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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

#191

Post by pfdietz »

scottLobster wrote: post #176
buboard wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

I'm not sure the public's imagination is ever gripped by grand visions for very long. Just look at how quickly Apollo ended once we made it to the moon, and how controversial its budget was at the time. Going further back, remember that most of the Western settlers we romanticize as "pioneers" with "the spirit of exploration" today were in fact looking for economic profit and an escape from bad working conditions in…

Defense against asteroids is a bad justification for space exploitation. The first thing that would have to be done is telescopic search, and with very high probability nothing really dangerous would be found, and so no further space activity could be justified on the basis of defending against that threat.

Defense against long period comets might be a better bet, as they are harder to rule out.

Re: You Promised Me Mars Colonies but I Got Facebook

#192

Post by truncate »

lazylizard wrote: post #186

I dunno why ppl keep saying all we got is facebook. We got vxlan, 100gbe, SSDs,nvme SSDs,and soon non-volatile memory, GPUs, dpdk, segment routing, containers, config management, nosql, json, bittorrent, blockchain, eliptical curve crypto, totp, letsencrypt/acme, raft consensus..and more!

I somewhat agree. Facebook may not appeal much to people interested in let say space exploration or self-driving cars, but amount of engineering lessons learned by deploying a software at that scale is still invaluable. We are so much better at distributed systems, machine learning than we were, and that knowledge can be applied to other problems (and it is).

Re: You Promised Me Mars Colonies but I Got Facebook

#193

Post by pfdietz »

skybrian wrote: post #102

Seems like we don't get Mars colonies and supersonic jets for good economic reasons? These are luxuries at best. It's a nostalgic idea of progress only tenuously related to actual progress. More relevant questions might be why the cost of housing hasn't improved and why we haven't cured cancer yet.

Cancer's a really tough problem, and we're only now getting the mass of detailed information about its biology (in all its forms) that allows targeted therapies.

Re: You Promised Me Mars Colonies but I Got Facebook

#194

Post by gruez »

lazylizard wrote: post #186

I dunno why ppl keep saying all we got is facebook. We got vxlan, 100gbe, SSDs,nvme SSDs,and soon non-volatile memory, GPUs, dpdk, segment routing, containers, config management, nosql, json, bittorrent, blockchain, eliptical curve crypto, totp, letsencrypt/acme, raft consensus..and more!

>[...] nosql, json, [...]

Those are not like the others.

Re: You Promised Me Mars Colonies but I Got Facebook

#195

Post by adwn »

petre wrote: post #163
philipkglass wrote: post #50

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…

The future acording to Ford Perfect: just the same old stuff in faster cars and smellier air. Douglas Adams was a visionary, as many writers before him. That's why we need literature and human sciences - because we lose focus otherwise.

Almost all "visionaries" are wrong, and it's impossible to tell in advance which ones aren't.

> That's why we need literature and human sciences - because we lose focus otherwise.

Non sequitur: neither part of that sentence follows from the rest of your post.

Re: You Promised Me Mars Colonies but I Got Facebook

#196

Post by chr1 »

trixie_ wrote: post #157
chr1 wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There is a big difference between "the only thing preventing development of better rockets" and "one of things". NASA and every other country would be doing it now if better computers were the only thing needed for reusable rockets.

There is no sharp line dividing computers that made spaceX possible and slow ones, and with a little bit worse computers spaceX could develop the rocket after more failed attempts, spending much more money and time. But with the technology of 80's they'd end up with something very expensive and not very reliable similar to shuttle/buran.

Re: You Promised Me Mars Colonies but I Got Facebook

#197

Post by chr1 »

catalogia wrote: post #165
chr1 wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> NASA could not do that decades ago because then we didn't have good enough computers to [...] control the engine to land vertically. 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 met…

Landing rocket on low gravity lunar surface, or test rockets that did not go to space is a much easier task, which is evidenced by multiple failures of early spacex rockets, despite grasshoper landing every time.

Re: You Promised Me Mars Colonies but I Got Facebook

#198

Post by kobayashi »

ElFitz wrote: post #161
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.

Plus, the clickbait headline is merely a copycat of one Thiel's own words, except it was with flying cars and Twitter

Please post the Thiel article

Re: You Promised Me Mars Colonies but I Got Facebook

#199

Post by masonic »

skybrian wrote: post #102

Seems like we don't get Mars colonies and supersonic jets for good economic reasons? These are luxuries at best. It's a nostalgic idea of progress only tenuously related to actual progress. More relevant questions might be why the cost of housing hasn't improved and why we haven't cured cancer yet.

We don't have a market for commercial supersonic jets (given present technology) because they are an environment-clobbering indulgence even worse than private jets. And its consumers would no longer be as comfortably private with their consumption being sprayed all over IG and the like.

Re: You Promised Me Mars Colonies but I Got Facebook

#200

Post by pfdietz »

jacobwilliamroy wrote: post #160
DennisP wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's not called the Senate Launch System for no reason.
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