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Making Humans a Multiplanetary Species [video]

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Re: Making Humans a Multiplanetary Species [video]

#551

Post by lazyjones »

AndrewKemendo wrote: post #203
mikeash wrote: post #148

Some of the comments here make me think of crabs in a pot pulling down the ones who try to climb out. Nobody's making you participate in this venture. If you don't like it, then you're free to go do whatever it is you do like. You might think Musk could better direct his efforts and resources elsewhere, but most other billionaires don't do anything all that interesting, they just invest their money in mundane stuff,…

If you don't like it, then you're free to go do whatever it is you do like. Right. And as what appears to be the loudest voice in this discussion, it's also my prerogative to advocate for what I believe to be a better allocation of resources. Lets not pretend there is not competition for attention, capital and enthusiasm for vision based projects. That I advocate for one over another - in competition - is exactly wha…

> it's also my prerogative to advocate for what I believe to be a better allocation of resources.

Honest question, not trying to be rude: what makes you believe you have a better idea of what a good allocation of resources (and Elon Musk's / SpaceX's skills) would be?

If you're so smart and good at allocating resources, what prevents you from pursuing that other project instead of demanding from other people to follow your lead?

Re: Making Humans a Multiplanetary Species [video]

#552

Post by ph0rque »

dsabanin wrote: post #84
codeulike wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Watch the end of the video. I think he intends to terraform it. Edit: looks like he's aiming for a city of 1m people in the short term, Terraforming in the long term.

We can't solve simplest problems on Earth (like re-capturing CO2 for example), but believe we'll be able to terraform a planet to which we haven't even been able to send a human yet?

We can't solve simplest problems on Earth (like re-capturing CO2 for example)

But we can. There are these nanomachines that take in CO2, store the C, and release the O2 (on a simplistic level)... called trees. For the average American, $15/person/year will plant enough trees to offset all the CO2 released into the atmosphere. http://shindyapin.tumblr.com/post/141034501197/climate-chang...

Re: Making Humans a Multiplanetary Species [video]

#553

Post by sctbpwn »

Grishnakh wrote: post #469
Klathmon wrote: post #389

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In some ways HN is designed to combat this. You need to "earn" downvotes with contributions, and the sites UX is designed in a way to slow down low effort comments, and to make comments sit for a bit before allowing replies (with workarounds if needed). The things that aren't features (like the lack of notifications) also help.

>In some ways HN is designed to combat this. Yeah, those things are an example of something that sounds great in theory, but doesn't work out in practice.

Your shit is greyed out so I guess it's working pretty well.

Re: Making Humans a Multiplanetary Species [video]

#554

Post by throwanem »

Gracana wrote: post #414
grecy wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Nobody's making you participate in this venture. If you don't like it, then you're free to go do whatever it is you do like. I can't agree more. I've seen HN degrade into that kind of discussion over the last 2 years and it really disappoints me. Part of me wishes HN had a really strong moderator that slapped down nay-sayers. If you're not contributing something valuable, comment deleted.

I think hackaday is a good example of a community with similar (techie) people to HN that has gone further down the same path of negativity, cynicism, and salt. HN is great and the moderators here do a good job (I'm always impressed by the way dang handles issues), but I do think some sort of push is needed to get us off of that path.

Hackaday comments have never not been salty, and I say that as someone who's followed that site since before the pictures were in color. I'm not sure there is a useful comparison to be drawn.

Re: Making Humans a Multiplanetary Species [video]

#555

Post by hoorayimhelping »

dudus wrote: post #277

Watching live the announcement and presentation by Elon on https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A1YxNYiyALg Where the hell did they get this audience from? Is this hosted on a frat house with some academic invites? There's a dude jokingly saying that burning man felt like mars with a lot of shit and no water, there's a guy plugging his comic book, there's a guy making a joke on how we should send Michael Cera to Mars, a g…

I started cringing and stopped watching as soon as the guy started talking about himself at burning man, like Elon Musk gives a shit.

Re: Making Humans a Multiplanetary Species [video]

#556

Post by tomrod »

schoen wrote: post #550
tomrod wrote: post #458

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pedantic point: not everything is Gaussian. Income, for example, doesn't go below zero. It may not even be log-normal, but rather a power distribution. Pedantic point aside, you bring up an important point. Can behavioral incentives be aligned to avoid the bottom side of participation?

If you measure income as change in net worth minus expenditures, it could go below zero. That might not be an appropriate definition in all cases, but, for example if you incur debts without acquiring an offsetting benefit (maybe by being compelled to pay damages to someone for something you did that you didn't derive much or any value from, like causing an accident?), it might be reasonable to say that you had negat…

Fair points.

Re: Making Humans a Multiplanetary Species [video]

#557

Post by Udo »

cbau wrote: post #110
maerF0x0 wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This brings up a good point. Why mars first? Why not a moon colony first?

Musk just addressed this. Mars has an atmosphere of CO2 and Nitrogen, so we can grow plants, a day length similar to Earth's (24.5 hours), and is larger.

There are other important reasons for this that don't make such a great subject for a public presentation, such as getting away from Earth's political and military sphere of influence and achieving greater redundancy in case a large asteroid impact event happens on the Earth/Moon system.

Re: Making Humans a Multiplanetary Species [video]

#558

Post by hoorayimhelping »

anexprogrammer wrote: post #93

I'd really like to see us taking space seriously. While I'm still here. One of my earliest strong memories was the last moon landing. This was followed by years of "Tomorrow's World" and "Horizon" telling us about the Moon bases, Mars bases and orbital platforms that would soon follow. We got Skylab and some very interesting probes. I'm a tiny bit disappointed in that. We were meant to be en route to Starfleet Comman…

I was so inspired by Elon saying "people have this expectation that technology just continues to improve on it's own," before going on to talk about ancient civilizations reaching peak technology and backsliding hard.

Re: Making Humans a Multiplanetary Species [video]

#559

Post by tomrod »

curuinor wrote: post #508
tomrod wrote: post #458

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pedantic point: not everything is Gaussian. Income, for example, doesn't go below zero. It may not even be log-normal, but rather a power distribution. Pedantic point aside, you bring up an important point. Can behavioral incentives be aligned to avoid the bottom side of participation?

This is less of a pedantic point than might be assumed. The Gaussian depends upon a notion of independence and identical distribution: independence can be dispensed of when one thinks about power laws. If you can soberly state the assumption that the effects of a comment on any other comment is completely negligible, or falls into a couple of other strange exceptions that leads to the universal phenomena that generat…

Your point is well stated! I demured that my point would be pedantic since it was pointing out an inappropriate comparison with the Gaussian analogy.

All this said, I'm hugely and awesomely excited by the future prospects of becoming a multiplanet species.

Re: Making Humans a Multiplanetary Species [video]

#560

Post by sqeaky »

benevol wrote: post #323
wmccullough wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're my hero! This attitude is why I quit regularly contributing to this site. Any time any single person does something positive, some armchair "expert" comes out the woodworks to tell you how it won't work or can't work.

I would never say "it won't work", but I do think we humans have a tendency to turn to technology to solve our most basic problems, while the real solutions lie within us (where most people never look). I believe we should first learn to clean up our act on planet Earth before we export anything of our existence and what we do. To me, the real revolution that needs to happen is a spiritual one - a statement that will…

> the real revolution that needs to happen is a spiritual one

I think the only "spiritual" anything we need is to drop anything spiritual and focus more intensely on reality and evidence based reasoning. Spirituality has done plenty of harm and it is not hard to argue more harm than good if you can lump religion in there with it.

Your ridiculous claims about undiscovered capacities in our brains allowing to to survive is non-sense. Our ability to problem solve base on past experience/evidence is the real miracle and our gradual takeover of every ecosystem is why we have survived this far. Now we need to use this capacity we already demonstrated to not kill ourselves. Going to space is one possible option.

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