171–180 of 273 posts
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I watched Free Solo not long ago, yesterday I watched Falcon 9 launch then land flawlessly and today I watched Dragon 2 dock with the ISS. It's mind boggling how apt humans are to what should be impossible.
Oooh, I'm eagerly awaiting that film to screen in Berlin later this month! I loved Alex's TED talk. Just that little taste had my palms very, very sweaty.
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> In the past we even had space ships, which could start from ground, go to space, do stuff, come back and the could be reused The 're-used' aspect of the Shuttle involved massive re-fits which took months for each vehicle. It was like having to send your car back to the manufacturer for a total rebuild (often including engine change) every time you went for a drive. SpaceX is a massive improvement in this respect.
And two expended boosters and an expended fuel tank.
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There used to be a time when a single person mastered X% of humanity's technology anf knowledge. Packing up 100 people on some boats meant you could start a viable colony across some seas. Can you still do that today?
Now we can keep X% of the knowledge of humanity on a portable device. That should help.
Congratulation to SpaceX. That being said, we should take a step back and stop drinking the Elon Musk Koolaid. This has been done flawlessly by Russian Soyouz hundreds of times over the last decades (with almost no failures). This has also been done with the Shuttle.
22 failures / 786 launches
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For anyone that hasn't seen the ground abort test: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1_FXVjf46T8 It's pretty rocking.
I wonder if this one is still valid (for the human certification) as it was done with a very different capsule. Wasn't there a new one since?
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Starship is supposed to carry a couple hundred passengers. That would be a few hundred ships all launching at once; while I share the enthusiasm I’m not sure that’s realistic due to the [lack of] economic incentives involved.
> That would be a few hundred ships all launching at once Yes, that's the plan as described by Elon! Maybe not "all at once" but over the course of some days/weeks, yes. > I’m not sure that’s realistic due to the [lack of] economic incentives involved Every Mars thread someone pops in to say this, but it simply isn't true. There are major economic incentives to go to Mars, and selling tickets is #1 of hundreds. There…
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Trade is required when the materials of subsistence cannot all be produced locally. A successful mars colony would need to have a plan to reach self-sufficiency through Martian plus asteroid resources.
> A successful mars colony would need to have a plan to reach self-sufficiency through Martian plus asteroid resources. Not at all. While there will be an economic and logistical incentive to reduce the dependence on imports from earth, it is not reasonable to expect the colony to fully duplicate the manufacturing capabilities of earth. There will be drugs, electronic components and human experts that will imported f…
Aren't there former colonies of western empires that now produce their own drugs, electronic components, and human experts? Granted, it's a bit more difficult because it requires first building the life support infrastructure or the world, whereas colonies on Earth have their life support for free. However, Mars has geologic processes that produce minerals, and people have already mapped out the chemical processes that could be conducted with in-situ resources, all the way up to production of feedstocks for making plastics like ethylene. (Also done for Venus.)
I believe a Martian colony would be successful when they achieve economic viability (import value lower than export value). This would happen well before they would reach actual self sufficiency.
There are political reasons for self sufficiency, which can warp the market a bit.
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Now we can keep X% of the knowledge of humanity on a portable device. That should help.
What percentage of humanity's knowledge is available to be put on a portable device? A lot is behind paywalls or other copyright encumbrance.
Fantastic, very impressive. But somewhere inside (my little star-wars/trek spirit), I wish that it was not so tricky. That we all could just travel and explore the universe. Everybody always talk about how difficult it is in space and how much better earth is. Wish the debate would be more about all the possibilities in space or on other planets. What can we do with zero gravity? For all the bad things with living on…
I honestly don’t see any benefits to living on Mars until every inch of space on Earth is used up. Everything about living on Mars is hostile to life. Doing anything there like mining and manufacturing will be orders of magnitude more difficult and for what? To say we are somewhere else that looks like the Atacama but infinitely more difficult to get to? It seems silly to be trying to rush to a place that wants to ki…
Wasn't there a fair bit of difficulty involved in building fleets of sailing ships and exploring the Earth? As it so happens, the reward for doing so was to become dominant in the new global geopolitical context. There's an incentive to keep up in the new expansion of context to keep from being left behind and engulfed in a larger context. The potential total population of the solar system, even based on just on foreseeable technologies, asteroid resources, and solar power could easily be in the hundreds of billions. Fusion power increases that potential by orders of magnitude.
It seems silly to be trying to rush to a place that wants to kill you when we have a great place here already that we could just stop messing up.
These aren't mutually exclusive things. And make no mistake: Many things involving ocean travel prior to the industrial revolution literally involved rushing to places that want to kill you, via another place that wants to kill you. Isn't rushing to a place that wants to kill you another kind of "doing things that don't scale (at first)?" If it means eventual geopolitical dominance in a future larger context, there will be wealthy nations willing to foot the bill.