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Starship V3

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Re: Starship V3

#611
post #564

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For reference: Starlink is Unless it manages to massively eat into mobile network market share (pretty unlikely in my view) growing past $100bn (yearly revenue) or so seems unrealistic to me. Even with cheaper launch costs, it is not clear to me that Starlink would ever be interested in offering service for like $80/year (=> price competitive with mobile carriers in low income nations).

> Unless it manages to massively eat into mobile network market share Several mobile carriers are already using them for backend of remote towers.

And to add to this: They still have packet loss when they switch the satelites every 1-4 minutes.

Re: Starship V3

#612

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He didn’t found Tesla, he bought it then called himself founder.

That's pointless nitpicking, when he bought it it was so early you can easily say he made everything of it.

I don't think so, I think it's an important point, and he thinks it's an important point because he tried to pretend he did found Tesla by claiming that title officially when he bought it, which I find duplicitous and underhand, something of a pattern with Elon Musk in his business dealings.

He did a great job building that company up, but is now ruining it with a series of really bad decisions and appears to operate more on hype than tangible progress nowadays.

Re: Starship V3

#613
post #432
post #315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Data centers in space make sense if it is military AI controlling drone swarms over Starlink during global conflict.

Why? These data centers will likely be further away from the Starlink satellites than Satrlink is from Earth. It would make much more sense to control you drone swarm from something on Earth's surface.

But there are cheap drone swarms on earth which could destroy it.

Re: Starship V3

#614

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Moon more likely than mars, but “permanent” is a big lift in that sentence. Humans gestate at 1g and only 1g. Try doing it elsewhere and you’ll have horrible problems.

there is literally zero evidence to support that assertion

Yes, we don't experiment on humans in space right now, so there is no evidence, sure. My (limited) understanding leads me to this conclusion for (I think) two _very good_ reasons:

1. The twisting and folding of the heart tube is highly dependent on gravity and micro-pressures of circulating blood in the embryo. I learned that from Dr. Larry Taber at Wash U in St. Louis. In microgravity, there's a very strong chance the heart forms incorrectly or if it does form correctly, it conditions itself for zero-g life, so it will have reduced pumping strength because it never needs to move blood from toe to head against gravity. So, even if you gestate a kid correctly in microgravity, the transition to an environment _with_ gravity could be extremely stressful on the body or possibly fatal.

2. Other phases of gestation _depend_ on gravity. The "baby dropping" around the beginning of third trimester is important to kick start the body to prepare for birth. The baby presses on the cervix to stimulate dilation during the process of birth, etc.

Re: Starship V3

#615

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is also zero evidence to oppose it. We know some things from experience about the long term (1 year or so) effects on human health of 0g (tl;dr: not good). We know very very little about the long-term effects of 0.166g on human health, because it's never been done. (best guess: also not good).

Mice blastocysts develop into embryos in orbital microgravity: https://www.space.com/international-space-station-mouse-embr... Skepticism is good, but ignoring related work weakens an argument.

This is a blastocyst, then back to earth experiment. No organ development?

Re: Starship V3

#616

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's pointless nitpicking, when he bought it it was so early you can easily say he made everything of it.

I don't think so, I think it's an important point, and he thinks it's an important point because he tried to pretend he did found Tesla by claiming that title officially when he bought it, which I find duplicitous and underhand, something of a pattern with Elon Musk in his business dealings. He did a great job building that company up, but is now ruining it with a series of really bad decisions and appears to operate…

I really don't see the difference between buying a garage startup without a single product and a few months after its creation (total paid: $6.5 million, peanuts that show that it was basically an empty box) and actually founding it yourself. In any case, absolutely everything Tesla has been in the past 20 years is due to Elon Musk and not to the supposed "founders".

Musk wants to be called founder and he's absolutely right, as he got in when there was still nothing. Not that I care, but if you want to criticise Musk there plenty of real stuff to do it. This one is at the level of "he inherited his money".

Re: Starship V3

#617
post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We don't even have permanent settlements on Antarctica. Don't hold your breath.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Research_stations_in_Antarctic... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esperanza_Base https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Villa_Las_Estrellas

Obviously there are research stations on Antarctica. And presumable your argument is that these are "permanent"? My point is that they are not, not in the sense that we will need for Mars. No one lives there full time, people aren't raising families there, they are very dependent on regular deliveries from the outside.

Supply runs to Mars will be in the range of 10000x as expensive, possibly even higher. Something that costs $100 to get to Antarctica will cost $1million to get to Mars. Permanent Mars settlement will entail a level of self-sufficiency that we haven't proven on a place that is comparitively balmy and has the benefit of a breathable atmosphere and abundant water (Antarctica). Not to mention radiation...

Don't hold your breath. I'm as much a fan of space colonization of as the next nerd, but it's premature.

Re: Starship V3

#618
post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why on earth (pun intended), would you want that? You don't want to be there? Almost every other place on earth is better. So you send a skeleton crew along with what they need. If it is to test an actual community living isolated, sure. But I think it'll always be different because you know that help is at most a few months away and probably a lot less. I don't think you can fake that, unless you're never told you'r…

Are you talking a Mars or Antarctica settlement? ;) (eg any place on Earth is infinitely better than any place on Mars, maybe a couple of scientists are ready to endure Mars for a couple of months at a time, but beyond that? It will be like living in a labour camp in (frozen) hell.

No air, scarce water, radiation challenges. Comms to earth has a 3min lag on a good day, 6mins roundtrip. On a bad day it's 45mins.

We are better off at this stage of human civilization to look at building resiliency and redundancy at home. Settling margins of Earth in places like Antarctica, underground, under water is many orders of magnitude simpler than Mars, provides useful models for distant future space colonization, and also provides us with some of the civilizational redundancy and resiliency many space-colony-enthusiasts are looking for.

Re: Starship V3

#619
post #399

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nobody’s tried because they are a short flight away from South America. No point. It’s cheaper and easier to fly it in. There are skeptical arguments against Mars settlement but the Antarctica thing is kind of a weak one. To point out one more problem with it: there’s legal and treaty restrictions in play for that continent. You can’t just go. That’s another limiting factor.

You can try the same thing in Greenland or far north of Canada. But nobody does that either, because there is no reason to do so. However put a reason to go to Mars, i.e. alien shipwreck and there is going to be multiple cities within end of the decade.

Can you explain why and how we would build cities on Mars if we found an alien shipwreck there? That doesn't make any sense to me.

It would likely cost bare minimum 10-100 billion dollars to put a few boots on the ground on Mars, how could we possibly build cities there within the end of the decade?

Re: Starship V3

#620

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mice blastocysts develop into embryos in orbital microgravity: https://www.space.com/international-space-station-mouse-embr... Skepticism is good, but ignoring related work weakens an argument.

This is a blastocyst, then back to earth experiment. No organ development?

Blastocyst to embryo. It's not in itself evidence that humans can grow in space. It's evidence that the early stages of mammal morphogenesis work fine. So why conclude without evidence that human morphogenesis probably won't? It's too early to say either way.
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