51–60 of 183 posts
Sending humans to Mars seems less attractive to me than sending robots to Ceres. Is there an argument for Mars that doesn't include the phrase "multi-planet species"?
I don't know where Ceres is or what it is so I had to Google it (I also assume most of HN doesn't know of it). 1st result) Ceres - Non-profit organization in San Francisco, California 3rd result) Ceres is the largest object in the asteroid belt that lies between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter.
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To be clear, the difference I'm calling out here is not that the cutural norm is stupid, but that it's only enforced in specific contexts for no apparent gain. I wouldn't say a large proportion of people are walking around in public naked, but a large proportion do swear in the course of normal speaking. Really, it's the news agencies which are the worst offenders in this regard, which is doubly bad because they will…
I don't understand why civility revolts so many people these days. I tell my son that he can use the F word whenever it makes contextual sense and also doesn't offend other people. For instance, he can use it around me, because to me it's just a word. I don't care. He can use it around his friends when it makes sense. But, he had better not use it around his grandparents. Is it such a bad thing to ty to empathize wit…
To be clear, I'm talking about news articles accurately referencing and representing what they are reporting. I'm not sure how you can get more contextually appropriate than that. I'm not talking about how professional communication should use swearing because it's fun. I'm talking about how they feel the need to go out of their way to not accurately represent the name of what they are talking about or the actual words that are the cause of the news itself.
It's like people being offended if my last name is "babcock" because it has "cock" in it. At some point it switches from one party making an effort to present themselves civilly to the other party being uncivil by taking umbrage over small, inconsequential items. In this case, news agencies are apparently so worried over the latter that journalism suffers (we'll call the article in question here journalism, and leave the Scaramucci news articles out of it to prevent muddying the issue...). I think that's a real shame.
I don't understand why people are so quick to dismiss SpaceX's ambitions as unrealistic. They were the first to achieve re-usability of the first stage of an orbital class rocket, the first to prove out supersonic retro-propulsion and the first private company to re-fly a spacecraft (the Dragon Capsule). Given that, it seems like they should be given the benefit of the doubt when they say they are going to do somethi…
I don't understand why people are so quick to dismiss SpaceX's ambitions as unrealistic. They were the first to achieve re-usability of the first stage of an orbital class rocket, the first to prove out supersonic retro-propulsion and the first private company to re-fly a spacecraft (the Dragon Capsule). Given that, it seems like they should be given the benefit of the doubt when they say they are going to do somethi…
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Anything can be trivialized if you detest social norms enough. Fake examples: > It took me forever to find a good font for my webcomic that wasn't comic sans. I'm astounded that apparently we can't use a perfects good font, lest some bogeyman jump out and make you regret it. It's a font! For Microsoft Bob's sake. How bad can it really be and why do we need to penalize the usage so? > John Smith, 56, was arrested for…
To be clear, the difference I'm calling out here is not that the cutural norm is stupid, but that it's only enforced in specific contexts for no apparent gain. I wouldn't say a large proportion of people are walking around in public naked, but a large proportion do swear in the course of normal speaking. Really, it's the news agencies which are the worst offenders in this regard, which is doubly bad because they will…
News agencies do not sell clarity and accuracy, they sell advertising views. Enough of the suppliers of advertising views will stop supplying that good for news agencies to sell if they encounter a “fuck”, even in a context where it wouldn't earn an FCC fine, that news agencies have a clear economic incentive to avoid the word.
Sending humans to Mars seems less attractive to me than sending robots to Ceres. Is there an argument for Mars that doesn't include the phrase "multi-planet species"?
Mars has a more terrestrially-similar gravity level.
Mars has way more solar power.
Ceres is basically vacuum, can't aerobrake. And its gravity well is so small you also can't take advantage of the Oberth effect.
Mars' atmosphere shields you from the vast majority of solar radiation (so no risk of death from acute radiation poisoning), from all micrometeorites, and even a significant amount of galactic cosmic radiation. It also provides global access to gaseous CO2, nitrogen, argon, and even some water vapor.
Mars can be terraformed.
Sending humans to Mars seems less attractive to me than sending robots to Ceres. Is there an argument for Mars that doesn't include the phrase "multi-planet species"?
Consolidating all their effort behind a single vehicle makes sense, but is there a large risk of the same thing that happened to the A380? Could the BFR end up being too big for servicing the existing market? Or does the existing market end up as 1/1000 the new market opened up by having the BFR?
In aircraft, cost per flight is roughly proportional to aircraft size, so "too big" can be indirectly a problem.
With rockets, the difference between fully/rapidly reusable and expendable (or even partially reusable) is so vast that "too big" is basically irrelevant.
In his presentation, Musk showed the expected per-flight costs. BFR would be cheaper /per flight/ than Falcon1. ...and if you dig into last year's presentation, the projected per-flight costs are lower even than Rocketlab's Electron. PER FLIGHT.
Sending humans to Mars seems less attractive to me than sending robots to Ceres. Is there an argument for Mars that doesn't include the phrase "multi-planet species"?
First off, in the 'backup' argument Mars isn't meant as a bomb shelter for the human species. It's a shelter for human civilization, which is a higher level and much more fragile thing. Think about the libraries of the Arab world, not "The Arabs have to exist or humanity could die out when Rome falls!"
The other argument is as a launchpad. Mars is halfway to anywhere in the same way low earth orbit is, but Mars comes with exploitable resources. In the future, we can debate whether those resources are better exploited by enormous robotic fleets and autonomous systems or with humans on site, but with current tech readiness levels nothing beats in-situ humans for adaptability. A strong Martian industrial base will produce huge returns for terrestrial society. From dense high-throughput communication networks to massive orbital manufacturing depots to idyllic ring-world habitats, everything we want to put in orbit is cheaper starting from Mars.
They're only just proving this out, but one of the theses behind Made in Space [0] is that there are all sorts of microscopic manufacturing processes - optical components and chips being the most obvious - which would benefit from manufacturing in an ambient gravity between 0-1g. Which you simply can't get on Earth.