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Bezos donates $100M each to CNN contributor Van Jones and chef Jose Andres

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Re: Bezos donates $100M each to CNN contributor Van Jones and chef Jose Andres

#461

Post by aeturnum »

ncallaway wrote: post #442
onion2k wrote: post #420

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's how we get to the moon and Mars and how we survive as a species. This is unbelievably pessimistic. You're literally saying that Earth is beyond repair and the only way for humans to survive is to move to a rock in orbit that we've spent a total of 3 days on in the past 70 years, or to a planet no one has visited that has radiation that makes life essentially impossible for us. Assuming that's true, let's run som…

> This is unbelievably pessimistic. It's not pessimistic, it's realistic. It's just that what the parent poster means by "how we survive as a species" and what you mean are...different things. Going to the moon, going to mars, are necessary for the survival of our species...on a 100,000 year time horizon. At some point, something catastrophic may happen to earth. An asteroid impact, or a Gamma Ray Burst, or some othe…

First, I favor space exploration and think we, as a society, should spend more money on it than we do now. Second, calling this 'realistic' is nonsense:

>It's not pessimistic, it's realistic. [...] on a 100,000 year time horizon.

It has been 65 years since Sputnik was launched, so you are projecting out 1,565x that duration into the future. I'm sure you picked a nice, big, round number, but I think it's really important to grapple with how immediate all of space travel has been against how long our horizon is as a species is.

The first record we have of homo sapiens is from 300,000 years ago[1] - so 3x your time horizon. The founding of civilization could be pegged around 4,000 years ago with the founding of Babylon[2]. 100,000 years is about 25x the duration of the existence of civilization.

So I agree that space exploration must come at some point, but I actually think the most "realistic" approach would be to *ban* space exploration until climate change is under control. Fixing our impact on our own climate has fewer technical barriers and is a larger limiting factor to human survival than space. If the time horizon is really 100,000 or 10,000 years, then addressing climate change would be a blip on that timeline.

[1] https://theconversation.com/when-did-we-become-fully-human-w...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Babylon

Edit: accidentally a word

Re: Bezos donates $100M each to CNN contributor Van Jones and chef Jose Andres

#462

Post by aeternum »

mustafa_pasi wrote: post #255
aeternum wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We need to go to space because if we don't, all of humanity will go extinct. The earth won't last forever and also tends not to fare well when it goes 1:1 with asteroids or nukes.

Humanity won't go extinct any time soon, and at this point in time focusing resources on fighting problems like climate change is infinitely more rewarding than any stupid dicking around on the moon or mars. Mars won't ever be even as habitable as a thoroughly fucked up earth. It is a huge waste of time and resources that could be better employed on more immediate problems.

Even if we manage to get human carbon output under control, we know that historically the earth has gone through very extreme natural climate changes.

If we want to keep the earth habitable by humans over long time-scale then we absolutely need to learn how to do minor terraforming. Much better to experiment on the moon or mars than the earth.

Re: Bezos donates $100M each to CNN contributor Van Jones and chef Jose Andres

#463

Post by 8note »

Karsteski wrote: post #348
ModernMech wrote: post #322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But why do we have to go to Mars to invent all those things? Aren't there enough incentives to invent them in the context of helping our own planet?

Would the internet have been invented if not for military interests? Innovation, especially massive leaps, is born from necessity and drive, not "let's improve our technology".

But as above mars and the moon are not necessities - climate change is

Re: Bezos donates $100M each to CNN contributor Van Jones and chef Jose Andres

#465

Post by Causality1 »

nebula8804 wrote: post #454
Causality1 wrote: post #394

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seconding this. Musk is a workaholic who happens to be a total jackass on Twitter but his employees are well paid and to the best of my knowledge aren't forced to piss in bottles at work.

I thought Tesla and SpaceX famously underpay and overwork compared to most of the big Tech firms?

Quick Googling gave me values of 92K for the average SpaceX employee and $18.37/hr for Tesla's lowest unskilled labor rate.

Re: Bezos donates $100M each to CNN contributor Van Jones and chef Jose Andres

#466

Post by ghostbrainalpha »

semi-extrinsic wrote: post #339
ixacto wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We need to make humanity a multi-planetary species, Mars is just the beginning. The moonshot is just a tech validation, then we can send humans to the rest of the planets and the belt too. Figuring out how to solve pollution on Earth is also doable with modern technology. We can terraform Earth to be more habitable as well, we could melt the antarctic icecap and colonize it. Maybe even make a new civilization there w…

Am I the only one who calls bullshit on this? Let's say Elon pulls off going to Mars and establishing a permanent colony within the next 50 years. What plausible doomsday scenarios are there where everyone on Earth dies, but the people on Mars survive and are completely self-sustainable and able to grow their population exponentially? I mean, even if 99.99% of all humans on Earth are killed, there will be several ord…

It's seems pretty unlikely now. But what about once the Mar's colony has been established and growing for 300 years+ ?

Re: Bezos donates $100M each to CNN contributor Van Jones and chef Jose Andres

#467

Post by fnord77 »

dpcx wrote: post #427
fnord77 wrote: post #417

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Musk, for all his flaws, started an actual rocket company with new and frankly insane tech. there's nothing that spacex has done that's "new tech". VTVL rockets were worked out in the 60s and the 90s spacex does a good job of making it seem like what they're doing is new, though.

Do you have some examples of VTOL rockets from the early days? I can't find much online other than the Lunar module, and that was designed for VTOL on the moon...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McDonnell_Douglas_DC-X

I also believe that Blue Origin had VTVL working before space-X

in the early 2000s there were one or two other scale VTVL projects that were working, I can't find info on them now.

also Masten: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A5b9LnzjGgU

Re: Bezos donates $100M each to CNN contributor Van Jones and chef Jose Andres

#468

Post by 8note »

X6S1x6Okd1st wrote: post #390
sofixa wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's how we get to the moon and Mars and how we survive as a species. It's what's next. I find it extremely weird that people are banking on a (almost literal) moonshot for the survival of our species. Isn't trying to stop/lessen the damage we're doing to the place we currently live and which can sustain us better and more optimistic proposition than hoping a metric shitton of things go perfectly after probably mil…

I don't think people that think about this as their day job consider climate change to be the existential threat we are fixing by going to mars. It's generally: nuclear war, asteroid strike, super volcano bioweapon/plauge and possibly malicious AI.

Super volcanoes, nuclear wars, asteroid strikes and bioweapons makes earth about equal to living on Mars or the moon. You could build all the same things on earth instead, for a fair bit cheaper.

Malicious AI would almost certainly affect the moon or mars more heavily than earth, since on earth you can survive without high tech solutions

Re: Bezos donates $100M each to CNN contributor Van Jones and chef Jose Andres

#469

Post by tmp_anon_22 »

Zelphyr wrote: post #9

All the critics lobbing cynicism against Bezos, Branson, and Musk saying, in essence, that their money is better spent here at home reminds me of a wonderful scene from The West Wing when one character asks why we have to go to Mars: "'Cause it's next. For we came out of the cave, and we looked over the hill, and we saw fire. And we crossed the ocean, and we pioneered the West, and we took to the sky. The history of…

I love the West Wing but "pioneered the West" is a really interesting way to frame Columbus and Spain and France and Britain and ultimately the US doing what they did in the 17th-20th centuries.

Re: Bezos donates $100M each to CNN contributor Van Jones and chef Jose Andres

#470

Post by missedthecue »

monocasa wrote: post #305
missedthecue wrote: post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you pay back loans without income?

Your capital you used for collateral on the loans accrues value quicker than the loan's payments. Hence that 1% effective rate.

But eventually, you sell that capital to repay the loan, triggering a tax event.
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