Space Sunday, of planets, signs of life, and an award

Posted on by Inara Pey
Comparing the large dwarf planets with Earth and the Moon. Credit: unknown

As I noted back in July 2024, classifying just what “is” and “is not” a “planet” is something of a minefield, with the entire debate going back to the 1800s. However, what really ignited the modern debate was – ironically – the search for the so-called “Planet 9” (or “Planet X” as it was then known), a body believed to be somewhere between 2 and 4 times the size of Earth and around 5 times its mass (see: Space Sunday: of “planet” and planets).

That hunt lead to the discovery of numerous bodies far out in the solar system’s Kuiper Belt which share similar characteristics to Pluto (size, mass, albedo, etc), such as Eris (which has at least one moon) Makemake, Haumea (which has two moons), Sedna, Gonggong and Quaoar (surrounded by its own ring of matter), all of which, like Pluto, appear to have reach a hydrostatic equilibrium (aka “nearly round shape”).

Is it a dwarf planet? A TNO? A Plutoid? This Euler diagram, used by the  IAU Executive Committee, demonstrates the complexity in trying to classify objects within the solar system. Credit: Holf Weiher

The discovery of this tiny worlds led to an increasing risk that the more we looked into the solar system, so the number of planets would require updating, causing confusion. So, in 2006, the IAU sought to address the issue by drawing up a definition of the term “planet” which would enable all these little planet-like bodies to be acknowledged without upsetting things too much. In the process, Pluto was relegated to the status of “dwarf planet”, in keeping with the likes of Ceres in the inner solar system, Eris, Makemake et al. This make sense – but that’s not to say it didn’t cause considerable upset.

The definition was also flawed from the outset in a couple of ways. Firstly, if taken strictly, the criteria the IAU had chosen meant that Saturn Jupiter, Mars and Earth were actually not planets, because all of them have not “cleared the neighbourhood around [their] orbit[s]”: all of them have gatherings of asteroids skipping around the Sun in the same orbit (notably some 10,000 for Earth and 100,000 for Jupiter).

Secondly, that body has to be “in orbit around the Sun” pretty much rules out calling called planet-like bodies orbiting other stars “planets”; something which given all the exoplanet discoveries by Kepler and TESS et al has become something of a bite in the bum for the IAU. As a result, the “pro-Pluto is a planet” brigade have felt justified in continuing their calls for Pluto to regain its planetary status.

Several attempts have been made to try to rectify matters in a way that enables the IAU to keep dwarf planets as a recognised class of object (including Pluto) and which addresses the issues of things like exoplanets. The most recent attempt to refine the IAU’s definition took place in August 2024, at the 32nd IAU General Assembly, when a proposal offering a new set of criteria was put forward in order for a celestial body to be defined as a planet.

Unfortunately, the proposal rang headlong into yet more objections. The “Pluto is a planet” die-hards complained the new proposal was slanted against Pluto because it only considered mass, and not mass and hydrostatic equilibrium, while others got pedantic over the fact that while the proposal allowed for exoplanets, it excluded “rogue” planets – those no longer bound to their star of origin but wandering through the Galaxy on their own – from being called “planets”. Impasse ensued, and the proposal failed.

In the meantime, astronomers continue to discover distant bodies that might be classified as dwarf planets, naturally strengthening that term as a classification of star system bodies. This last week saw confirmation that another is wandering around the Sun – and a very lonely one at that.

Called 2017 OF201 (the 2017 indicating it was first spotted in that year), it sits well within the size domain specified for dwarf planets, being an estimated 500-850 metres across, and may have achieved hydrostatic equilibrium (although at this point in time that is not certain). Referred to as an Extreme Trans-Neptunian Object (ETNO, a term which can be applied to dwarf planets and asteroids ), it orbits the Sun once every 25,000 years, coming to 45 AU at perihelion before receding to 1,700 AU at aphelion (an AU – or astronomical unit – being the average distance between Earth and the Sun).

As well as strengthening the classification of dwarf planets (and keeping Pluto identified as such), 2017 OF201 potentially adds weight to the argument against “Planet 9”, the original cause for the last 20 years of arguing over Pluto’s status.

2017 OF201 imaged by the Canada–France–Hawaii Telescope on 31 August 2011

To explain. Many of ETNOs and Trans-Neptunian Objects (TNOs) occupy very similar orbits to one another, as if they’ve somehow been clustered together. For example, Sedna has a number of other TNOs in orbits which closely match its own, leading the group as a whole to be referenced informally as “sednoids”. Among “Planet 9” proponents, this is taken as evidence for its existence, the argument being that only the influence of a large planetary body far out beyond Neptune could shepherd these ETNOs and TNOs into clusters of similar orbits.

However, by extension, this also means that 2017 OF201 – together with 2013 SY99 and 2019-EU5 should have also fallen to the same influence – but none of them have, orbiting the Sun quite independently of any clusters. This potentially suggests that rather than any mysterious planet hiding way out in the solar system and causing the clustering of groups of TNO orbits, such grouping are the result of the passing influence of Neptune’s gravity well, together with the ever-present galactic tide.

Thus, the news concerning 2017 OF201 confirmation as a Sun-orbiting, dwarf planet-sized ETNO both ups the ante for Pluto remaining a dwarf planet and simultaneously potentially negating the existence of “Planet 9”.

Jupiter: Only Half the Size it Once Was?

Definitions and classifications aside, Jupiter is undoubtedly the planetary king of the solar system. It has a mass more than 2.5 times the total mass of all the other planetary bodies in the solar system (but is still only one-thousandth the mass of the Sun!) and has a volume 1,321 times that of Earth. It is also believed to have been the first planet to form in the solar system; possibly as little as one million years after the Sun itself was born, with Saturn following it shortly thereafter.

Jupiter is an important planet not just because of its dominance and age, but because of the role it and Saturn played in the overall formation of the solar system, although much of this is subject to contention. The primary concept of Jupiter’s and Saturn’s voyage through the solar is referenced as the “grand tack hypothesis“, on account of the two giants migrating through the solar system in the first few millions of years after they form.

Jupiter as it is today, as seen by the Hubble Space Telescope. Not long after its formation, it might have been twice its current size. Note the black dot to the left of the image is the shadow Io, the innermost of Jupiter’s large moons. Io itself is outside of the frame. Credit: NASA/JPL / University of Arizona

Under this theory, Jupiter formed around 3.5 AU from the Sun, rapidly accreting a solid core and gaining mass to a point where it reach around 20 times Earth’s mass (although Earth would not form for another 45-50 million years). At this point, it’s mass and size (and those of Saturn) were such that they entered into a complex series of interactions with one another and the Sun, with both migrating towards the Sun, likely destroying a number of smaller proto-planets (all of them larger than Earth) along the way. At some point, these interactions reversed, and both infant planet started migrating away from the Sun again, clearing the way for the remnants of the smaller proto-planets they’d wrecked to gradually accrete to form what we now know to be the inner planets, as Jupiter and Saturn continued outwards to what are now their present orbits.

Believed to have occurred over between 4 to 6 million years, the “grand tack hypothesis” is contentious, as noted, and there are alternate theories concerning Jupiter’s formation and the early history of the solar system. Because of this, astronomers Konstantin Batygin (who, coincidentally, is one of the proponents of the “Planet 9” theory) and Fred C. Adams used complex computer modelling to try to better understand Jupiter’s formation and early history, in order to try to better determine how it may have behaved and affected the earliest years of the solar system’s formation.

In order to do this, and not be swayed by any existing assumptions concerning Jupiter’s formation, they decided to try to model Jupiter’s size during the first few million years after its accretion started. They did this using the orbital dynamics of Jupiter’s moons  – notably Amalthea and Thebe, together with Io, Jupiter’s innermost large moon – and the conservation of the planet’s angular momentum, as these are all quantities that are directly measurable.

Taken as a whole, their modelling appears to show a clear snapshot of Jupiter at the moment the surrounding solar nebula evaporated, a pivotal transition point when the building materials for planet formation disappeared and the primordial architecture of the solar system was locked in. Specifically, it reveals Jupiter grew far more rapidly and to a much larger size than we see today, being around twice its current size and with a magnetic field more than 50 times greater than it now is and a volume 2,000 times greater than present-day Earth.

Having such a precise model now potentially allows astronomers to better determine exactly what went on during those first few million years of planetary formation, and what mechanisms were at work to give us the solar system we see today. This includes those mechanisms which caused Jupiter to shrink in size to its present size (simple heat loss? heat loss and other factors?) and calm its massive magnetic field, and the time span over which these events occurred.

Yeah. Finding Life is Hard

In March, I reported on a possible new means to discover evidence of biosigns on worlds orbiting other stars by looking for evidence of methyl halides in their atmospheres (see: Space Sunday: home again, a “good night”, and seeking biosigns). In that reported, I noted that astronomers had potentially found traces of another element associated with organics, dimethyl sulphide (DMS) , within the atmosphere of exoplanet K2-18b, a hycean (water) world.

This is the strongest evidence yet there is possibly life out there. I can realistically say that we can confirm this signal within one to two years. The amount we estimate of this gas in the atmosphere is thousands of times higher than what we have on Earth. So, if the association with life is real, then this planet will be teeming with life.

– Prof Nikku Madhusudhan, lead investigator into the study of the atmosphere of K2-18b and the apparent discovery of dimethyl sulphide.

Now in fairness, the team behind the discovery did note that it needed wider study and confirmation. Extraordinary claims requiring extraordinary proof and all that. And this is indeed what has happened since, and the findings tend to throw cold water (if you forgive the pun) on that potentially wet world 124 light-years away, having  dimethyl sulphide or its close relative, dimethyl disulfide (DMDS) in anywhere near detectable levels.

An illustration of what K2-18b may look like. Credit: NASA / ESA / CSA / Joseph Olmsted

The more recent findings come from a team at the University of Chicago led by Rafael Luque and Caroline Piaulet-Ghorayeb. Like Madhusudhan and his team at Cambridge University, the Chicago team used data on K2-18b gathered by the James Webb Space telescope (JWST). However, in a departure from the Cambridge team, Luque and his colleagues studied the data on the planet gathered by three separate instruments: the Fine Guidance Sensor and Near Infrared Imager and Slitless Spectrograph (FGS-NIRISS), the Near Infrared Spectrograph (NIRSpec) and the Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI) – the latter being the sole source of data used by the Cambridge team.

Combing the data from all three instruments helps ensure a consistent, planet-wide interpretation of K2-18b’s atmospheric spectrum, something that cannot be obtained simply by referencing the data from a single instrument. And in this case it appears that by only focusing on MIRI, the Cambridge team inferred a little too much in their study.

We reanalyzed the same JWST data used in the study published earlier this year, but in combination with other JWST observations of the same planet … We found that the stronger signal claimed in the 2025 observations is much weaker when all the data are combined. We never saw more than insignificant hints of either DMS or DMDS, and even these hints were not present in all data reductions.

Caroline Piaulet-Ghorayeb

Most particularly, the much broader set of spectrographic data gathered from the three instruments points to some of the results observed by Madhusudhan’s team could actually be produced entirely abiotically, without any DMS being present. The Chicago paper has yet to be peer-reviewed, but their methodology appears sufficient to roll back on any claims of organic activities taking place on K2-18b or within its atmosphere.

AAS Recognises Gene Kranz

The “original four” NASA Flight Directors. Back row, (l to r): Glynn Lunney and John Hodge. Bottom (l to r): Gene Kranz and Chris  Kraft. Credit: NASA

Eugene Francis “Gene” Kranz is a genuine NASA legend. He may never have flown in space, but he played a crucial role – along with the late Christopher C. Kraft (also see: Space Sunday: a legend, TESS and a rocket flight), John Hodge and Glynn Lunney (also see: Space Sunday: more from Mars and recalling a NASA legend) – in formulating how NASA runs it manned / crewed spaceflights out of their Mission Operations Control Centre, Houston.

He is particularly most well-known for his leadership of his White Team during the Apollo 11 Moon landing in 1969, and for leading the work to get the crew of Apollo 13 back to Earth safely when that mission faced disaster. As a result of the latter, Kranz and his entire White Team received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1970 as well as being immortalised in film and television (although the line “Failure is not an option” was not something Kranz ever said – he instead used it as the title for his 2000 autobiography; the quote was purely fiction and used in the 1995 Ron Howard film Apollo 13, which saw Ed Harris play Kranz).

His career at NASA ran from 1960 through 1994, during which he rose from Mission Control Procedures Officer to Director of Mission Operations. As a result, he has been the recipient of NASA’s own Distinguish Service Medal, Outstanding Leadership Medal and Exceptional Service Medal.

And he has now been similarly recognised by the American Astronautical Society, which on May 21st, 2025, named him the recipient of their 2024 Lifetime Achievement Award. Only presented every 10 years, the award recognises Kranz for his “exemplary leadership and a ‘must-never-fail’ style that ensured historic mission successes, empowered human space exploration, saved lives and inspired individuals around the world.”

The ceremony took place at the Johnson Space Centre, Houston, Texas, where Kranz was also able to revisit the place where he and his teams and colleagues made so much history: the Apollo Mission Operations Control Room (MOCR – pronounced Mo-kerr – NASA has to have an acronym for everything 🙂 ).

Gene Kranz, with his AAS Lifetime Achievement Award, seated at the restored console he occupied at the White Team Lead Flight Director, notably during the Apollo 11 and Apollo 13 missions. Credit: NASA

The latter had been recently restored as a direct result of a project initiated and driven by Kranz in 2017 in memory of Apollo and so many of his colleagues who have since passed away (the most recent, sadly, being Robert Edwin “Ed” Smylie whose team worked alongside Kranz’s White Team to make sure the Apollo 13 astronauts returned to Earth safely, and who passed away on April 21st, 2025). Fully deserving of the AAS award, Gene Kranz remains one of the stalwarts of NASA’s pioneering heydays.

2025 Week #21 Project Zero User Group Meeting: updates

Posted on by Inara Pey
via Linden Lab
The following notes were taken from the Thursday, May 22nd 2025 Project Zero User Group (PZUG) meeting.

  • They are based on my audio recording of the meeting + chat log.
  • They should not be taken as a full transcript of the meeting.
Table of Contents

Meeting Purpose

  • The Project Zero User Group provides a platform  for open discussion about Project Zero, the cloud-streamed version of the Second Life Viewer. Topics can range from sharing the goals for Project Zero, demoing the current experience, and gathering feedback to help shape the future of cloud access for Second Life.
  • These meetings are conducted (as a rule):
    • The second and fourth Thursday of every month at 13:00 noon SLT.
    • In Voice and text.
    • At the Hippotropolis Campsite.
  • Meetings are open to anyone with a concern / interest in the above topics, and form one of a series of regular / semi-regular User Group meetings conducted by Linden Lab.
  • Dates and times of all current meetings can be found on the Second Life Public Calendar, and descriptions of meetings are defined on the SL wiki.

Resources

Note: “Zero” or “Project Zero” in these summaries always refers to the SL official viewer running in a browser; “Firestorm Zero”, “FS0” or “FS Zero” always refers to the Firestorm viewer offering in a browser.

Recent Updates

Avatar Picker

The Avatar Picker. Credit: Linden Lab
  • The Picker is actually a browser HTML element separate to the viewer, popping out and to the left of the viewer within a browser tab.
    • This is currently experimental, but is something the Lab would like to move towards.
    • The idea is is move away from floaters in the viewer, where appropriate, moving things to one side in the browser so as to leave the in-world view less cluttered.
  • The picker is associated with the new Avatar Welcome Pack also issued in April, and forms first part of presenting Project Zero with a new UI, built using HTML / React, and first discussed by Philip Rosedale when Project Zero was initially launched.

Go Menu and Toolbar Button

  • Previously referred to as the “Destination Picker”, the Go Menu has now been implemented, the name aligning with the Go button seen on the web account registration  / join pages.
  • Accessed by a new Toolbar button within Project Zero – also called Go – the “menu” is a scrollable  panel of potential destinations for (new) users.
  • Currently, the panel contains three destinations, rather than the 12 indicated in the April meeting. These have been selected on the basis of activity, rather than location; the activities being: meeting people, building, joining a role-playing game.
The Go Menu panel. Credit: Linden Lab
  • The Go Menu is automatically displayed when a new user first launches Project Zero, and is experimental at this point, and:
    • May well be expanded more towards the notional 12 places.
    • Is not intended as a replacement for the Destination Guide.
    • Is being monitored by LL to gather information of how well it is used and the potions people tend to use the most.
  • In addition, a new Toolbar button has been created.
    • This is called “Go” and has an airport-style image of an aircraft departing.
    • It is part of the default set of Toolbar buttons.
    • Allows a user to re-display the Go Menu panel.
  • Even with the limited choice on offer, the Lab has already noted that users coming into SL tend to pick on the option that has other avatars present, rather than being purely driven by activity. However, s noted in the meeting, it is still too early in testing to say this is definitively so (it might just be that as the first location in the panel, London City is just naturally clicked on, for example).

Toolbar Refresh

  • The general display of the toolbar buttons has been refreshed for Project Zero.
  • In particular, buttons are no longer displayed on the left side of the viewer window; everything defaults to the bottom of the window, with the number of buttons reduced to better-suit the initial needs of incoming new users.
The new Project Zero Toolbar layout as seen by incoming new users – click for full size, if required. Credit: Linden Lab
  • By default, this Toolbar comprises:
    • Go button – described above.
    • Avatars – opens the avatar picker, also described above for changing an avatar / altering the style of dress.
    • Six unchanged buttons: Destinations, Walk/Run/Fly, Camera Controls, Profile, Speak, Chat.
  • During the meeting, the following default buttons were additionally suggested:
    • Chat Bar (per most viewers outside of the official viewer).
    • Inventory.
    • People / Friends + access to Groups.

General Discussion

  • It was noted that those attending the meeting had all been unable to access Project Zero to test the new features – it is hoped (no promises) that this might bee addressed.
  • Suggestions for alternative Go Menu destinations were offered:
    • Builders Brewery and Ivory Tower of Prims as places for those wishing to learn to build.
    • A broader selection of game destinations, rather than just MadPea.
    • Places like Dreamer’s Bay, where newcomers can receive assistance, have the opportunity for free housing, etc.
  • There was a general Discussion on how people make friends, and the various means of doing so, possibly in the hope of finding a route to making it easier for newcomers to do so, rather than them getting confused by multiple different ways.
  • The above led to a more esoteric discussion on Calling Cards; the Friends List (and how it’s not really that, it’s more a contacts / acquaintances list for many, which strayed into the realm of Firestorm Contact Sets); feedback on how people might go about making friends. These discussion appeared to be more for gleaning information than aiming towards anything planned for Project Zero.
  • The point was made that Second Life is potentially far less sociable nowadays than previously, and that while the onus seems to be on creators and content – which can help – the sense of wider community and of having places to go and things to do has been somewhat lost. In this, mention was made of fun activities such as skydiving, regions like the Greenies and other builds by Rezzable, etc.

Date of Next Meeting

A return to Umi in Second Life

Posted on by Inara Pey
Umi, May 2025 – click any image for full size

Update, July 2025: Umi appears to have closed. The SLurl here have therefore been removed.

It’s been a fair while since I’ve written about any of Paradox Ivory’s region designs; the last occasion was following a visit to Cravone City in 2021 (a place which itself appears to have expanded mightily since then). Paradox has also in the past been responsible for a location called Umi, which shared a region with her Tokyo Street Subway Entrance, locations I wrote about in 2019 and 2018 respectively.

Both of the latter vanished into the ether sometime after 2019, and to be honest, at that point I lost track of Paradox’s work. So I was pleasantly surprised when Cube Republic poked me about Umi’s return – this time on a much larger scale.

Umi, May 2025

Once again occupying a Full private region – this time leveraging the Land Capacity bonus – and with an adjoining Homestead (currently under construction, UMI is expanded well beyond its 2018/9 form, offering a lot to see and the promise of more to come, given Paradox is in the process of expanding it into the adjoining region.

Welcome to Umi, where serene rural rhythms blend with vibrant urban energy amid a captivating fusion of Japanese and Korean cultures. Here, each street corner tells a tale, every café beckons you to linger, and every encounter promises a journey to joy. Don’t forget to say hello to Umi’s beloved resident cats, who add their own special charm to this enchanting island experience. Welcome to a world where every purr and whisker brings a new adventure!

– From the Umi About Land description

The Landing Point for Umi sits at its southern end, where the setting meets the sea, the two separated by a stretch of rocky, shingle beach which may not avail itself overly well to sunbathers or swimmers, but is certainly appreciated by the local populace of seagulls.

Umi, May 2025

Taking the form of a ferry quay stretching a makeshift-looking pier (wooden planks and iron grating welding on to sealed oil cans for floatation) out into the bay, the Landing Point gives the impression that one has literally just stepped off the ferry on arriving (an if you listen, you will hear the ferry’s horn away in the distance and it (presumably) chugs off back to the mainland.

Once through the gates of the ferry terminus, visitors have a choice of routes: along the raised causeway road (presumably elevated to keep it clear of high tides!) and thence up into the town proper. For those preferring a wander along the not entirely attractive beach, it is possible to turn east or west and do so, either extremity of the shingle and rock waterfront having a stepped footpath leading up into town as well. Of the two, the walk to the west also offers the opportunity to visit the Seaside Café, which is doing its best to remain happy and sunny, despite the aging drabness of the beach!

Umi, May, 2025

Umi itself is neatly tiered, rising from the waterfront as set of linear elements. The first of these, bracketed at either end by the steps rising from the extremes of the beach, as well as being reached directly from the steps rising from the end of the causeway road, is a walled water channel, complete with narrow footpaths to either side and with little bridges periodically spanning it.

Behind this is a small residential district, complete with a playground and what looks like a nursery school. Another waterway (a storm drain?) separates this area from the uppermost part of the town, pair of contented Buddha-like stone cats guarding the central stairway leading up to it.

Umi, May 2025

This upper area mixes businesses with apartments and residences, footpaths and streets combining to form an engaging little maze to encourage visitors to explore. Within this area one will find the first warnings of on-going construction, but these are easy to avoid without risk of coming to injury. There’s also a traditional shrine awaiting discovery and further little park spaces.

A point of note here is that there are a number of private rental residences within Umi (four easily identifiable within the upper district, numbered as they are, with four more in the middle-level apartment blocks to the east side of the setting); so do be a little wary of trespassing people’s homes. There are also a number of small business premises available for rent in the setting as well.

Umi, May 2025

The overall attention to detail is one of the many things that make Umi so attractive. Paradox has worked hard to give the town a sense of being a living, breathing space. Houses are furnished, window boxes and planters are cultivated; the general clutter of life can be found everywhere; there is a feeling that much of the town has grown organically, rather than being neatly planned, birds sing in the trees and can be found making the most of garden spaces and the like.

Paradox has also made great use of sound surfaces as well: iron gratings cover drains and form the walkways on bridges. When you walk on them, they will ring with the sound of your heels passing over them. There are also plenty of places to sit and pass the time – such as the Café Umi.

And then there are the cats. As much residents here as anyone, they are to be found everywhere, all of them doing typical cat things: stalking, walking, looking cute, sleeping, making it clear whether your attention is wanted or not, and offering the occasional snippet of conversation.

Umi, May 2025

Even with all this said, I’ve still only scratched the surface of Umi’s treasures. To appreciate them in full, I recommend you hop over and pay a visit for yourself! My thanks, again, to Cube for the hat-tip.

Art and pondering humanity’s future in Second Life

Posted on by Inara Pey
SLEA 3: Manoji Yachvili – Lost the Last
I live in the countryside and I love nature and I think I could not live without the thousand shades of green that pass through the seasons, the sound of birds, the buzzing of bees, the bleating of sheep, the neighing of horses … and I see how the world is changing.
Nature will find a way to survive, it’s resilient, and like a thousand other species have, I’m convinced that we’re doomed to extinction, at least as structured as we are now.
So I wonder if there will be and what will be our future as human beings?

With these words, artist Manoji Yachvili (Onceagain) introduces us to a provocative essay-in-art exploring our relationship with our home world; questions of life within the broader solar system (and by extension, our galaxy as a whole); on the genuine threat of climate change, and questions of our survival as a race, and how we might recall Earth, should we survive the ecological destruction we are actively encouraging each and every day.

SLEA 3: Manoji Yachvili – Lost the Last

Entitled Lost the Last, the installation is particularly provocative for me, as it focuses in part on the questions of life on Mars and the potential for humanity to settle thereon. Or perhaps “dangerous” might be a better term; I’ve been both directly and indirectly involved in the questions related to the human exploration of Mars (up to and including working with Mars analogue environments and looking at questions of human factors), all of which could so easily cause me to superimpose my own commentary on certain things rather than focusing on the installation itself (such as dwelling on the bunkum idiocy of a certain CEO of a commercial space venture and his “plan” for “colonising” Mars).

It is possibly this wider focus on Mars, coupled with our on-going efforts to explore it and seek answers to basic questions as to what happened there to both turn it from a warm, wet planet, possibly harbouring basic life, and what happened to that life;, which caused Manoji to focus on it within this installation. As such, there is perhaps a temptation to critique it in light of the references to climate change on the basis that the latter is unlikely to cause Earth to drift into a Mars-like state of potential frozen stasis, but rather push us  increasingly towards the broiling hell we know as Venus.

SLEA 3: Manoji Yachvili – Lost the Last

However, I would venture to suggest such critiques are put aside, as the focus should be on the broader questions asked by the installation, and what any potential colonisation of Mars, coupled with the global failure on the parts of governments and corporations to really work to reverse – or at least slow – the critical overload with are placing on this planet in terms of climate impact and pollution, might mean for this planet.

The installation itself forms two halves. The first – which housed the installation’s Landing Point – presents a barren landscape, seemingly rusted with iron oxides. It carries a very Mars-like feel to it, but it is not Mars. It is a dead (or near-dead) Earth. This is shown by the remnants of a high-rise building to one side of the setting, an old highway information sign and evidence of even old ruins from humanity’s past. The Landing Point sits within a small structure – and I would suggest spending a minute or two examining the contents of this room prior to moving on; they have a lot to say for themselves.

SLEA 3: Manoji Yachvili – Lost the Last

A gallery lies a short walk from the Landing Point, the hazmat figure standing in front of it again suggesting this is in fact Earth, albeit Earth with a clearly noxious atmosphere. Within this gallery lies an exhibition of art carefully crafted to aid in illustrating the idea that we are the architects of Earth’s – and our own – doom. Mixed with the images are 3D pieces by various artists, selected by Manoji, they further underscore the themes of loss and memory.

There are some apparent anachronisms here: The space suited figure apparently cannot survive without their suit and helmet as they explore what is left of Earth, but horses and trees can. However, as we know from Mars, life – admittedly in its more basic forms – is remarkably hardy and able to survive in environments utterly hostile to us. As such, I would suggest the inclusion of horses and trees within some of the images is intended to be a metaphor for this fact: we can more easily relate to life persevering when Nature has turned Her back on us, rather than depictions of more basic life we might not recognise.

SLEA 3: Manoji Yachvili – Lost the Last

On encountering the far wall of this space (walk into it), visitors will be asked to accept a local Experience (if they haven’t in a previous visit). This will teleport them to the second part of the installation: a base on Mars.

Surrounded by a backdrop which put me in mind of the Columbia Hills (not that this is remotely relevant), the base serves as a place where memories of all we have lost are kept alive – at least in miniature: ideas of open homes where we were once free to breathe the air outdoors; places rich in grass where the creatures with which we once shared our home world could wander; a place where water flowed freely, without having to be canned and rationed. It serves as an illustration of what we stand to lose if we persist in making Earth hostile towards us, and all we stand to lose.

SLEA 3: Manoji Yachvili – Lost the Last

Evocative and with much to say, Lost the Last should be seen, explored and considered.

SLurl Details

2025 week #21: SL SUG meeting -SLua

Posted on by Inara Pey
Chaos and Calm – Chaos Theory, March 2025 – blog post

The following notes were taken from the Tuesday, May 20th, 2025 Simulator User Group (SUG) meeting. They form a summary of the items discussed, and are not intended to be a full transcript. The notes were taken from my chat log of the meeting. Pantera also recorded the meeting, and that recording is embedded at the end of this piece – my thanks to Pantera, as always, for providing it.

Meeting Overview

  • The Simulator User Group (also referred to by its older name of Server User Group) exists to provide an opportunity for discussion about simulator technology, bugs, and feature ideas.
  • These meetings are conducted (as a rule):
  • Meetings are open to anyone with a concern / interest in the above topics, and form one of a series of regular / semi-regular User Group meetings conducted by Linden Lab.
  • Dates and times of all current meetings can be found on the Second Life Public Calendar, and descriptions of meetings are defined on the SL wiki.

Simulator Deployments

  • There are no planned deployments to any channels this week, only restarts.

SL Viewer Updates

SLua Updates

I’m going to write up an implementation of better event handling in pure SLua so that people can get a feel for the API and make suggestions before we commit to actually implementing a specific implementation in the server.
Got sidetracked improving setlinkprimitiveparamsfast perf with many PRIM_LINK_TARGETs since I saw that bogging down the SLua alpha sims but I’m back on track now 🙂

– Harold Linden (SLua development contractor)

  • It was reiterated that the plan remains to move SLua to a more open beta on Agni (the Main grid), once further updates have been made by LL. (Such as the event handling and memory management mentioned). When this happens, it will initially be to a “handful of regions” prior to gaining broader deployment.
  • Harold Linden indicated that most of the current Canny Feature Requests for SLua will be implemented during the beta phase of the project – although some, such as “require” will take time to “do properly”, and so there may be stopgap solutions “similar to the ones people already use for LSL that uses local pre-processing.”
Not ideal but there’s a lot of yak shaving that needs to be done to get proper “require” working with new “library” type assets and don’t want to block the rest of SLua on it. 
  • In responding to a comment about an possible inter-script dependency system, he further noted:
There would be no inter-script dependencies per-se, this is more akin to pure modules that can just export types and functions etc with no shared state. More like a statically linked library that only gets evaluated when the script is compiled. It’s essentially just enabling something that people already tend to do with pre-processors, the only difference is the assets live with the rest of your stuff.
  • This sparked a debate on the use of libraries, plug-ins ,etc., a lot of which is “still TBD”, other with matters of object update handing, etc. This discussion ran through must of the remaining 40 minutes of the meeting. Please refer to the video for specifics (as I am not a coder, and far from qualified to interpret all of the discussion!).
  • One important additional point was raised by Harold Linden:
Oh right, I feel like I should mention, we’re trying to track down a couple potential memory corruption bugs in SLua that we’ve had trouble reproducing on our dev machines. We’re going to look at pushing a version of the server with debugging instrumentation (AddressSanitizer) to the SLua sims on beta grid. It might make things slightly slower, but it’s only temporary.

In Brief

“Missing Content on Login”

We had a repro recipe for “missing content on login” and I was able to kinda fix it. It was semi-reliable (would happen maybe 20% of the time) for one our viewer dev contractors, but I couldn’t reproduce it myself. It is “kinda” fixed in that I have eliminated some unnecessary resets during login that would help trigger the bug, with a subsequent savings of effort and bandwidth of object update data on arrival. However the root race condition that is being avoided… I didn’t actually figure that out. 
So… I would expect improvements (reduction of missing content on login) but I don’t think this fixed everything. In particular, I thought maybe it would help reduce the rate of missing attachment items on avatars, but upon more thought I realized this fix is not relevant to that problem. Anyway, heads up: this fix is expected to be in Fig Pudding [the next simulator update].

– Leviathan Linden

TP Failure and Log-in Issues

  • Reports suggest that that has been a “big increase” in TP failures and login failures over the last week (I can attest to the former; having had around a 40% TP failure rate on first attempts to get somewhere on several days). Viewer logs and times incidents occurred, submitted via Canny, would be helpful in debugging issues.
  • It was also noted that LL is engaged in making some network infrastructure changes, so again, a request was made for those “experiencing connectivity problems not of the usual sort or frequency” to file a Canny report would be useful. Times, places, names, and log files.
  • The game_control capability remains on-hold. Leviathan Linden is currently engaged in other work, and unfortunately, game_control is is “near the bottom of” the stack of work he has on-hold as a result.

† The header images included in these summaries are not intended to represent anything discussed at the meetings; they are simply here to avoid a repeated image of a rooftop of people every week. They are taken from my list of region visits, with a link to the post for those interested.