More Everything Forever • Hacker News Board

Re: More Everything Forever

#111

Post by ryandrake » Wed, Apr 23, 2025, 10:31 PM UTC

margalabargala wrote: post #87

aeturnum wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really think you are under estimating things here. The trip to mars is ~145x longer (at minimum!) than the trip to the moon. Let's say it only takes us twice the time to develop a rocket & ship that can do that (and come back ofc) - so that's 20 years (for 145x the distance). Then you gotta develop structures and building techniques, some of which you can look at with robots, but some of which will need human feedb…

The goal was "get a few humans on Mars". Not the insane goal of "a million in 20 years". Firstly, there's no reason the trip can't be one-way, or at least, temporarily one-way. Secondly, there's not a huge need to develop a new rocket. We've delivered lots of one-way cargo to Mars using the Atlas V; something like the SLS could deliver much more, plenty for a couple humans to get there and not die. We've already laun…

Consider what it takes just to keep McMurdo Station (staffed by only 200-1000 people) running on Antarctica, and that's on our own planet. I don't know what the cost is, but according to [1] the budget for the US's Antarctic program overall was $356M in 2008. And it depends on reliable logistics to get people and things to and from it.

From there, step up to the ISS, which costs about $4B/year to maintain and operate, an order of magnitude more.

It's likely another order of magnitude (tens of billions/year) and probably more like two (hundreds of billions/year) to do the same thing on Mars.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Antarctic_Progra...

Re: More Everything Forever

#112

Post by Smaug123 » Wed, Apr 23, 2025, 10:32 PM UTC

codr7 wrote: post #100

bryanlarsen wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a "controversy filter" that downrates articles with more comments than points.

Explains a lot, there's no such thing as substance without controversy.

Basically false, I think? From the first couple of pages of the top-of-all-time HN posts:

* War stories (e.g. "How I cut GTA Online loading times by 70%" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26296339 )

* Anything by ciechanow.ski (e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42443229 )

* Strange bits of personal whimsy (e.g. "I sell onions on the Internet" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19728132 )

* Neat toys (e.g. 2048, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7373566 )

Re: More Everything Forever

#113

Post by paulpauper » Wed, Apr 23, 2025, 10:43 PM UTC

aeturnum wrote: post #47

I am surprised this obviously correct take is so controversial! The problem, essentially, is that the "more everything forever" crowd wants to get paid for the idea of the future today and then will never actually deliver what they promise. They are selling snake oil for the new millennium. Yes, of course I support space travel and settling on mars. I expect that, if we doubled or tripled NASA's budget, we could get…

There is no pleasing the NYTs or other tech critics like Wired, Axios, or Arts Technica. Either tech is too profit-focused, too focused on mundane or minutia, violates user privacy, or its proposals are too far-fetched or unworkable. What would be the perfect tech or the perfect tech company? One that makes minimal profits , works on products that are not too outlandish, does not make big promises yet is able to secure large investments with modest proposals.

Re: More Everything Forever

#114

Post by cousin_it » Wed, Apr 23, 2025, 10:45 PM UTC

aethrum wrote: post #107

If you like optimistic Sci-Fi, I would recommend the Culture Series. It really changed me when I read it in university.

The Culture is a world of AIs that are far better than humans at every task, and keep humans as basically pets out of sentimentality. I agree a lot of "nice" futures with AI will look like that, but the problem is that there are much more "nasty" futures than "nice". I don't see a path from AIs built for profit and national defense to a Culture-like future or any "nice" future at all. Or rather, there could be such a path but it would require AIs to be built for public interest already now.

Re: More Everything Forever

#115

Post by alganet » Wed, Apr 23, 2025, 10:46 PM UTC

dmonitor wrote: post #106

alganet wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is known that the specifics of the story were modified. The current text is kind of frozen by its own similarities to itself. The use of extracted quotes is probably a mistake. You have to find the same event in a lot of other books beyond Matthew to be able to find a tiny whiff of historical information, very faint, very difficult to do with translated versions.

Luke 17:20-37 also seems to support the idea that Jesus was trying to tell people the kingdom was spiritual, not physical. The kingdom as a concept wasn't some novel idea, either. Jesus was claiming he was the fulfillment of the messianic prophecy in Judaism. He was reinterpreting the prophecy, though, as a spiritual rather than literal liberation. Tangential, but you can interpret the anti-christ in christian belief…

All of these declared disputes in meaning, names and events is precisely what I am referring to.

One could argue that Jesus is the book itself anthropomorphized, edited so many times by so many sinners (crossed), that whatever salvation was contained within (a prophecy, a guide, a story) is not there anymore. It only serves to spare those who changed and betrayed it (to support churches and beliefs not originally present in it).

Thus, the book died. It is said that once it briefly was brought back to life. It is a reference from the New Testament to itself. Then it died again (once a living, thriving narrative of human history constantly being augmented, now unable to be that again, eternally locked in disputes and conflicted interpretations, thus, dead).

Re: More Everything Forever

#116

Post by ryandrake » Wed, Apr 23, 2025, 10:49 PM UTC

alabastervlog wrote: post #108

feoren wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Colonizing Mars is such a dumb idea. A back-of-the-napkin calculation puts humanity's total military expenditure at about $100 trillion (USD adjusted to 2022 $) since 1949. That's not accounting for lives lost, infrastructure destroyed, and all the other negatives that come from war. Humanity is spending unfathomable fortunes just to be able to kill each other. And you're saying colonizing Mars is a dumb idea? Huma…

Mars is extremely terrible. I don't understand why we'd want to colonize it, versus any number of other things we could do with that immense effort. Visit it, sure, I guess, maybe, but colonize? LOL why?

There are places on Earth that are probably 3-5 orders of magnitude less terrible than Mars, and we don't even have a reason to colonize those areas. Let alone a cold, barren, lifeless, radiation-covered, nearly atmosphere-less rock.

Re: More Everything Forever

#117

Post by grogers » Wed, Apr 23, 2025, 10:59 PM UTC

janalsncm wrote: post #85

I will say that our discourse is weighted pretty heavily towards people who don’t deserve it. Most genuine experts are careful to only talk about things they know, not bloviate about everything under the sun. I am sure Marc Andreesen is a very intelligent person but he built and sold a web browser. He isn’t an expert on every tech topic. Same with Peter Thiel and the rest of the PayPal mafia. PayPal isn’t revolutiona…

VCs won't be expert level in every area, but they are in a unique position to have a deep knowledge about a lot of different things. It's necessary to be able to invest effectively.

Re: More Everything Forever

#118

Post by lesuorac » Wed, Apr 23, 2025, 11:03 PM UTC

f1yght wrote: post #32

bko wrote: post #20

This book seems insufferable, at least based on the review. Half of the review is trying to poke holes in why people won't live on mars and the other half is about how people trying to pursue goals such as this are self-serving and corrupt. I'm sure a market exists for this kind of book, but to me it's just exhausting. What's the harm in trying to go to mars if it results in decreasing the cost of space flight by 99%…

I think the final paragraph of the article sums up the issue pretty well. The tech world spends a lot of thought and energy on trying to escape our current existence instead of trying to make it better. There's very real crises that are solvable like climate change and food security. But instead of working hard to fix those, tech billionaires are focusing on space travel, AI, etc. Things that are important and could…

Nobody wants to be told that they have to install solar panels to save climate change.

Picking a problem like space flight avoids all the "nimbyism" from say actual nimbys but also from say Exxon.

There's an interesting fight every 4 years in Texas where billionaires who want to own a casino in Texas flood money into the state to get it approved and billionaires outside of the state who don't want to share the market flood money to counteract it. If you pick something that doesn't have a billionaire that will oppose you then your live is much easier.

Re: More Everything Forever

#119

Post by foobiekr » Wed, Apr 23, 2025, 11:07 PM UTC

grogers wrote: post #117

janalsncm wrote: post #85

I will say that our discourse is weighted pretty heavily towards people who don’t deserve it. Most genuine experts are careful to only talk about things they know, not bloviate about everything under the sun. I am sure Marc Andreesen is a very intelligent person but he built and sold a web browser. He isn’t an expert on every tech topic. Same with Peter Thiel and the rest of the PayPal mafia. PayPal isn’t revolutiona…

VCs won't be expert level in every area, but they are in a unique position to have a deep knowledge about a lot of different things. It's necessary to be able to invest effectively.

They really aren’t. And I know a lot of them personally.

Re: More Everything Forever

#120

Post by __MatrixMan__ » Wed, Apr 23, 2025, 11:10 PM UTC

chadcmulligan wrote: post #110

janalsncm wrote: post #85

I will say that our discourse is weighted pretty heavily towards people who don’t deserve it. Most genuine experts are careful to only talk about things they know, not bloviate about everything under the sun. I am sure Marc Andreesen is a very intelligent person but he built and sold a web browser. He isn’t an expert on every tech topic. Same with Peter Thiel and the rest of the PayPal mafia. PayPal isn’t revolutiona…

Its not just tech bros though, anyone who's made lots of money from business is treated like they're the smartest person in the room by many people. The person who made millions from making a sugary drink and marketed it as something healthy is not necessarily pretty smart and more than likely isn't someone you want in charge of anything.

"not necessarily pretty smart" is a very nice way of putting it.

I don't know where the threshold ought to be, but beyond a certain size a pile of money can only indicate bad things about its owner. Either they're too unimaginative to turn that potential into action, or their designs are so against the will of the people that it's going to take gargantuan amounts of coercion to get them done. Either way, a billionaire is an individual of dubious merit.