in the stars in great detail, and does a very good job of staying grounded in hard science. It seems like he really knows his stuff. The episodes can be quite long (15 - 60 mins), but definitely worth checking out. I've been slowing making my way through them.
My pleasure. Some of the earlier videos from his megastructure series are a little slow, but he has some absolute gems.
So far, I've really liked the video on "Black hole farming at the end of civilization", some of his Fermi paradox episodes, as well as the one on terraforming.
>One great idea I heard to make mars more habitable in general is creating a large magnetic field at a Lagrange point between mars and the sun. A sort of "radiation sunshade"
That sounds like it would be massive, or actually maybe not, like a shadow getting bigger the farther it is away from light.
What about the Mars-based idea, that massive wire that wraps around Mars I think.
Why did you get down voted? You're not a popular magazine reiterating some vague plan about using a large wire-magnet to generate what you're talking about?
I don't know, we'd have to get the atmosphere from somewhere, maybe after the magnetosphere is re-established whether artificially or inside Mars, grab asteroids with ice and use that for the atmosphere.
Well, to do it all at once you'd need an icy planetoid, but that's not realistic at all. More "realistic" would be a fleet of robot probes designed to steer water ice laden asteroids onto a collision course with Mars. It would be like building up water a snowflake at a time, and it would be touch to manage. If you do it before an atmosphere starts to develop, you'll lose a lot of it. If you start to do it later though, you're going to be kicking up a lot of dust, but maybe that could be put to some use.
