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You Promised Me Mars Colonies but I Got Facebook

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Re: You Promised Me Mars Colonies but I Got Facebook

#151

Post by buboard »

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…

there is value to space travel for exploration, but space travel is currently promoted for tourist purposes. There is nothing wrong with that, but companies won't offer anything beyond that because going on a 6 month space trip to mars is torture rather than tourism.

Re: You Promised Me Mars Colonies but I Got Facebook

#152

Post by [deleted] »

guelo wrote: post #115
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 r…

[deleted]

Re: You Promised Me Mars Colonies but I Got Facebook

#153

Post by [deleted] »

pmiller2 wrote: post #144
gorgoiler wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 engin…

This is kind of an amusing metaphor. But, if infrastructure engineers are the zookeepers, does that make the front end and mobile engineers the animals? And what about the backend engineers?

[deleted]

Re: You Promised Me Mars Colonies but I Got Facebook

#154

Post by nootropicat »

Animats wrote: post #71
scythe wrote: post #25

Why is it always space? Space technology requires lots of energy and our society is currently in the middle of realizing that our current way of getting energy is going to kill us. Of course we're not making large-scale investments in energy-intensive exploration. I wish EDS maglev, fusion power or quantum computing generated so much excitement, to say nothing of grid batteries, magnetocaloric heat pumps, or electric…

Why is it always space? Good question. The best off-earth real estate in this solar system is worse than the worst on-earth real estate. It's easier to build colonies in Antarctica or underwater on the continental shelf than on Mars. Mars is small, cold, and nearly airless. We're not short of low-value real estate, after all.

"Hell is other people". It's not possible to escape the state on Earth anymore. It's a pure question of travel time. Underwater continental shelf or Antarctica, it's all trivially accessible and indefensible. It's not possible to start a new way of living somewhere, like the Amish or Mormons did. What's needed is at least the equivalent of travel time and cost between Europe and Americas before steam ships.

Space is not that hard assuming some basic human upgrades. Nothing scifi needed (like mind uploading), just an engineering problem - things that today take a factory but would have to fit into a human sized body.

Re: You Promised Me Mars Colonies but I Got Facebook

#155

Post by buboard »

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…

> access in any meaningful amount of time

I agree about space constraints, but if we really wanted to, we 'd work to create humans that live long enough to go there , or somehow else send human hybrids frozen in a ship. Biotechnology is amazing but so constrained by premature regulation it's not seeing a lot of progress. I have the feeling that scientists were secretly wishing some rogue scientist would try to apply crispr on humans.

I think it's true that the public's imagination is not much gripped by grand visions anymore but rather numbed and distracted with mindless trivialities

Re: You Promised Me Mars Colonies but I Got Facebook

#156

Post by jacobwilliamroy »

itronitron wrote: post #147
jacobwilliamroy wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd love to hang out on the martian web. Sounds cool as hell, and a lot healthier than earth web.

you could create one here on earth, and sell connected 'pods' that people could live out of from their parents' basements (only half joking)

Now I want to write a browser extension which simulates earth-mars latency.

Re: You Promised Me Mars Colonies but I Got Facebook

#157

Post by trixie_ »

chr1 wrote: post #87
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…

NASA could not do that decades ago because then we didn't have good enough computers to model the process of burning in the engine, or to control the engine to land vertically. So i don't think that effort spent on facebook and other computer related things was a waste.

If you were right then NASA and every other country would be doing it now. But you’re not right. There’s nothing about the computers or engines that couldn’t of been done decades ago.

Re: You Promised Me Mars Colonies but I Got Facebook

#158

Post by buboard »

joe_the_user wrote: post #120
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 ne…

"social networking" with martians would be a lot like email, light speed is a bitch

Re: You Promised Me Mars Colonies but I Got Facebook

#159

Post by trixie_ »

headmelted wrote: post #53
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…

How on Earth (see what I did?) would NASA drive down the cost of space? “I don’t care if it’s not real science - Go there and do that, you burden on the taxpayer” - Every administration official in charge of NASA’s budget ever, probably. I love me some NASA but I don’t envy the people asking for funding one iota. Also, For All Mankind is terrific.

Simple, by putting out contacts for reusable, low maintenance vehicles. NASA is in the position to define the requirements for bidders.

Re: You Promised Me Mars Colonies but I Got Facebook

#160

Post by jacobwilliamroy »

DennisP wrote: post #121
jacobwilliamroy wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 reall…

Or, there would be less money for SLS. NASA has been spending $2 billion annually for SLS development for a while now, and all they'll get is a disposable rocket the size of Starship that costs at least a billion dollars per launch, or $10,000/kg payload. Meanwhile SpaceX is spending less than one billion dollars total for Starship/Super Heavy, and at scale it'll launch payload for $20/kg. How much more money would N…

That's strange. Why is NASA doing sls instead of just contracting SpaceX? From your comment it sounds like SpaceX is much more efficient at launching things into space than NASA, and I'd like to know how that came to be the case.
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