201–210 of 231 posts
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Another way of putting it is that it could potentially affect 40 million people.
There are areas of the globe that are more densely populated than California. But on the other hand, you typically don't launch rockets there.
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> One famous example occured on August 25, 2017, when a Falcon 9 rocket carrying Taiwan’s FORMOSAT-5 satellite created a hole four times bigger than the state of California. Doesn't sound too local to me.
Good point. Deserves some numbers. California's area is about 500 thousand km^2, and the Earth's is about 500 million, which means the side facing the Sun is about 250 million, so we're talking about 0.2% of the area facing the sun. Suppose the hole takes six hours to heal (the article makes it sound like it takes much less), and suppose there's a launch every month (since launches have in the past carried 600 satell…
Couple nits: - frequency estimate should be more aggressive, should be looking for an upper bound on all numbers to quantify max potential impact. I would crank that up to once a day or more.
- a hole allowing twice as much sounds like a comolete guess. Could it be 100x, 10,000x? or perhaps less than 10%? Other comments make the ozone layer sound more important. The hole punching effects on that layer are unknown (to me and the article does not mention it). In effect, this could be a light show, or it could be a routine perforation of each layer of the atmosphere (more data needed)
- that extra radiation is not spread out across the area of the earth. Instead how many people and animals are present under that hole. Everyone underneath the hole presumably would get the full blast. Thus, it is simple, those people get twice the radiation, whatever that factor is, it is not averaged across the whole planet because it is a local effect. Thus, the area sizes only matter for determining how many people and animals receive extra exposure.
- starlink donated their services to Ukraine. That one act of donation does not make it a public good. Starlink is a for profit service, not a public good (some services can be quite good, but that is different from "a public good")
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It may not seem like a big issue but it speaks to the attitude of billionaires. I am no longer free to vent personal amounts of coolant from a refrigerator but Elon Musk can punch all of the holes he wants with his expensive rockets.
There are thousands of people responsible for planning, certifying and monitoring the operations of these launches. Within SpaceX, but also the launch site owners, the FCA, journalists covering it all. There are comprehensive environmental impact assessments, with opportunities for comments from the public. One of the thousands of people involved in all of that is a billionaire. Furthermore it’s an issue that affects…
Journalists are not scientists.
Did you mean FAA rather than FCA?
The FAA did ask SpaceX to do a lot of additional ground level items: https://www.cnbc.com/2022/06/13/faa-spacex-starship-environm...
The reviewers at th ed FCA were unlikely to be in the thousands, the rest mentioned I would completely discount.
The "crime" is that one person is not stopping to ask whether we should. There is a lot of hubris is there. Regardless, nobody should get a free pass to wreck the earth (but this is kittens, putting tons of C02 in the air is generally free, so... yeah...)
Looks like the biggest "green" issue is the rockets burns tons of fuel. Thd FAA review was a green light. This phenomena of punching holes was hopefully considered by the FAA (but at this point, can only hope that everything was at least considered)
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I wonder what the total carbon footprint is of the Musk Empire. (Tesla + SpaceX + X + Boring Company + …)
And I wonder how many times over Tesla makes up for it.
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Zero?
Tesla's sales of approximately 4.5 million vehicles have each offset about 20 tons of CO2 over their lifetimes compared to a traditional gas vehicle [1]. This equates to preventing a total of 90 million tons of CO2 from entering our atmosphere. As we continue to transition to renewable energy, the environmental benefits of each Tesla vehicle are set to increase further. In contrast, a SpaceX launch generates around 3…
Though, everyone that bought a tesla, they would have bought a gas vehicle instead? I think that is potentially a very invalid assumption which negates that savings calculation. Yes, EVs can be cleaner than conventional cars, but it still adds an impact. Less bad does not necessarily mean all good.
The mentions of teslas charging network sounds very PR heavy. What if that network flops in 5 years and meanwhile the non-common standard means a global charging infrastructure is never properly developed?
Musk's hyperloop was supposed to be built in a few towns that lost money on the deals and pulled funds from other transit projects. Those transit projects never happened.
I don't think anyone can at all decide whether musk, tesla and his companies are yet a net good without the benefit of more time and 20/20 hindsight.
A technically correct, but insignificant headline which appears dangerous at first glance; yeah that seems par for the course of modern journalism.
Not being able to tell the difference between a news article and a blog post is par for the course of modern society.
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Space is alot bigger than you think or make out, the effects on astronomy are short lived while they get into position
I would take the astronomers opinion [1] on how "big" is space over a throwaway HN shill reassuring me that I am idiot worrying too much. [1] https://www.space.com/astronomers-urged-protect-dark-skies
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They should be banned anyway. The more we can do to make their operations impossible the better. Their mere existence makes a mockery of the idea of the stock market as a considered reflection of value of companies and explicitly makes it into a gambling den for dead-eyed people competing to have the fastest card counting systems under their suits. If a company is valuable now, it'll be valuable in 5 minutes.
Have you ever listened to an earnings call? It only takes a few words from CEO or CFO to reduce the value of the traded stock to nearly zero.
There's a benefit to liquidity to everyone, but I don't really see a liquidity benefit faster than a few _minutes_, much less faster than a few _ms_: end individual traders don't even get to trade that fast anyway, they're just artificially disadvantaged against the institutions.
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Good point. Deserves some numbers. California's area is about 500 thousand km^2, and the Earth's is about 500 million, which means the side facing the Sun is about 250 million, so we're talking about 0.2% of the area facing the sun. Suppose the hole takes six hours to heal (the article makes it sound like it takes much less), and suppose there's a launch every month (since launches have in the past carried 600 satell…
I applaud the attempt to quantify. Couple nits: - frequency estimate should be more aggressive, should be looking for an upper bound on all numbers to quantify max potential impact. I would crank that up to once a day or more. - a hole allowing twice as much sounds like a comolete guess. Could it be 100x, 10,000x? or perhaps less than 10%? Other comments make the ozone layer sound more important. The hole punching ef…
I think the right way to approach this is to consider the unshielded radiation flux over the hole and the time that the hole takes to close. This would give a good back of envelope upper bound of the increase in cancer risk. There’s probably other effects, but all I care about is harm to individuals.
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It just so happens that those who advocate and benefit directly from it are the ones who already have the power to make markets. The product of a company is based on its labor utilization, which doesn't change materially in the (very) short timespans of HFT. Liquidity aside, five minutes isn't going to make much of a difference when most people generally wait weeks or months to make major asset purchases like a car o…
Labor utilization is only one piece of a very big puzzle. Other pieces that change more quickly include commodity and supply chain costs, competitor activities, technological advances, and many other factors, all of which can change quite quickly in our globalized world.