You Promised Me Mars Colonies but I Got Facebook • Hacker News Board

Re: You Promised Me Mars Colonies but I Got Facebook

#61

Post by thatfrenchguy » Sat, Nov 16, 2019, 8:27 PM UTC

smnrchrds wrote: post #28

helpPeople wrote: post #14

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.

> the 30k car is never coming 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.

You mean when global warming will make most of the US a nightmare ? Great.

Re: You Promised Me Mars Colonies but I Got Facebook

#62

Post by radicalbyte » Sat, Nov 16, 2019, 8:27 PM UTC

microtonal wrote: post #29

eanzenberg wrote: post #12

It 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. The Connected-Information Age seems to have brought on some great advances 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…

I'd argue that the decline of religion and the implementation of this Darwinian style of capitalism in the West is a large contributor towards this. The large increase in the number of non-working people (pensioners) also plays a roll.

In America I'd give television - especially Fox News. That channel is like WWF - it's basically a scripted soap opera written to be extremely compelling to the viewers. Only unlike WWF it's portraying itself as a true representation of the real world.

If anything the internet increases the amount of community: you can always find like-minded people.

Re: You Promised Me Mars Colonies but I Got Facebook

#63

Post by buboard » Sat, Nov 16, 2019, 8:29 PM UTC

trixie_ wrote: post #39

NASA hasn’t been actively trying to drive down the cost of space. If the had it would of unlocked space for all of us decades ago. It took SpaceX investing their own profits into building a reusable booster. And now they’re doing the same for the entire vehicle with Starship. NASA does pay SpaceX for flights to the IIS, but most of that money goes into building Dragons and the rockets to support them. What if NASA ac…

why would NASA want to drive down the cost of space? I mean, they would want to drive it down in order to go farther in space, but their mission is to explore space, not be the uber for space

the criticism of their research budget is valid though, they need to be more ambitious and driven

Re: You Promised Me Mars Colonies but I Got Facebook

#64

Post by jacobwilliamroy » Sat, Nov 16, 2019, 8:29 PM UTC

trixie_ wrote: post #39

NASA hasn’t been actively trying to drive down the cost of space. If the had it would of unlocked space for all of us decades ago. It took SpaceX investing their own profits into building a reusable booster. And now they’re doing the same for the entire vehicle with Starship. NASA does pay SpaceX for flights to the IIS, but most of that money goes into building Dragons and the rockets to support them. What if NASA ac…

Well then there would be less money for things like PACE, ICE-SAT, ICE Bridge. They've been building earth satellites to improve fisheries management and inform earth conservation efforts. PACE will be particularly helpful for me as an oceanographer because of they've got those neato optical plankton sensors onboard.

Also, NASA allocates funding based on decadal surveys of the scientific community, so they have really considered doing as you propose.

Re: You Promised Me Mars Colonies but I Got Facebook

#65

Post by dade_ » Sat, Nov 16, 2019, 8:30 PM UTC

I watch what NTT Research is up to, and frankly, how many startups even know anything about how to fabricate a superconductor, let alone have the facilities to create them? They have the tools to make websites and little computers with sensors made in Shenzhen, so that is what they make.

https://www.ntt-review.jp/archive/ntttechnical.php?contents=...

Re: You Promised Me Mars Colonies but I Got Facebook

#66

Post by bryanrasmussen » Sat, Nov 16, 2019, 8:30 PM UTC

headmelted wrote: post #44

molteanu wrote: post #23

I've told myself countless times lately, that it is simply not possible for young graduates to come to work knowing basically nothing, surfing fb and youtube all day long and then go buy cars and going to Greece as their very first vacation. Something, somewhere, just stinks badly. I've literally never seen a challenging and well run project in almost 10 years in this business. Always late, always overstaffed, always…

“I'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” This was actually painful to read because of how much truth there is in it.

I would say I have seen two.

Re: You Promised Me Mars Colonies but I Got Facebook

#67

Post by adventured » Sat, Nov 16, 2019, 8:32 PM UTC

buboard wrote: post #15

bpodgursky wrote: post #4

A 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)

I still think the Voyagers 1 and 2 are bigger feats. Moon landings were cool as an indirect way to develop ballistic missile technology in such a vast scale that nowadays the world's peace relies on this kind of deterrence - Good. And they gave as huge tech advancements as added benefits. Moon landings in 2020s are vanity projects for billionaires with very diminished added benefits. The apollo program was staggering…

You're ignoring the value in making the moon landings routine and instead focusing on the public propaganda value of the nth landing (the "meh" part).

The most important part of a technological adoption process is making a thing routine. That's where most of the value is in fact derived. That is true of all technology that is made far less inexpensive and far more routine.

We're deriving drastically more value out of space now than we did with Apollo and we're spending a lot less money to do it. That will accelerate.

Billionaires perfecting regularly landing on the moon would have a massive benefit of taking a hard-to-accomplish space task and turning it into a common task. It's the exact opposite of being an implied low value vanity project. The ability to then use the moon for manufacturing, storage, basing and experimentation has very large benefits to working on Mars and more broadly in space generally.

Re: You Promised Me Mars Colonies but I Got Facebook

#68

Post by OnlineGladiator » Sat, Nov 16, 2019, 8:35 PM UTC

buboard wrote: post #56

bitL wrote: post #16

"You get what you measure" - talk to VCs that could finance your idea and then weep when you see what ideas do they actually select. Quick boring ROI + veiled scams are the way to go these days if you want to get external funding.

I think the bigger lie is that you absolutely need VCs to finance your idea.

What do you think is a better way to fund a manned mission to Mars? It's hard to argue with the progress that SpaceX has made - and that wouldn't exist without VC funding. Meanwhile NASA continues to operate at the whims of Congress. It's doing fine, but it's not looking for any moonshots like it was 50 years ago.

Re: You Promised Me Mars Colonies but I Got Facebook

#69

Post by jacobwilliamroy » Sat, Nov 16, 2019, 8:36 PM UTC

Irene wrote: post #8

samfisher83 wrote: post #2

I think the article points out the main reason. It is more profitable to build Facebook than put a man on mars.

Connectivity-driven innovation is cheaper. Science is becoming harder and is getting less bang for its buck. We saw great progress in AI over the past few years but even this has taken far more effort and money than building social networks. Perhaps connectivity-driven innovation could help to speed up applied science innovation if power of the crowd is more efficiently utilized?

I don't agree that connectivity and applied science are two separate things. We don't get to netflix without applied sciences: encryption, compression, networking, neural networks. I don't know why the author said that. He has a degree in computer science

Re: You Promised Me Mars Colonies but I Got Facebook

#70

Post by Razengan » Sat, Nov 16, 2019, 8:37 PM UTC

> “Why We Can’t Solve Big Problems”

I think it may partly be because most of human civilization is still basically slave labor.

You indenture some people and you tell them what to build.

People don't care about problems they're not supposed to take care of. It's a detriment to them if they do.

This kind of makes it tricky to take on tasks like say, space elevators or arcologies or extraterrestrial colonies. You need expertise and constant collaboration from so many different domains it's hard for a single organization to have enough musclepower and brainpower for, even with contractors.

Then there's the tribalism. Governments may have the resources to take on global/space-scale projects but they generally try to hinder other governments, even within the same nation.