Only 4 more years until Elon Musk puts a $30,000 Tesla on Mars where solar power roofs cost the same as conventional. I believed it until about 3 years ago, when I realized spaceX is Elon's government subsidized advertisement for his other projects. Also the 30k car is never coming. And the roof price is loaded with astricks to be 'correct". We really need to wake up to the next gen marketing tactics.
You Promised Me Mars Colonies but I Got Facebook
21–30 of 230 posts
Re: You Promised Me Mars Colonies but I Got Facebook
#22It sounds like people are forgetting the world before Facebook. Isolated, repressed locations, limited flow of information from tiny amounts of sources. The Connected-Information Age seems to have brought on some great advances and has been self-sustaining from a profitable perspective. Sure, the worlds' governments could have spent billions / trillions building bases on Mars or even terraforming it. But for what pur…
There were plenty of tools available for sharing and communicating in real time before Facebook existed. The actual innovation was the Internet and personal computing.
This seems to be the core of what this poster is trying to express as far as I understood.
Re: You Promised Me Mars Colonies but I Got Facebook
#23I've literally never seen a challenging and well run project in almost 10 years in this business. Always late, always overstaffed, always endless meetings and poorly trained people that nevertheless earn well above the median wage so the incentive to improve onself is almost zero and the attitude is "we're better than the rest of humanity. We deserve all, the rest deserves nothing."
I did an Electrical Engineering faculty. I know how hard it is to do math and physics and all that. But since there's such an easy money to be made from slinging yet another website or a stupid mobile app with these dumbed down languages, the interest in the sciences and anything more complicated slowly wanishes. We'll pay the price eventually. Maybe not now, maybe not in 10 years, but eventually. We're too comfortable.
"There existed no need on Caladan to build a physical paradise or a paradise of the mind — we could see the actuality all around us. And the price we paid was the price men have always paid for achieving a paradise in this life — we went soft, we lost our edge." - Dune
(I'm from Eastern Europe)
Re: You Promised Me Mars Colonies but I Got Facebook
#24Earlier quoted context omitted.
of course that would be humanity’s effort. But we can only remember leaders
What I'm saying is that, by the time it happens, Elon is going to be a footnote in someone else's story.
Re: You Promised Me Mars Colonies but I Got Facebook
#25I wish EDS maglev, fusion power or quantum computing generated so much excitement, to say nothing of grid batteries, magnetocaloric heat pumps, or electric impedance tomography. I guess QC has done well lately.
Re: You Promised Me Mars Colonies but I Got Facebook
#26A lot of really stupid shit is going to happen in 2020, but if Starship makes it to orbit and Crew Dragon successfully launches astronauts, those are the only events anyone will remember in 100 years. (Come, on tell me with a straight face you remember anything else important that happened in 1903)
Re: You Promised Me Mars Colonies but I Got Facebook
#27It sounds like people are forgetting the world before Facebook. Isolated, repressed locations, limited flow of information from tiny amounts of sources. The Connected-Information Age seems to have brought on some great advances and has been self-sustaining from a profitable perspective. Sure, the worlds' governments could have spent billions / trillions building bases on Mars or even terraforming it. But for what pur…
> It sounds like people are forgetting the world before Facebook. Isolated, repressed locations, limited flow of information from tiny amounts of sources. Facebook is not the internet. This problem was solved long before 2005.
Re: You Promised Me Mars Colonies but I Got Facebook
#28Only 4 more years until Elon Musk puts a $30,000 Tesla on Mars where solar power roofs cost the same as conventional. I believed it until about 3 years ago, when I realized spaceX is Elon's government subsidized advertisement for his other projects. Also the 30k car is never coming. And the roof price is loaded with astricks to be 'correct". We really need to wake up to the next gen marketing tactics.
Never is a strong word. We may not get 30k electric cars in 5 years, but we will eventually. We may not get full autonomous vehicles in a decade, but we will certainly have it before the turn of the century.
Re: You Promised Me Mars Colonies but I Got Facebook
#29It sounds like people are forgetting the world before Facebook. Isolated, repressed locations, limited flow of information from tiny amounts of sources. The Connected-Information Age seems to have brought on some great advances and has been self-sustaining from a profitable perspective. Sure, the worlds' governments could have spent billions / trillions building bases on Mars or even terraforming it. But for what pur…
What exactly has this given us? People have smart phone addiction. Studies have shown that people feel more isolated than before, because the coherence of local communities is dissolving.
The Internet has brought us much. A kid somewhere can learn a lot of things that you could not easily learn before in a small town in the middle of nowhere. We have FLOSS software and people that cooperate on large, open, projects.
But to me Facebook and other advertising-based have been a net loss. Of course, there is community and communication, but they existed before Facebook in Usenet, e-mail lists and forums. However, now all the communication is spoiled by advertisments, people being driven subconsciously to get likes, and numerous attempts to induce dopamine shots. I really liked the internet more from 1995-2008 (before Facebook got very big in Western Europe) than from 2008-now.
Re: You Promised Me Mars Colonies but I Got Facebook
#30It sounds like people are forgetting the world before Facebook. Isolated, repressed locations, limited flow of information from tiny amounts of sources. The Connected-Information Age seems to have brought on some great advances and has been self-sustaining from a profitable perspective. Sure, the worlds' governments could have spent billions / trillions building bases on Mars or even terraforming it. But for what pur…
Also would like to add, sheer advances in compute and software lead by Facebook and others has enabled much cheaper space travel than what was possible in 1970's - 80's. This type of stuff is getting cheaper every day, so why be selfish because you "want to see it in your lifetime?" It'll happen. I don't care if it happens in 20 years, 200 years, or 2000 years.
And they certainly aren't developing the software that space agencies and companies are using. If anything they're likely diverting talent away from more beneficial work towards selling ads.
There are maybe 2 projects on this list that could possibly be beneficial for space exploration, and they aren't groundbreaking.