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It’s an age of marvels

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Re: It’s an age of marvels

#331

Post by oconnor663 »

paulryanrogers wrote: post #168
somenameforme wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Re: Moon landing - It had very little to do with people losing interest. In 1972 Nixon defacto completely cancelled the human space program, which he had been rapidly stripping away since Apollo 13. He was paranoid that a catastrophic failure was imminent and would negatively affect his 1972 election campaign. Interestingly when he signed off on the final stripping down in 1972, he remarked that we may never set foot…

> It's only in very modern times that private companies can take to the stars, completely independent of governments... Are there any private companies putting humans in space without huge government grants, launch facilities, or ex-gov talent?

This is all deeply hypothetical (and I'm super biased), but I think it's important to distinguish two different questions:

- Is it possible for a private company to make it to space without government money?

- Is it possible to do that while competing with other companies that do get the money?

Observing that "company ___ would not have succeeded without government money" is answering the second question but maybe not the first.

Re: It’s an age of marvels

#332

Post by somenameforme »

paulryanrogers wrote: post #234
dotnet00 wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The 'huge government grants' thing is doing a lot of (excuse the pun) heavy lifting, as are launch facilities and ex-gov talent. The government is a customer on Crew Dragon, it's a government 'grant' if you consider it a grant when the government pays money to a company for stationary specifically designed for the government (say, with the respective agency's logo on it). Similarly, the launch facilities are being le…

I'd still say that's not "completely independent". One might even say it's just outsourcing NASA's once many teams to different companies. Also I doubt these companies would be as numerous or as big without the promise of fat government contracts looming on the horizon.

In 2023 SpaceX launched commercial (in other words excluding experimental/starship stuff) 96 times including 7 times for NASA. NASA played a critical role in SpaceX's early founding, where their first contract with NASA is effectively what enabled the company to exist. But I would also emphasize that such wasn't just serendipity. SpaceX's entire initial concept was built around said NASA contract, because it existed. If it didn't then they obviously would have been pitching to e.g. telecoms companies or whatever. But since then they've increasingly just become another customer, though certainly a VIP customer!

As for talent, launching stuff is not really NASA's competency in modern times. After the Space Shuttle was retired in 2011 until SpaceX entered the picture in 2020, the one and only way we got to the ISS was by relying on Russia. The SLS [2] was NASA's effort at creating a new launch vessel and it's just been a complete failure that was already been obsoleted by the Falcon Heavy years ago. SLS's expected cost per flight is $2billion+. So you're looking at up to twice the theoretic payload for 20x+ the cost. If not for corruption/graft, that rocket would have long since been cancelled and would certainly never fly a single mission. And I'm completely ignoring Starship here!

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Falcon_9_and_Falcon_He...

[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Launch_System

Re: It’s an age of marvels

#333

Post by maxerickson »

prawn wrote: post #330
MisterBastahrd wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep. For example, one staple dish of Cajuns is called "rice and gravy." Essentially, you sear thinly cut 7-steaks, remove them, cook down some trinity, then add the steaks back with some water or broth and seasonings. That's it. The steaks simmer in the broth for hours and create their own gravy. We serve it over rice, usually accompanied by some roux peas (tres petit pois cooked in a roux with onions and bacon) and…

I have looked a few times in Walmarts and not found duck breast, which is something I eat in Australia once every 2-4 weeks. And also noticed particular cuts of beef that I'd expect are missing. I have been to the US 10+ times, usually 1-9 week roadtrips, and can't remember ever noticing an independent butcher (though sometimes there is an equivalent within a non-Walmart grocery store).

Duck just isn't commonly eaten in the US. You probably won't find it at butchers either.

Independent butchers aren't all that uncommon. Though, for example, my town has 3-4 grocers that sell meat without having a counter (but I expect you could talk to the butcher at a couple of them), a grocer that does have a counter, and then a couple of independent butchers.

Re: It’s an age of marvels

#334

Post by p9fus »

iamthirsty wrote: post #229
mtalantikite wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My problem with it is that not only are we paying the environmental cost to have berries all year round in the grocery store, it's that they're also just shit quality. Like not just passable, but are bitter and sour and not worth it at all. And it's sort of at the expense of really good, local berries when the real season hits. For example, I live in Brooklyn and the grocery stores last summer barely had any local bl…

> They look like berries Americans shop with our eyes, not our mouths.

To be charitable to people who shop with their eyes, the people who shop with their mouths usually get tossed out of the store :P

Re: It’s an age of marvels

#335

Post by vundercind »

ramblenode wrote: post #163
orthoxerox wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's still a difference between the stores having meat on their shelves and the stores having every kind of meat on their shelves. And every kind of vegetable, every kind of drink, every kind of cheese as well.

If you think the average American supermarket has every kind of meat, cheese, drink, and vegetable, you are in for a big surprise traveling the world. In many ways American markets have fallen behind relatively poorer countries in variety. Most of what is sold are monocultures and packaged foods. The selection of fresh produce (or any produce) is often disappointing.

I think we’re backsliding on choice, if anything.

It gets even worse if you look at packaged stuff. “Look, twelve brands of coffee!” but actually it’s three because some of them are owned by the others, or by the same parent company.

Re: It’s an age of marvels

#336

Post by somenameforme »

throwaway11460 wrote: post #149
at_compile_time wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>exporting our heavy carbon producing industries to the Moon Never study rocketry, it wil ruin your whimsical innocence.

It's very fortunate that rockets are not the only way to get stuff into space, and more importantly, that we don't need to literally bring a whole factory and the input materials up on a rocket but instead use resources available in space. Even if we actually had to bring everything from Earth, Starship is cheap and powerful enough to build an orbital ring which would make orbital lift nearly too cheap to meter.

Assuming you're hitting on carbon stuff. There are simple solutions even with rockets. For instance liquid H2 / liquid O2 rocket engines are a thing - this is what the Space Shuttle Main Engine used. [1] Reacting hydrogen with oxygen is, counter-intuitively, an extremely effective propellant! And the exhaust is literally water vapor.

Some reason SpaceX decided on methane based propulsion are because it's more safe/stable than liquid hydrogen, because Mars is the goal, and the Sabatier reaction! [2] You can create methane + water from reacting CO2 + hydrogen. And Mars has practically infinite CO2 + hydrogen, which translates to practically infinite fuel + water. Add in fully reusable rockets and you have one heck of a nice starting framework for colonization, that in some ways almost feels too convenient.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RS-25

[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sabatier_reaction

Re: It’s an age of marvels

#337

Post by prawn »

bmitc wrote: post #320
ertgbnm wrote: post #23

More than anything else, I think the modern American super market would blow the minds of anyone born before 1900 more than any other marvel that exists. You have blueberries for sale in January??? A variety box of tea from 7 different countries? A wall of spices? Pineapples? Packaging made from aluminum that is just thrown away? The bread isn't full of sand and grit? And it's sliced!!! All relatively affordable and…

I think supermarkets hide a bit of a scary thought though. It sends this signal as food always being available, but it sits atop a very tightly "balanced" supply chain that is quite fragile. A few major supply chain disruptions and food scarcity becomes real very fast (a few days at most).

Also exposed when thinking about hardware stores. If you need to build/repair part of your house and the supply chain for wood or steel is gone, are you going to wait for tall, straight trees to grow? And then if you don't have milling hardware? Know how to create and extrude steel roofing or angle iron or similar?

Re: It’s an age of marvels

#338

Post by andbberger »

nicklecompte wrote: post #227

Minor nitpick: > A past what-the-fuck was that we know exactly how many cells there are (959) in a particular little worm, C. elegans, and how each of those cells arises from the division of previous cells, as the grows from a fertilized egg, and we know what each cell does and how they are connected, and we know that 302 of those cells are nerve cells, and how the nerve cells are connected together. (There are 6,720…

no one but sebastian seung and his gang of hacks actually thinks this. the connectome is but a very useful, _very_ expensive tool.

and, actually as of writing, we have a connectome for the _adult_ drosophila brain (more than one actually). two orders of magnitude larger, 200,000 neurons.

neuroscience discussions on orange website are always a sight to behold but, uh, even more so than the connectome (we spent $50M peeling atomically thin layers off the most important fly to have ever lived and then hundreds of man years annotating it) the techniques of modern neuroscience would blow people away. we routinely image from the entire drosophila brain at several hertz, while it is running on a virtual reality treadmill using biological sensors genetically engineered to be expressed in a specific subset of neurons.

Re: It’s an age of marvels

#339

Post by adolph »

emmelaich wrote: post #324
paulmd wrote: post #315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

it's always odd when people latch onto that as an example, because the west has definitely had politically-induced holodomors caused by over-export of staple crops as well. classically, the irish potato famine comes to mind. you can probably objectively calculate the relative importance of pre-capitalism serfs and post-capitalism serfs by volume of political discourse and online discussion and citations - the peasant…

Such a patina of reasonableness to your comment but your comparison of the Irish famine to the Holomodor is way overwrought. Holomodor was deliberate and largely not caused by bad harvests. Irish had the potato blight; and in the beginning they were given a large amount of charity. WRT authoritarianism, govt have a monopoly on violence that individual companies will never have.

Not to disagree with you but to add context, the monopoly on violence has not always been as straightforward as one might imagine:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Blair_Mountain

The British East India company’s operations are another example.

Re: It’s an age of marvels

#340

Post by bmitc »

prawn wrote: post #337
bmitc wrote: post #320

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think supermarkets hide a bit of a scary thought though. It sends this signal as food always being available, but it sits atop a very tightly "balanced" supply chain that is quite fragile. A few major supply chain disruptions and food scarcity becomes real very fast (a few days at most).

Also exposed when thinking about hardware stores. If you need to build/repair part of your house and the supply chain for wood or steel is gone, are you going to wait for tall, straight trees to grow? And then if you don't have milling hardware? Know how to create and extrude steel roofing or angle iron or similar?

Yea, our supply chain fragility and dependence really scares me sometimes. I try not to think about it, to be honest.
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