161–170 of 230 posts
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.
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 reall…
This raises some interesting questions about why the-future-seen-from-1970 included so many developments that failed to materialize. Unfortunately, I think it provides mostly wrong or irrelevant answers. One thing that made the 20th century so amazing was the discovery of scientific phenomena that were easily translated to industrially and commercially relevant technologies. We're still mining the rich vein of techno…
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
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.
Autonomous propulsive landing isn't something SpaceX invented. Besides the DC-X in the mid-90s which is often cited in these discussions, there are the Soviet Luna probes. In 1966 the Luna 9 lander used retrorocket thrusters to arrest its descent to the lunar surface to 6 m/s at 5 meters above the lunar surface (airbags handled the rest.) This is not quite as impressive as what SpaceX does today for a few reasons, but it seems to me that a concerted effort to iterate on this tech could have been a lot more successful decades ago than you think.
(I believe in 1970 Luna 17 landed on the moon with no airbags, but I don't know much about Luna 17)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I always wondered whether this phenomenon was something local or whether it holds true outside eastern Europe as well. I saw that you're from eastern Europe and I checked out your website. You're in the exact same city I am in. I moved here a couple of years ago from western Europe. What a small world.
If these, and others of its kind, are the things that also keep you awake at night, feel free to get in touch. It's hard to openly express them around here (edit: here, meaning the city where I live, not HN) as I always seem to get into trouble for that. Thought police is always on the lookout.
It doesn't take a thought police to reject that as almost surely greatly exaggerated and undeservedly disrespectful.
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…
Starting that work now is a huge economic opportunity too.
There is no need to continue to squander resources.
There are a lot of wants to do that. Understandable too. No judgement.
We have a global priority conversation coming. The sooner the better.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> People were connected in open pseudonymous platforms and engaging in continuous explorative mystery with each other. This also had the effect that most people were way more respectful towards each other because you didn't have an instant "ego comparison" trough shined up social media profiles. Nowadays most discussions quickly turn ad-hominem because all the needed information is readily available: "You said this n…
"Anonymity breeds toxicity" is propaganda pioneered by Facebook whose founder believes in radical unprivacy.
The WWIV boards were all pseudonymous, open and welcoming. There was pretty much no discrimination there (because no one knew your gender, age, religion, skin color, or class unless you told them). They were typically run by a mix of ordinary people, including those who would be discriminated against in real life.
The Wildcat boards in my area were all real-name only, enter your address and phone number to register an account and the sysop will call to verify. Those were the ones who claimed to be more civil, but were rife with discrimination, bullying, and snobbery. They were typically run by the more wealthy and powerful, who never faced discrimination.
The early internet, with IRC, usenet, web forums, and even some way into the blog phase, seemed to have followed the WWIV path, and it was good. But then the wealthy and powerful wanted more control and more data to discriminate on, and they resurrected the old real-names policies.
Big thanks to all social networking companies like Facebook, Google and Twitter to keep NSA and CIA always in people's pocket!
All HN fanboys time to put some serious thumbs down now