761–770 of 839 posts
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One could use hollow core fiber, which has much higher limits. Up to 99% of light in a vacuum IIRC.
A wave guide?
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
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True that, but that would point to the need to do this outside of NASA.
I would say it should lead to reform in the legislative process for these sorts of projects. This launch represents the triumph of private enterprise, yes, but there is a strategic need for the US to have such capabilities independently of the ups & downs of private industry. So I would say it points to the need to have a blended approach. I would love, for example, for NASA to license the technology from SpaceX with…
This can only work if there truly are many competing sellers and buyers of the same service.
A market with a monopoly or monopsony doesn't work well, and the military industrial sector often has both: NASA, NRO and DoD are not competing as buyers while Boeing, Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman basically take turns as contractors because DoD doesn't let one win or lose too many contracts in a row to prevent one of them needing rescue.
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Once the job finished, the machine is dispensable, but the astronaut definitely wanna go home, which will cost much much more.
Has nobody considered sending an older astronaut and not bothering with a return trip? I could imagine a lot of volunteers if you promised 5 years worth of dried food, comms back to earth and lots of fame.
But this is something that's not going to be allowed.
Look at all the safety measures they're putting in spacecraft to ensure people live. No way is anyone going to approve a one way trip to Mars.
I sometimes wish people were more comfortable with their own mortality and death in general, but that's how all the humans with "warrior genes" died off.
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I think the comparison between Elon Musk and Henry Ford starts to break down a bit towards the end of your comment. Elon Musk tweets plenty I don't like, but he's far from a Nazi.
This is definitely a hindsight is 20/20 moment. In an age where radio was new, where televisions were even newer, where transcontinental news took hours, days or even weeks to travel, the knowledge that the Nazis were engaging in mass murder was not readily available. When allied troops liberated the concentration camps they filmed everything that they saw because they were concerned that without footage no one would…
Either way, that's not really my point. There are probably better "eccentrics" to compare Elon Musk to, that aren't so dramatically worse than Elon Musk. Perhaps Howard Hughes? There are some problems with that one too, but I think the rift between Elon Musk and Howard Hughes is probably narrower than that between Elon Musk and Henry Ford.
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Would it be exciting to terraform a planet or go to another star system and observe life there?
Would it be exciting to live in a tin can and do maintenance on air purifiers for 20 years?
But yeah, it's not for everyone. Imo, it would be pretty exciting to continuously enlarge some sort of habitat somewhere.
In case there's no way to return to Earth, would definitely need a steady supply of drugs of all kinds and good doctors, otherwise suicides would become the number one cause of death soon enough.
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Not quite, it’s “If you build it, they might come.” You only need to look to the history of railroad in the US to see how infrastructure frequently didn’t pay off.
Didn't railroads essentially opened up most of the North American continent?
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Building a moon-base or mars-base would be an interesting experiment for humans. 1. Have a backup of our species in case something happens to Earth. 2. A great experiment in anthropology! It could help us rethink how we organize life on earth. As far as I see, a moonbase would be a "greenfield project" on land that doesn't belong to any nation, where they have to build everything from scratch. How will they organize?…
Won't they just recreate Earth's social structures on the Moon? Possibly with divergence over time but why would they suddenly abandon racism and nationalism?
Consider the map in the section Turn of the Tide on Wikipedia's Women's Suffrage in the United States article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women%27s_suffrage_in_the_Unit...
It's not a coincidence that as you go from west to east, the level of suffrage for women generally decreases prior to the 19th amendment. Nor is it a coincidence that the 19th passed. This was due, in part, to the federal system of government allowing states great freedom in how they operated, but also due in part to the expanding frontier. Governments were allowed to experiment. Wyoming (followed quickly by Utah) was the first state to recognize women's right to vote. It actually working was great evidence for proponents in other places. It also put competitive pressure on other states to get it right if they wanted women to immigrate to their state (which they did).
Over the short term, we'll probably see something on the moon more like the early British colonies. But over the long term, once the moon becomes more or less self sufficient and people start spreading out across the surface to found new domes or tunnels or whatever form colonies eventually take, I suspect we'll reap social and governmental benefits.
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> Ceres does not currently have a space gas station on the surface. Golly gee whittakers, really? I had no idea! Well that changes everything! Obviously we'll need to build infrastructure. My point is that it's a worthwhile investment. You obviously seem to disagree, which is fine, but if all you're going to do is be needlessly condescending then this conversation is probably not worth continuing (but eh, it's a Sund…
Your every response to very real engineering challenges is "just do the thing" or hand wave it away. I don't think you actually understand the difficulties. You have read some pop science books and some "hard sci-fi" and think you've got it all worked out. Everything seems easy and straight forward when you don't understand the actual problems. Deep space is hostile and unforgiving. Asteroid and cometary landing/samp…
I understand the difficulties perfectly well (or at least recognize that there are numerous difficulties far beyond my expertise, let alone that of people far more knowledgeable about space exploration than I am). That doesn't mean they cannot be overcome in the coming decades, nor does it mean that they cannot eventually be overcome in a way that's economically viable, no matter how much you strangely want to pretend otherwise, nor does it mean we can't discuss how we might try to overcome them. Technology marches on, and naysayers like you get left in the dust.
> You have read some pop science books and some "hard sci-fi" and think you've got it all worked out.
https://arxiv.org/pdf/1612.03238v1.pdf
https://www.nasa.gov/content/goddard/new-nasa-mission-to-hel...
"pop science books and some 'hard sci-fi'" indeed. But no, apparently you've got me all figured out. Just some starry-eyed nobody who watched Dune a few too many times instead of someone who, you know, actually pays the slightest bit of attention to what NASA (let alone other space agencies) is actively researching and around which it's planning missions.
(As a disclaimer: I have watched David Lynch's Dune a few too many times, but I assure you that has no bearing on my perception about what's feasible in the coming decades in terms of actual real-life space technology, at least not until we get people so hopped up on drugs that they figure out how to fold space)
> You're talking about mining asteroids like it's a solved problem and it's just a question of willpower.
All things are a "question of willpower". Nobody (least of all myself) is under any illusion that it's easy or that it's a "solved problem". The only claim is that it will someday be possible, and that for that to happen we need to be figuring out how to solve those problems, and in general what we need to do to make it possible.
Meanwhile, you're talking about mining asteroids like it's some impossibility that we'll never achieve. Too hard with today's technology and economies of scale, so let's not even talk about it, right? What a bleak and pathetic outlook on humanity's technological progress.
> Many things in pop science books or science fiction are simply not practical and many more aren't even possible.
And this ain't one of them. There is nothing being discussed here that is entirely outside the realm of physics. We ain't talking fucking warp drives and replicators and Vulcans here. We're talking about very real plans and very real research by very real space agencies and very real companies trying to figure out exactly how they can make use of the vast resources beyond this single planet.
Yeah, obviously it's expensive now, and we don't have all the necessary technologies now. What about 20 years from now? 50? 100? That's the target, and that's where we're fundamentally at odds: you're going off on this tangent about how it's so expensive and impossible in 2020 (and needlessly insulting me in the process - thanks, buddy) while entirely ignoring that we ain't talking about 2020 at all. And in that equation is the fact that Earth's resources are - whether you like it or not - finite. Earth cannot sustain humanity's continued economic and industrial growth even in ideal conditions (and let's face it: we ain't in ideal conditions). As resources become scarcer and scarcer, so too do those asteroids become not only more and more economically viable to mine, but more necessary.
Baby steps. Now is the time to start building out that infrastructure, bit by bit. First LEO, then the Moon, then beyond (including Ceres and the rest of the asteroid belt). We'll get there eventually, assuming we don't drive ourselves to extinction first.
> Also while space is awesome, Earth is right here. It's the only place in the solar system humans can live without being wrapped in massive amounts of technology.
Not forever it ain't.
And that's another key point there: you do realize how destructive Earthside mining is to that very environment that makes Earth friendly to us humans, right? How it poisons our soil and our water and trashes ecosystems? Earthside mining at modern scales is "cheap" only if you ignore the countless externalities thereof. Such concerns are not an issue with asteroids; there is no ecosystem to destroy, no rivers to poison.
The sooner we're mining asteroids instead of Earth, the better the prospects for Earth to continue to be a place where humans can live without being wrapped in massive amounts of technology. And if we're too late for that, well, hopefully we've figured out the technologies with which we need to wrap ourselves, eh? If we can survive in space, we can survive on even the most human-hostile Earth imaginable, and between mining and carbon pollution and deforestation and the myriad of other short-sighted things we as a species have done to our home, that human-hostile Earth is not only an inevitability, but one that's coming sooner than you think.
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It's interesting to think about that from the other side, too. Just delivering the raw materials to the manufacturing facility would cost ~$3000/kg (assuming rock bottom SpaceX prices). Based on some loose googling, I think that 1kg of raw material would yield only something on the order of 100m of cable. It looks like a typical 100m fiber optic patch cable retails for about $60. So, there's clearly a lot of value to…
For the time being, they are targeting specialty applications where it is not uncommon to charge in excess of $1000 per meter even for normal earthly fibers. For scaling up, if one uses the smallest commercial fiber standard (80um diameter cladding--they would put the buffer and whatnot on after it comes back to earth) the mass of the fiber is only 53grams/km so using your $3000/kg the cargo cost is only $0.16/meter…