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SES-10 Mission

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Re: SES-10 Mission

#301

Post by simonh »

erikpukinskis wrote: post #258
doikor wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everything today is better then yesterday and tomorrow everything will be better then today (on average on a global a scale for all the issues you pointed out). Progress is being made all the time. But the news/media mostly just reports the failings/problems/issues (sells better) so it feels like everything is getting worse. (There are some looming issues on the horizon like climate change etc. which might change thi…

My morality doesn't work in terms of averages. "Better on average" doesn't equate to "good enough" to me. It's a way for people to make themselves feel better about doing violence. I am responsible for countless murders due to living a normal American lifestyle. The fact that previous Americans were responsible for a higher number of murders doesn't make that go away. There are quite possibly more slaves today than t…

> My morality doesn't work in terms of averages. "Better on average" doesn't equate to "good enough" to me....

Nobody is expecting it to. But do you know why poverty, disease, hunger and slavery are at far lower levels compared to historic norms? It's because at the global scale we are enormously richer than we have ever been before. We can afford multi-billion dollar programs to fight diseases such as Ebola, HIV, Malaria and the many others we have actually eradicated. We have huge reconstruction and investment programs for developing countries. Space technology, including satellite communications systems, GPS and weather monitoring are revolutionizing third world agriculture and market economies as well as saving lives.

A richer and more prosperous world is also a world better able to tackle the problems you quite legitimately raise.

Re: SES-10 Mission

#302

Post by ooqr »

JshWright wrote: post #300
Jaruzel wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Kudos for Doing Parenting Right. So many 'parents' dump their kids in front of Cartoon Network, and ignore them for 18 years.

We are very fortunate to be in a position where we have the opportunity to invest in our kids. I don't have a commute, and make enough that my wife is able to focus her efforts on our household full time. However, I am quite proud of the fact that if someone asks her what she wants to be when she's older, half the time it's "a ballerina", and the other half it's "a mommy scientist". If she grows up continuing to beli…

You sound like you're living the life my wife and I aim for. We'd like to homeschool full time as well to get the best possible education when we start having little ones.

I'm still in the very early stage of my career (web developer currently), but I'm lucky enough to work remotely most of the time and live in a beautiful forested area of NC. What general field do you work in? If software, where within that?

Re: SES-10 Mission

#303

Post by ooqr »

sqeaky wrote: post #190
jacquesm wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Illiterate people can too using Skype and such. Instant planetwide communication between any party of humans sharing a common language is now pretty much a given.

While you are correct for the most part, I would point out that text services have wider distribution even if only for bandwidth reasons. But there are other reasons, there are good (enough) and widely distributed text standards (SMS), but not yet for video. But maybe we are both over thinking it, does the old voice network reach even further?

Writing is reusable and presumably most of the learning going on behind rapid technological expansion requires literacy. Even just to navigate around Khan Academy.

Re: SES-10 Mission

#305

Post by JshWright »

ooqr wrote: post #302
JshWright wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We are very fortunate to be in a position where we have the opportunity to invest in our kids. I don't have a commute, and make enough that my wife is able to focus her efforts on our household full time. However, I am quite proud of the fact that if someone asks her what she wants to be when she's older, half the time it's "a ballerina", and the other half it's "a mommy scientist". If she grows up continuing to beli…

You sound like you're living the life my wife and I aim for. We'd like to homeschool full time as well to get the best possible education when we start having little ones. I'm still in the very early stage of my career (web developer currently), but I'm lucky enough to work remotely most of the time and live in a beautiful forested area of NC. What general field do you work in? If software, where within that?

I'm a senior developer for Silent Circle.

Re: SES-10 Mission

#306

Post by jononor »

grondilu wrote: post #182
acover wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are several reasons: adventure, incentivize cheaper space travel, drastically improve humanity's chance at survival. Waitbutwhy has an amazing explanation of the how's and why's. http://waitbutwhy.com/2015/08/how-and-why-spacex-will-coloni...

I'm familiar with this article. First, "adventure" is a reason to go there, not to settle. Second, I'm not buying the "drastically improve humanity's chance at survival" argument. There have been several mass extinction events in the past, so in order to survive one that might be coming, we should move to a place where there is likely no life at all? That does not make any sense to me. If we can survive on mars, we c…

> If we can survive on mars, we can survive on Earth no matter what can plausibly happen to it.

Exactly. So going to Mars and staying there long-term will require us to develop many solutions that can be applied here on Earth. Both under current conditions and conditions that would currently be civilisation-threatening.

Re: SES-10 Mission

#307

Post by mstade »

mrkgnao wrote: post #291
StavrosK wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why does this video look like it was shot in 1990? Camera quality can't have been that bad in 2008, can it?

Might have been an early mobile phone camera.

I don't think the video was shot with a mobile camera, but probably a DV camera typical of the day – Canon XL1 was pretty popular if I recall. These days you can record HD video on your cell phone, but a decade ago (and recall, the original iPhone was released just in the year prior to this video) you had to get dedicated equipment that would run in the thousands of dollars.

Camera quality has absolutely exploded in the last decade, when compared with how much they've shrunk, and Apple certainly had a role to play in that transformation. I'm not at all surprised that video from a decade ago looks so dated compared with video today.

Re: SES-10 Mission

#308

Post by jacobush »

hyperpallium wrote: post #251
JshWright wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I can't wait until I have a talk with my kids when they realize the significance of this day https://goo.gl/photos/7rT5rxvsP9AxVZxn6 My four year old daughter, watching the launch with rapt attention. When we watched the Echostar 23 launch two weeks ago, she asked why it didn't land... Crazy that rockets landing is already totally normal for her.

As a child, I thought it was weird that spaceships didn't land... supported by science fiction covers showing them landing. e.g. Tintin https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/7/7c/The_Adventure... I mean, a regular ship doesn't discard part of itself to set sail... as a child, I didn't understand the need for multi-stage rockets.

That image is totally iconic for me. Rocket equation be damned, I still think there should be SSTO (Single Stage to Orbit) ships.

Re: SES-10 Mission

#309

Post by [deleted] »

SEJeff wrote: post #53

I can't wait until I have a talk with my kids when they realize the significance of this day: Kid: Daddy, ou mean when you were growing up, they threw away rockets each time? Me: Yes Kid: Doesn't that make them expensive? Me: Yes. And then not long after will be the other talk: Kid: Daddy, you mean people used to be in charge of driving themselves in cars? Me: Yes Kid: Did people ever die? Me: Millions Good job Elon…

[deleted]

Re: SES-10 Mission

#310

Post by joss82 »

JshWright wrote: post #298
alashow wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your backyard is a forest? Looks awesome :) btw, I suggest disabling sharing geo location of photos ( https://photos.google.com/settings - Remove geo location in items shared by link).

Yeah, it's pretty awesome (I actually grew up in the house across the street, and that large wooded area is a big part of why we picked this neighborhood when looking to buy a house). Fair point about the geo location (I actually assumed Google would have stripped all metadata by default, like any real image sharing service...), I'm not super concerned about it though. I use my real name on HN, my employer and other…

Awesome answer.

It made me smile.

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