301–310 of 326 posts
Is this considered OTA given space is a vacuum? Also, I've had some scary deployments in my time but this would take the biscuit!
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> still only a dot with a good ground-based telescope. That gives a pretty good feel for how far away it is!
What? No it doesn’t, you need to know how big it is for that, and most people don’t have a sense of scale that encompasses either the full size of Earth (how far have you tried hiking, even over multiple days? If it was the Pacific Crest Trail congrats but you’re unusual) nor the size range of planets. Most stars (and galaxies) can be described with the same words I just used for Pluto, but stars and galaxies are tho…
- Pluto's the size of the moon, more or less. (Or even assuming it's ~Earth-sized), but... - ... can barely be seen from Earth, even with fancy equipment, and - ...The probe is 4x farther away than that.
Gives good "distant" vibes in a way that large numbers don't.
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>Half a century of operation. The stability of society (specifically American, specifically California/Caltech/JPL/Pasadena) must also be marveled at. That's 2 or 3 generations of engineers and scientists that were trained well enough to actually get things done. This is a marvel of teaching, technical communication, and societal infrastructure. Notably, NASA/JPL has maintained its prestige and funding for that entir…
The thought occurred to me some years ago that a key aspect of governmental institutions is their durability , particularly in the face of adversarial politics. Though the inefficiency of government services is quite often grossly exaggerated, there's much consideration which has to be made of the trade-offs between efficiency and durability. This should be front-of-mind whenever someone proposes a start-up to addres…
Governmental institutions are durable even when they are detrimental to society, as long as the government has enough police and military might to prevent insurrections. The society must put up with grossly inefficient institutions simply because the government has a monopoly on some sectors.
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Is this about the US specifically? There are many countries with universal healthcare and a decent social safety net (Scandinavia comes to mind). Why haven’t we seen this explosion coming out of them?
Nowhere in the world has UBI. The Scandinavian social safety net is excellent and I think the positive effects of that are apparent. People can take larger risks than they can in the US, but still nowhere near as large as they could with UBI
Does anywhere have something close that we could see partial "explosion"?
Or is the completely novel?
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Damn, that's cool. Do you have a link to the whole document?
To the memorandum? No! That would be fun to track down.
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To the memorandum? No! That would be fun to track down.
Looks like this, although a quick search doesn’t find it: 43. J. Wooddell, "Design of a CMOS Processor," pp. 2-3, files of J. Wooddell. 44)J. Morecroft to K. Frewing, "FDS Programming," January 14, 1975, files of R.J. Rice, Jet Propulsion Lab.
Part I : Manned Spacecraft Computers [1]
Part II: Computers On Board Unmanned Spacecraft [2]
Part III: Ground Based Computers for Space Flight Operations [3]
[0] https://history.nasa.gov/computers/contents.html
[1] https://history.nasa.gov/computers/Part1.html
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On some other YouTube channel, I recently saw a diagram where the width was 0.01 light-year. That’s “only” about 59 billion miles; surely we can’t be too far from the moment we can conceive of Voyager 1’s distance in light-years. Nope. At its current speed, we’ve got another 129 years. That’s an underestimate because the spacecraft will continue to decelerate a bit as it pulls farther away from the sun. That’s about…
>That’s about 60,000 years to the nearest star. Assuming it doesn't hit a rock or eventually fall into something. How long could it physically last with cosmic rays etc hitting it? will it eventually just an unrecognizable metal lump?
Likely a long, long time.
Neanderthal cave paintings have lasted upwards of 60,000 years.
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>Half a century of operation. The stability of society (specifically American, specifically California/Caltech/JPL/Pasadena) must also be marveled at. That's 2 or 3 generations of engineers and scientists that were trained well enough to actually get things done. This is a marvel of teaching, technical communication, and societal infrastructure. Notably, NASA/JPL has maintained its prestige and funding for that entir…
This is a really good point, especially for a country that is so young and that has grown so fast. Maybe the instability resulting from that growth is yet to come but it doesn't detract from what NASA and JPL have accomplished so far.
USA gained independence 247 years ago. That puts it in a minority of countries that have been sovereign as long or longer.