Earlier quoted context omitted.
I wouldn't support Musk if he was a fascist nazi. My personal views are libertarian.
How would you define the terms "fascist nazi" and "libertarian"?
I'm fine with the google definitions.
Where did all the starships go?
241–250 of 369 posts
Re: Where did all the starships go?
#242Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Musk has built orbital rockets. Musk has built lots of cheap orbital rockets. That changes everything. > That's disingenuous and you know it. Why make such claims? See the other responses in this thread.
It changes the price and speed of satellite internet. Apart from that...?
There were cars before the Model T, but only for the rich. Ford made cars affordable for everyman. That changed everything.
There were books before Gutenberg, but only for the rich. His printing press made them cheap enough to print newspapers. That changed everything.
Before Bessemer, making steel was extremely expensive and rarely one. With the Bessemer Process, vast quantities of steel could be cheaply made. That changed everything. Google says:
"The process revolutionized the industry by reducing costs and increasing production, making steel accessible for major infrastructure projects in the 19th and early 20th centuries."
Re: Where did all the starships go?
#243Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Musk has built orbital rockets. Musk has built lots of cheap orbital rockets. That changes everything. > That's disingenuous and you know it. Why make such claims? See the other responses in this thread.
> lots of cheap orbital rockets It's valuable for sure. It's nothing like, "The one person who is advancing our space faring abilities by leaps and bounds". There are many others, and many are doing more (again, NASA, etc.). JPL's homepage says "Our missions have flown to every planet and the Sun ...", and that they've been on Mars for four years, so let's be serious and not throw wild absurd claims at the wall (very…
> There are many others
Now that Musk led the way, sure. People laughed at Musk when he started out.
> NASA
Has sent a handful of probes out, only a handful because they are so costly. Now NASA can send out legions of them. There was a previous discussion here about why only one JWST was made and launched, at a cost of $10B. We all hope and pray it doesn't break down. Now with Musk's rockets we can launch lots of them and make N times the discoveries!
(With cheap launches, we don't have to make single machines that must be super reliable. We can make cheap machines at fractions of the cost, and so what if a few of them fail.)
Lowering costs by an order of magnitude changes everything.
Re: Where did all the starships go?
#244Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't know, to the East of the Iron Curtain science fiction wasn't mostly about future optimism (at least after the initial "we're building a better society" optimism had been brutally murdered during the 1950s and 60s), but often a critical mirror of then-current society transported into the future to escape state censorship. Maybe it's as simple as free societies not having the evolutionary pressure to produce gr…
There are some brilliant SF writers from the eastern bloc. They had to write to get around censorship and the official line. Stanislaw Lem is great.
Why was George Clooney persuaded to make such a bad adaptation of Solaris?
Re: Where did all the starships go?
#245It's far more practical to adapt life to space and other planets, than it is to adapt space and other planets to human life. The problem with writing a story about artificial life exploring the universe is that it's unrelatable without humans in it. I think humans are stuck on earth permanently because there are no other environments in the solar system we can live in as easily as earth. Traditional sci-fi explained…
Our trajectory is to meld ourselves with machines. Fleshy humans may he stuck on earth but our machines have no such restrictions and can be engineered for all kinds of extremes. We will eventually figure out how to imprint our consciousness into a chip. Maybe not for another thousand years but weve been building machines our entire existence to conquer nature. We will figure it out.
It won't be a chip, as higher densities are required.
Then the heat must be removed.
Then, stacking has to happen.
Do we reach a synthetic neuron?
Re: Where did all the starships go?
#246My theory about this aligns with my theory about the disappearance of ‘futurists’ from the popular conversation - we’re living in science fiction. The future is arriving every day. It no longer feels necessary to speculate about a changed world - you need only look out the door. I say this as someone that still loves (and writes a little) speculative fiction. Just a guess as to what’s happening.
The original "futurists" were Italian, eventually under Mussolini.
That is a loaded term.
Re: Where did all the starships go?
#247Earlier quoted context omitted.
Really though? Seems to me that the only sub-genre of space science fiction that is surviving relative to others is hard space science fiction. There's an abundance of high quality titles to choose from even (compared to the previous millennium). Edit: Highlights include Leviathan Wakes/The Expanse, The Three-Body Problem, Children of Time, Pushing Ice (and other titles by Alastair Reynolds), Interstellar (debatable,…
The Three Body Problem is not even close to hard science fiction.
Three Body Problem in the book set the alien world in Alpha Centari, which is not a three body system.
Even a cursory analysis at the time of writing would have ruled out Alpha Centari.
It was shockingly bad research.
Re: Where did all the starships go?
#248Earlier quoted context omitted.
Also, we've realized the scientific reality that traveling faster than light is likely impossible, and the vast distances to other habitable planets would mean tens of thousands of years of travel even with the most efficient technology. Interstellar space is also hostile to life, and any life present at the destination will not use the same DNA coding for protein (if gene expression even works that way). We also do…
With D-D fusion it might be possible to "live off the land" between the stars which probably have numerous interstellar objects of various sizes between them with a much larger cumulative mass than planets orbiting stars -- and it may be possible to completely disassemble those kind of bodies which are much richer overall in carbon, hydrogen, oxygen and nitrogen than terrestrial planets. A species with that kind of c…
A true spaceborne civilization, assuming anti-gravity isn't in there bag of tricks, probably wouldn't bother with the gravity well planets.
Re: Where did all the starships go?
#249Earlier quoted context omitted.
We could send ten thousand workshop machines, a thousand huge forges and presses and reactors, and enough people to run them and all the farms and chemical vats they use those machines to build. Is that not enough manufacturing capability?
And that takes, what, a million of those "Starships?" To be plausible you have to be able to get it a lot smaller than that. If you can fit it into someone's hand the rocketry gets to be trivial.
I was thinking less than 2000. One each for the huge machines, a few hundred for the smaller machines, a hundred to few hundred full of people.
And you could cut those numbers 10x and still have a huge variety of manufacturing capabilities.
I don't see why we would need a near-magic factory box just to build a colony.
Re: Where did all the starships go?
#250The starships left with the optimism. In the 50s there was a greater demand for stories with an unconstrained vision of the future where growth and expansion amount to flourishing. Later generations that lived in the excesses of growth saw it as the source of an intensifying dystopia. They stood athwart history and demanded decelleration. Star Trek lost ground to Terminator, Foundation to Neuromancer. Escaping sidewa…
Fantasy is not a downgrade from sci-fi; the genre serves an altogether different purpose which is equally valuable, if not moreso - the development of spiritual faculties of perception. It is the neglect of those faculties which leads to societal decay -- the current nadir we are in is STILL the fallout of the "death of God" (as Nietzsche put it) -- man's recognition that the Sky Daddy myth is no longer enough to explain the world led to a vacuum of a cohesion between metaphysics and morality. In its absence, materialism - hedonism in the realm of the senses - is all that that there is to derive hope or reason for living from.
Without fantasy -- Lord of the Rings being the chief example -- the "post-God" world has no means of developing said faculties outside of fantasy (the genre), and art - which, as a whole, is a form of fantasy.