291–300 of 321 posts
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Nope. Because of aero braking, Mars takes less delta v to get to and land on than the moon does.
Now I'm wondering why the Apollo program went to the moon if doing Mars is so much cheaper.
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Wikipedia supports the claim that she was an intern for Ted Kennnedy, but none of the rest. Interestingly she has an asteroid named after her. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexandria_Ocasio-Cortez
I'm not an AOC fan, but I was an intern on Capitol Hill, and I'm sure as hell not from an upper crust background. I'm not holding that against her.
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> the reason for this isn't that it is insurmountable, merely that far better land is close by. times a few orders of magnitude and this is the main reason to doubt a settled Mars colony. Possibly a research outpost, but why would that be staffed by humans rather than robots?
There is no 'few orders of magnitude', because it's conquered, you're not allowed to settle there, and it's not a new frontier. Yet Mars is a new frontier, and endless, massive numbers of humans would go to Mars in a heartbeat. Frankly, settlers travelling to the new world in the 1400s faced a far more dangerous journey and living conditions than a trip to Mars. We're talking first explorers here, so many died on boa…
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Agree there are obviously still issues, but you've just made the case yourself. We are discussing Flight 9 for Starship ~5 years into development. 10 years into the development of SLS we won't even see launch 2. They just operate in different universes no matter how much you dislike the CEO.
You are misunderstanding me. I am on two embryonic programs that are not viable without starship or an equivalent. If starship exists I will be able to cash out, buy a 54-foot catamaran and spend the rest of my life sailing around the world scuba diving and spear fishing. I want starship to exist and do not care who builds it. It does not exist and I know this because I am currently on the third floor of a boring coo…
Highly doubt this is true. Everyone's rich on their wild little minds.
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I mean a lot of other books, not just slightly different accounts.
> I mean a lot of other books Such as?
Predicting a destructive event (flood), gathering survivors to a safe place (ark), a sacrifice (bird that does not come back) followed by a success (bird comes back revealing land is close).
It is predictive of the Bible itself. It's original version lost, only surviving pieces gathered, first testament interpretation sacrificed, new testament proven to be a fertile narrative. (sounds like a preface, doesn't it?)
It's a book of the story of the book itself. Quite a thing. Is there something about the book that is not the book itself? Well, there are coincidences such as the ones I mentioned throughout the text. A kind of ghost conceptual presence, untangible but present in the similarities between the books.
There you go. Three pieces book. Two testaments and a ghost.
But is there something else beyond it? Probably not. That's what the book says, it's not there anymore. It says right away, as someone took it right in the beginning.
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%…
Because a lot of these stuffs like longevity and advanced AI are going to break the human society? I'd rather NOT have that kind of technical advancement before we figure out how to make the human society a bit more equal. With the whole world turning to the right, we are further, not closer, from that objective. I guess not everyone believes in that, but hey I'm just talking about myself.
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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…
Is there any optimistic sci-fi that doesn't have something like superpowerful perfect AI? It feels like such a thing is a bit of a cop-out as it removes all the problems that arise from human imperfections and yet our own history is that of an improving standard of living despite these imperfections.
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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 operat…
Which makes it just a matter of priorities. If the USA spent 10% of its defence budget for a year on it, we'd be done. Would humanity benefit more from a Mars base than it does from 10% of the USA's defence budget? Almost certainly. Though, to be fair, there are a lot of other things we could spend 10% of the USA defence budget on that would benefit humanity a lot more in the short term.
> They would require regular shipments of food and water from Earth That's one of the core challenges techno-optimists like Musk constantly handwave and ignore when grandstanding about humanity becoming a "multi-planetary species". Yes, we can settle Mars. We could probably even do so with the technology we have today, certainly if we invest resources into further research and development with that specific goal in m…