221–230 of 238 posts
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Beat me to it. Indeed, from that video I learned that astronomy work requires large and/or longitudinal datasets. I loved the tidbit that Galileo had a spat with Tycho Brahe because Brahe wouldn't share his data, so Galileo stole it (?)
Johannes Kepler was in there somewhere I recall. It was Brahe's data on the motions of Mars that lead Kepler to the idea of elliptical orbits.
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"A society grows great when old men plant trees in whose shade they know they shall never sit" - Paraphrased from Elton Trueblood
Which defines why American society seems to be F'ed of late. Decades of short term rewards combined with a baby boomer population looking at their last hoorah and declining relevance. Most of the old people I interact seem to be in a state of denial about soon not being here.
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What is a "growth tree"?
Not "growth tree" but an "old growth" tree. It just means a tree that was left to mature, and never cut down.
The reason for the distinction is that most of the old growth forests have been clear-cut and the lumber available today is fast-growth farmed lumber. If you compare a 2x4 at Lowe's with a 2x4 out of a 150-year-old house, you'll see that the wood itself is very different even though the species might be the same. The tree the new 2x4 came from was fairly young, while the tree the 150-year-old 2x4 came from was probably centuries old.
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Elon Musk is working towards getting humanity to Mars in the low chance Earth becomes uninhabitable, and he'll never live to see the Mars dream become a reality even if everything goes as planned. But I guess that doesn't fit the common narratives about a man that isn't a cartoon but a flawed human with strengths and weaknesses. This is why we don't hear of great men anymore: We only hear about them when they're long…
He is not doing that.
When mankind makes serious progress to any of a) living at the poles in scale b) living underwater at scale c) living subterranean (underground) at scale, get back to me and we can talk about offworld habitation (Mars, Venus, or Luna). All of these are hard enough, and provide mitigation against various disasters, at some level. They're hard enough problems to solve as it is.
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Why? It's very easy to get people to plant trees for you. Just give a gardener, even a very old one, some money and they'll do it for you.
Because "caring for the future" is not a problem that's solved with money. Especially when short-term profit trumps it, and the people that should be caring wont be alive in that future and don't give a fuck. Thinking "we'll just pay someone to do it" is exactly the mindset that fucked up everything. (And, for starters, you need to care for X to pay someone to do X, to begin with).
What do you mean? We are living in a golden age of unprecedented prosperity.
> Because "caring for the future" is not a problem that's solved with money. Especially when short-term profit trumps it, and the people that should be caring wont be alive in that future and don't give a fuck.
Have a look at the history of shareprices for eg Amazon or Tesla. The stock market loved these companies long before they ever turned a profit. Investors can and do look into the future. (And even short termist who only want to quickly flip some shares will look into the future to try and predict what other people are going to be willing to pay for the shares soon.)
Another exhibit: during the pandemic stock prices recovered long before the world emerged from Covid. They recovered as soon as traders anticipated the broader recovery.
> (And, for starters, you need to care for X to pay someone to do X, to begin with).
Well, if someone in fifty years is willing to pay for the tree (even if she's not born yet), markets will do the rest to come up with a positive price for the tree today.
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He is not doing that.
Amen. Mankind is not going to Mars as an escape route. Elon uses this as a way of generating a vision/dream. When mankind makes serious progress to any of a) living at the poles in scale b) living underwater at scale c) living subterranean (underground) at scale, get back to me and we can talk about offworld habitation (Mars, Venus, or Luna). All of these are hard enough, and provide mitigation against various disast…
EDS is a thing, I guess. Sad to see on HN of all places.
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I question how well many of the words that come to mind could be defined using only other one syllable words, but it sounds like a fun project.
Most of them aren't defined as rigorously as a dictionary would do, it's more like trying to come up with a plausible description for each word. "day" might be "time in which the sun goes round the earth" even though that's not technically correct. "sit" could be "to take a chair" and "sat" might be "to have took a chair" "moth" is "a bug that flies and likes to eat cloth", and so on.
I'm reminded of the famous story of (I think) the central beam in a building at Oxford. The story goes something like: The central beam was beginning to fail and the Oxford administration knew they needed to replace it. When they went around for quotes, no one could replace the beam because it was 100 ft in length and sourced from an old growth tree. Such logs were simply unavailable to buy. To solve the issue, the s…
Scattered around my country you will see plantations of huge oak trees, all the same age. What gives? Well, in 1801 and 1807, my countrys navy suffered terrible defeats by the Brits as part of the Napoleonic wars. The fleet was eventually rebuilt, but that took cutting down many old oaks. Fearing that oaks are a rare resource that must be replenished, the king ordered the plantning of new ones, so that future generations could still build powerful battleships. Those oaks matured in the 1960s.
The moral of the story is that you can't actually plan 150 years into the future.
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https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX_Mars_colonization_pro...
Parent didn't say he doesn't pay lip service to it, or doesn't make bullshit timelines and promises.
He is doing that. Whether you believe him, or whether he succeeds, or whether he's lying, is an entirely different conversation and something I can't _prove_. All I can prove is that there are public claims he is doing it, and he keeps saying it in interviews.
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That should have been hyphenated then. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old-growth_forest
It does not have to be. The English language has a process where phrases become hyphenated compounds which then become single words. It's permissible to be partway along that path, and for people to disagree where something is on that path. Pick any point in the past few centuries, and there's going to be something, possibly nowadays always a single word, but not necessarily so even now, that was in a state of flux a…
The poster was correct in asking what a “growth forest” is, because without the hyphen, the phrase parses as an adjective (old) modifying a compound noun.