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

Re: You Promised Me Mars Colonies but I Got Facebook

#111

Post by bogwog » Sat, Nov 16, 2019, 9:21 PM UTC

undefined3840 wrote: post #90

I’m surprised this article is so upvoted. 1. The author took this nearly word for word from Thiel/Eric Weinstein, who have both discussed this point extensively, most recently on Weinstein’s podcast. 2. The author is using this click bait headline to discuss his own industry/company, and this looks like some content marketing piece.

> and this looks like some content marketing piece.

Seeing that it's on linkedin, there's no need to read the article to know that's exactly what this is.

Re: You Promised Me Mars Colonies but I Got Facebook

#112

Post by dwighttk » Sat, Nov 16, 2019, 9:21 PM UTC

adventured wrote: post #67

buboard wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>You're ignoring the value in making the moon landings routine

which is?

Re: You Promised Me Mars Colonies but I Got Facebook

#113

Post by gorgoiler » Sat, Nov 16, 2019, 9:22 PM UTC

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…

Product engineers may be a mess but infrastructure engineers in this industry are capable of incredible works of human achievement.

The product punks, fresh out of college, throw together all kinds of whacky code in the name of front end product — which to their credit becomes incredibly popular with millions of people. It’s usually also incomplete bug ridden nonsense.

The real magic is in seeing infrastructure engineers scale this to thousands of machines running across continents, always up, always connected, with non trivial caching, CDNs, cluster turn up, release engineering with automated testing and performance regression analysis on each diff before it’s even committed, let alone in production, and every other manner of instrumentation and tooling under the sun brought to bear on the product code itself.

When they run out of things to do that are awesome they turn their eye to building their own compilers, languages, hardware, and networking gear, all to maximize productivity and minimize cost.

It’s a zoo, and the zookeepers are some of the smartest people I’ve met.

Re: You Promised Me Mars Colonies but I Got Facebook

#114

Post by skybrian » Sat, Nov 16, 2019, 9:22 PM UTC

randomsearch wrote: post #77

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.

Maybe that’s not true, in the long term? But certainly easier and more profitable in the short.

I doubt it would be any more profitable in the long run. A Mars colony would have extremely high barriers to trade. It's like a permanent trade embargo. Countries don't do well without trade. An entirely self-sufficient, technically advanced community hasn't been done, even on Earth.

Antarctica would be much easier and cheaper in comparison.

Re: You Promised Me Mars Colonies but I Got Facebook

#115

Post by guelo » Sat, Nov 16, 2019, 9:23 PM UTC

numair wrote: post #86

All of these articles and ways of thinking always miss the bigger, more fundamental shift in human society — we now know there is literally no place we can access in any meaningful amount of time where the “grass is greener” than the places we’ve already been. This is profound, semi-depressing, and enlightening at the same time. Rather than seeking something new somewhere else, our new obsession is in improving what…

I try to imagine humanity a thousand years from now, still bound to the same increasingly inhospitable planet, paying for the sins of our generations but nowhere to escape to. With probably an abandoned Mars or moon colony. Just nothing to explore. Even the boundaries of natural science would be mostly understood by that point. It would be so depressing. Our only salvation would be if we still have enough resources remaining for computers to run virtual worlds for us to explore. Basically video games, that's our best hope.

Re: You Promised Me Mars Colonies but I Got Facebook

#116

Post by base698 » Sat, Nov 16, 2019, 9:25 PM UTC

undefined3840 wrote: post #90

I’m surprised this article is so upvoted. 1. The author took this nearly word for word from Thiel/Eric Weinstein, who have both discussed this point extensively, most recently on Weinstein’s podcast. 2. The author is using this click bait headline to discuss his own industry/company, and this looks like some content marketing piece.

Link?

Re: You Promised Me Mars Colonies but I Got Facebook

#117

Post by widowlark » Sat, Nov 16, 2019, 9:25 PM UTC

There's a certain irony in Buzz Aldrin complaining that he didn't get Mars Colonies and simultaneously hating on Elon Musk for not being the US Government.

Re: You Promised Me Mars Colonies but I Got Facebook

#118

Post by bsenftner » Sat, Nov 16, 2019, 9:27 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.

It take a stabilization of the technologies and processes. In the early CG and VFX animation industry it was chaos too, but now many production studios are run tighter than a military operation. Experience in a moderately recent war feature with a good sized VFX budget, the military advisers remarked how the film set and following post production was better run than their real world military campaigns.

Re: You Promised Me Mars Colonies but I Got Facebook

#119

Post by goatlover » Sat, Nov 16, 2019, 9:27 PM UTC

OnlineGladiator wrote: post #68

buboard wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The goal of NASA is scientific exploration, not human colonization. Robots and satellites are much cheaper and safer than trying to make Mars a viable place to live, and you can explore many more places.

Re: You Promised Me Mars Colonies but I Got Facebook

#120

Post by joe_the_user » Sat, Nov 16, 2019, 9:27 PM UTC

numair wrote: post #86

All of these articles and ways of thinking always miss the bigger, more fundamental shift in human society — we now know there is literally no place we can access in any meaningful amount of time where the “grass is greener” than the places we’ve already been. This is profound, semi-depressing, and enlightening at the same time. Rather than seeking something new somewhere else, our new obsession is in improving what…

Just as much, if you consider what it would be like, who would want to be stuck on a martian mining colony ... without any social networking. Social networking might have it's downsides but it's rather a boon to people stuck in areas of extreme boredom and isolation.

The thing one can regret about the aesthetics of modern life, including social networking, is that it's made the uniqueness of places less (a social network and the Internet generally lets you be everywhere and yet nowhere and makes everywhere kind of the same). But I can't see martian colonies making human places more unique given such colonies would have to have a very uniform structure dictated by a harsh environment.