701–710 of 1001 posts
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The most important part of a Mars colony program will be the team on Earth raising money for more supply runs.
Raising money? Just equip the colony with Go Pro's and stream the content back to Earth as a reality TV show.
Anime reference: "Starship Operators".
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Exactly. HN is not a fanboy driven community usually, so it's where rational and educated conversation can take place. On the contrary I find criticism helpful in this kind of context.
It's helpful when the critic poses at least a fraction of expertise and experience as related to the subject of the people who's idea is being criticised.
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> 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. All public forums go bad once they reach a certain size. Since everything is on a gaussian curve (fat mediocre middle, and two asymptotes, one for greatness, the other for the opposite end), it's just pure statistics that junk comments will start creeping in once the popula…
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.
I've been making comparative studies of a few communities (HN, Reddit, G+, Imzy, Ello), and it's interesting to see how various ones work. In particular, there's a tremendous culture against the types of even indirect personal attacks at HN which fly in spades elsewhere. I saw @dang inveighing against a comment which began with "", on the grounds that that is the equivalent of an internet eyeroll.
On G+, discussion quality depends very much on the host and how they manage a particular thread. I've got problems with Google itself, but the platform can support quite good discussions. Overall participation has always been small (6-12 million users posting publicly per month, a value I'd had a hand in determining), but in corners, that's still a good crowd. The best circumstance is to cultivate a small group ~30-100 members or so, set firm expectations for participation, moderate aggressively (that is, promptly), though fairly and starting with social nudges. There's a balance between topic drift and derailment.
Reddit varies hugely by subreddit, the good ones are exceptionally good. The site as a whole has some faults that leak through even to the good subs though.
Ello has a very small (~10k or so daily, ~200k or so monthly visits) userbase, but it strikes me as quite well behaved for the most part, something I've commented on specifically to the site's admins.
Imzy, the "kinder, gentler Reddit" has largely proven not to be. For reasons not entirely suprising when you combine an on-tap, ad libitum anonymity access, lacking leadership, overtaxed / AWOL moderation, exceptionally ill-conceived notifications, threading, and response mechanisms, and a community drawn from SRS and similar beds of vitriol. It's not the issues advocated for, but the methods of advocacy, including ample amounts of friendly fire and hypocrisy, which generate problems.
I watched a trainwreck explode simply trying to discuss anonymity itself: https://ello.co/dredmorbius/post/qdxyzy2x4lbaq_4rx81nnw
Elon mentioned that there is no physical frontier left to explore on Earth, what about deep water exploration?
If exploration is the goal, wouldn't you get a lot more bang for your buck with a swarm of robots and probes around and on Mars? Sending people is very expensive in contrast.
SpaceX Interplanetary Transport System: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0qo78R_yYFA
Why do they launch the passengers first? Passengers eat and shit and breathe while they wait. They're also liable to be more upset if their mission is aborted, due to a failed tanker launch, while they're in orbit.
(1 hour 31 minutes)
Can someone with expertise to compare Musk's plan vs. Robert Zubrin's Mars Direct plan proposed in the early 90s?
Musk defiantly knows about the Mars Direct and he has ideas from it in his presentation. Mars Direct did not do any refiling in orbit, but rather does multible direct launches. That allows them to use smaller rockets. Zubrin worked under the assumption that the best he could get was a modified version of Shuttle (pretty similar to SLS actually). Mars Direct assumed a rocket with a normal upper stage that then deploye…
Mars Direct is all about the cheapest, simplest way for a state-sponsored space agency to send 4 people at a time to Mars, with a slow build up towards permanent settlement via increasingly concurrent missions.
SpaceX is trying to start a permanent settlement within the first 5 or so missions, with the first few hundred people being uber-qualified astronauts, and everyone thereafter being whoever can put up $200k for a trip, potentially one-way.
It's like a fusion of Mars Direct and the very plans Zubrin was opposed to (Elon acknowledged this by making a reference to "Battlestar Galactica", which Zubrin used many times as a pejorative in The Case for Mars). The only reason the multiple in-orbit refuelings and re-usable rockets makes sense is the ridiculous scale (100 people per trip) and the ultimate goal (Mars Trips for anyone who wants to go).
I created an account just to post this. The Q&A was the worst Q&A I have ever seen. Truly awful. I usually am a pretty calm person but watching that made my blood boil. This venture could well be one of the most important things to happen to humanity, and those were the questions that people asked. The questions were awful at all levels. Featured self promotion, ignorance and plain stupidity. I just needed to get thi…
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It's human nature to attacks a reality-distortion field. If he would have said "You know guys. We're going to Mars. But right now, we're working on making rockets that go up, on time, in one piece. When we finish with that, we'll show how to go. It'll be hard. Here are the technical and sociological issues involved. When we're getting close to being ready to go, we'll get working on them."
But why do you care if Musk and SpaceX have a reality-distortion field? Worst case (or best case for you) is that he fails and you get to gloat.
Today, I don't care. His clients know what they're getting involved with, and if they don't care, I don't either.
My concern is when he does go to Mars, he'll have hundreds of people signing up not realizing that he's putting lives on a beta rocket.
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It has an "atmosphere" It's 0.00628 atm according to Wikipedia. That's effectively a vacuum. You can't have liquid water on Mars. So you can grow plants in some kind of transparent pressurized place... Just like on the Moon.. or on a space station
You can pressurize a chamber using the thin atmosphere, rather than being restricted to the gasses you bring with you. You can use ISRU and atmosphere resource extraction to generate rocket fuel on the surface of mars, rather than being restricted to the rocket fuel you bring with you. Ultimately, the answer is Mars has the necessary resources and when you look into the details just makes more sense and is easier.