221–230 of 397 posts
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Over a decade ago, when Amazon wasn't the powerhouse it is today, I dated someone who routinely interacted with Jeff Bezos. According to them, Bezos feels the same way. Amazon is basically a means-to-an-end, and that "end" is to get humanity into outer space, as an insurance policy in the event of a catastrophe on earth.
How come Bezos has never brought this up, ever?
If they aren’t going to finish the Vegas monorail, maybe they can build a tunnel from the airport to the Strip?
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4. Removal of single-point extinction event if/when another dinosaur killer asteroid strikes Earth.
A dinosaur-killer sized asteroid strike would still leave earth far, far more habitable than mars is (there would at least be air and water) as would essentially any other conceivable natural or cosmic disaster.
It’s about a site in the Hell Creek formation that seems to show, in incredible detail, what happened in the first hour after the Chicxulub strike a couple thousand miles away.
It reset my ideas about Earth’s habitability after the impact.
[1] https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/04/08/the-day-the-di...
(AFAIK, not paywalled unless you’ve used up your monthly quota of free NY articles)
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The goal of Mars to me is silly. Mars is already worse off in terms of climate than Earth. Why not work to improve what we have? The only appeal I see is "uncharted territory" / wild west
Ironic that you use the Wild West as an example. Do you think the world would be better now if the British had just worked on improving Britain rather than settling in America? I’m sure there were many people calling the settlers silly back then too.
I suspect quite a few Native Americans do...
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The goal of Mars to me is silly. Mars is already worse off in terms of climate than Earth. Why not work to improve what we have? The only appeal I see is "uncharted territory" / wild west
Having a small group of people on Mars would be a great scientific boom. Einstein was inspired because as a patent clerk he worked across from the railway station and was very aware of time, time standards, physical trains. We'd give up our earth centric imaginations of time, gravity, and many other things.
[citation needed] I guess he was more inspired by the Michelson experiment and the Lorentz transformations.
> We'd give up our earth centric imaginations of time, gravity, and many other things.
Gravity works exactly like here (But you can jump higher). Time works exactly like here too (The length of the day and the year are different, it will be a problem to choose a good calendar, but it's already a mess here. Anyway, it's not a scientific or technological problem, people just don't want to change the calendar they are use to.)
Perhaps they will find a few new interesting cases for climate science an geology???
I love watching all of Musk's projects, as every single one can be connected to Mars colonization. 1. Electric cars for transport, Check. 2. Solar panels and batteries for power generation and storage, check. 3. Tunnel digging equipment for making underground bases and transport, check. 4. Satellite communications for an entire planet, check. 5. Then finally, the actual rockets to get us there. Hopefully he will cont…
The goal of Mars to me is silly. Mars is already worse off in terms of climate than Earth. Why not work to improve what we have? The only appeal I see is "uncharted territory" / wild west
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I don't understand this comment at all. The Boring Company's main plans aren't to create new and novel tunnels. The Boring Company's goal is to create cheaper tunnels. Like, if I said I was planning on developing a wheel at 1/10th the cost of current wheels, I don't care that the wheel predates my innovation by millenia. I'm not attempting to _improve_ the wheel, I'm attempting to make it viable in an increasing numb…
> The Boring Company's main plans aren't to create new and novel tunnels. The Boring Company's goal is to create _cheaper_ tunnels. The Boring Company's main plans, as can be evidenced by their communications (such as their FAQ) and their commitments and attempted commitments to build actual projects, is to pitch a radically new, 21st century mode of mass transit that is really just a variation of personal rapid tran…
The video linked has Elon saying specifically that they have an industry-standard TBM that they used for the Hawthorne test tunnel. There is no improvement there. They have 2 more machines they are building that are expected to be large improvements over the tunnel status quo for that given size of tunnel they are constructing.
Again, the improvement is not in the tunnel size... they are building their own TBMs, trying to get them to be faster at tunneling than the existing machine that they have.
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I'd like to live in a world where rich dickheads act more like Musk and do cool things. It's like living in a comic book. It's fun. But that's not our way forward. Forget the billionaires, we need to assemble, reinvest in our political system, and start building a better future from the ground up.
> But that's not our way forward. Forget the billionaires, we need to assemble, reinvest in our political system, and start building a better future from the ground up. Good luck with that. For now people like Musk and Gates are doing a pretty good job of things in various areas though.
Let's look away from the light and into the shadows ... where the @sshole billionaires live. It's not all glory and progress in billionaire land.
I love watching all of Musk's projects, as every single one can be connected to Mars colonization. 1. Electric cars for transport, Check. 2. Solar panels and batteries for power generation and storage, check. 3. Tunnel digging equipment for making underground bases and transport, check. 4. Satellite communications for an entire planet, check. 5. Then finally, the actual rockets to get us there. Hopefully he will cont…
The goal of Mars to me is silly. Mars is already worse off in terms of climate than Earth. Why not work to improve what we have? The only appeal I see is "uncharted territory" / wild west
I don’t see this doing $50M of good for easing congestion. I would prefer it if they’d commit to a much larger budget project connecting the airport to the convention center and several major hotels and casinos than this low density single lane tunnel.