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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

#201

Post by pfdietz »

p_l wrote: post #52
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 projects are endangered by politicians. The difference is that SpaceX funded reusability on their own, instead of depending on fickle funding from Congress that killed the original STS (leaving us with the one that flew and costed as much as Apollo per launch). And sometimes it wasn't Congress zit was president - like Nixon deciding to kill nuclear space propulsion for no known reason. The cutthroat politics of…

Nixon killed nuclear propulsion because there was no mission on the horizon to justify it. It was the right decision, although developing the shuttle was not.

Re: You Promised Me Mars Colonies but I Got Facebook

#202

Post by pfdietz »

skybrian wrote: post #114
randomsearch wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don't understand why some people say they want to live on Mars. They'd be confined in small metal boxes, surrounded by things that would kill them in a moment. The cost of everything would be enormous, if it was available at all.

If you want that experience, you can get it now on Earth in places we call "prisons".

Re: You Promised Me Mars Colonies but I Got Facebook

#203

Post by trixie_ »

chr1 wrote: post #196
trixie_ wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, spendi…

The decade doesn't matter. NASA is making poor decisions today with SLS, just as it did with the shuttle in the 80s.

The reality is it was possible to build cheap reliable reusable space vehicles with 70s technology.

Re: You Promised Me Mars Colonies but I Got Facebook

#204

Post by pfdietz »

DennisP wrote: post #133

I'll just mention there are a bunch of privately-funded fusion reactor projects, including TAE, General Fusion, Commonwealth, Tokamak Energy, LPP, Helion (funded in part by YCombinator), and others. There are also lots of companies working on molten salt reactors. In theory that's easier than fusion, but governments are more prickly about letting you work on fission.

TAE: it was explained to them 20 years ago why their idea didn't work, even theoretically.

General Fusion: acoustic compression was shown to be unworkable, so they pivoted to a slower scheme with a central conductor down the middle of the chamber. Good luck getting that conductor to survive 100T magnetic fields and orders of magnitude higher neutron loading than in conventional reactor concepts.

Commonwealth and TE: overall volumetric power density of their concepts will be very poor compared to fission reactors, even if every other problem is avoided.

LPP: there is a serious disconnect between accomplishment and hype. Also, pulsed approaches with very short bursts of fusion output make wall engineering much harder, and it's already very hard in continuous fusion reactor concepts.

The only one I cannot immediately dismiss is Helion, although that may be because I know less about them. The goal of direct conversion is admirable if they want to have a chance of being cheaper than fission, but the demands on that seem formidable. The high current, high voltage, billion reps over the lifetime of the reactor switching requirements seem extreme.

Re: You Promised Me Mars Colonies but I Got Facebook

#205

Post by lioeters »

kobayashi wrote: post #198
ElFitz wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

"We wanted flying cars - instead we got 140 characters."

Quote is from the article, "What happened to the future?"

https://foundersfund.com/the-future/

Re: You Promised Me Mars Colonies but I Got Facebook

#206

Post by foxrider »

heavyset_go wrote: post #182
ApolloFortyNine wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The final argument someone’s inevitably going to make is, survival of the race. Yeah, okay. You might want to self-reflect on our existence as deeply terrestrial beings that are intrinsically connected to the Earth. Even if you spend all of your day hidden in a bedroom, you can’t escape your bond with this planet. Instead of trying to find a mistress in the form of another moon/planet, we need to spend more time wor…

In the face of all extinction events, the bottom of the ocean would be more habitable than an alien planet.

But there is little to gain living on the bottom of the ocean. Space expansion offers us more than just survival, it bring orbital mining, Low G manufacturing, scientific projects and so on. It's much harder if not impossible to create something self-sufficient underwater than on Mars, since due to huge pressure any mechanical failure of your equipment is much more catastrophic. There are virtually no light or any good energy sources for growing food, you can't mine underwater effectively, and so on. It's a glorified bunker and nothing more. Compare it to mars - structures can be erected from much lighter spacious materials and expand outwards, there is sunlight, a lot of minerals to mine and since everything is pressurised from the inside the repairability is higher.

Re: You Promised Me Mars Colonies but I Got Facebook

#207

Post by DennisP »

pfdietz wrote: post #204
DennisP wrote: post #133

I'll just mention there are a bunch of privately-funded fusion reactor projects, including TAE, General Fusion, Commonwealth, Tokamak Energy, LPP, Helion (funded in part by YCombinator), and others. There are also lots of companies working on molten salt reactors. In theory that's easier than fusion, but governments are more prickly about letting you work on fission.

TAE: it was explained to them 20 years ago why their idea didn't work, even theoretically. General Fusion: acoustic compression was shown to be unworkable, so they pivoted to a slower scheme with a central conductor down the middle of the chamber. Good luck getting that conductor to survive 100T magnetic fields and orders of magnitude higher neutron loading than in conventional reactor concepts. Commonwealth and TE:…

I'm not trying to claim that these particular projects will succeed. I'm just saying that some VCs are in fact funding the sort of high-risk breakthrough physical technologies that the article claims are not being funded.

But a nitpick on LPP: wall engineering isn't really an issue for them since they're attempting boron fusion. Like Helion they're also planning direct conversion, since the output is a pulsed beam of charged particles. I once asked Lerner why they don't start with D-T and he had an argument that their concept actually works better with boron (don't remember why).

Re: You Promised Me Mars Colonies but I Got Facebook

#208

Post by nootropicat »

205guy wrote: post #183
nootropicat wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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…

This is so much hyperbole, typical of manifest destiny escapists. You start with a pop-interpretation of an edgy existential statement. The point of Sartre's "No Exit" was not to glibly quote the punch-line, it's to think about the logical implications. Probably something about learning to live together despite our flaws/sins. About escaping the state, the Book of Genesis figured it out long ago: humans behave badly…

>To dream of running far enough away to a mythical place where you alone get to make the laws is just futile escapism. The Amish and the Mormons just moved with their laws to a new place, and if you didn't agree with their laws, you still got kicked out.

Strawman. I literally wrote "like the Amish or Mormons did" yet you describe living alone in a hidden hut somewhere, Theodore Kaczynski style.

>Why does it have to be defensible?

Even in the XIX century, Mormons were eventually subjugated by force. They only managed to last several decades under their own laws. Today under the "Maritime Drug Law Enforcement Act" it's a federal crime to operate a submersible vessel without nationality in international waters. The claimed jurisdiction is global. So no, it's not possible to move away anywhere on Earth anymore. The moment anything substantial would be created, some state would claim it as their own.

>Why that should be as easy as a CRUD app on a virtual server with some rented storage.

What's the point of this hyperbole? The difference between an engineering problem and scifi is that the former can already be done, but is expensive or otherwise impractical, while scifi problem like mind uploading can't be done for any money today. Engineering problems, like making rockets cheaper, are solvable by throwing money at the problem as long as general physical laws permit improvements.

>the world is full, nobody is escaping anywhere

Which is exactly why developing space travel technology is so important.

Re: You Promised Me Mars Colonies but I Got Facebook

#209

Post by stjohnswarts »

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…

It just makes me think we need to invest more into terraforming Mars :D

Re: You Promised Me Mars Colonies but I Got Facebook

#210

Post by Paradigma11 »

dwighttk wrote: post #112
adventured wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Build an industrial moon base with a mass driver.

Build a few thousand kinetic impactors in space.

Decommision your nuclear weapons which cost 5*10^10$/year.

Profit.

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