811–820 of 839 posts
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Aren't physical buttons that you can feel with your touch safer than touch screens?
Not if they weigh so much you don’t make 11.2km/s
I'm surprised how I almost ended up tearing up and was close to crying while watching this. Saying this as someone who is not a huge NASA or space enthusiast. I did study physics, and I'm more into science than the average person though.
I pulled over on the side of the street to watch this with my kiddo on my phone. It was a historic moment that I didn't want to miss. I really wish that we didn't have to make EVERY experience ultra casual these days though...it was disorienting to keep hearing the astronauts referred to as "Bob and Doug". These are veteran Air Force and Marine pilots. They deserve their honorifics being honored if anyone does.
I guess if you consider funding coming from a source other than the government historic, then the launch was borderline mind boggling.
Agreed about "Bob and Doug". But then again the bravery, training, and talent of the astronauts weren't the focus of this launch. This was all about Elon and SpaceX.
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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…
So, no idea the cost of O-O amplification or O-E-O these days, but it's expensive. You have to run power (usually there's power with the optics), and the bigger problem is real estate (At least in urban areas). 100x lower signal loss would do away with most of these. For example, the MAREA ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MAREA ) undersea cable is 6,600 km long. Current optical fiber requires repeaters every ~100km. I…
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The Nazis were in power for six years before 1939 and existed as a political movement since 1920.
And they started mass-murdering people in 1939. The news were full of it.
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People buy and flip houses, despite the fact that it takes months. What timeline would you think would discourage short-term investment? Ultimately I'd rather place the responsibility for long/short term investing on the investor. The fact that most retail investors should be investing passively and long term is well known at this point, the issue is one of education. Don't dumb down the system when it's easy to make…
> People buy and flip houses, despite the fact that it takes months. What timeline would you think would discourage short-term investment? Months would be pretty good. But I suspect that wouldn't fly in practice. Flipping houses is long-term investment, no? Even if the asset isn't held for a long time, long-term value is added. This is very different to speculative trading where no value is added. > The fact that mos…
Buying stock by definition is purchasing the right to participate in a company's future profits. That's the reward for taking a risk on the company, and the primary metric by which "who can use it effectively" is determined. It isn't and has never been some board of financial justices trying to figure out how reallocate capital out of altruism, otherwise hedge funds and active traders would all be non-profits.
There isn't an obviously correct way to do this, it depends on one's objectives. Financially illiterate employees contributing to their 401ks have different needs than hedge funds who have different needs than people trying to build wealth for non-retirement time horizons in taxable accounts who have different needs than people saving in HSAs and 529 accounts who have different needs than Pension funds, among many other users of the market. It's up to the investor to determine their needs, not be coddled by some nameless, faceless system that only permits the lowest common denominator of participation.
On a more philosophical note, systems where people can't fail are systems I've experienced professionally (working for companies with political/economic moats so vast they can fail repeatably and not be punished). All it produces in my experience is complacent dead weight and rules to maintain said dead weight that unite to stifle the progress of those who wish to perform or make progress. The systems become benign tumors at best.
Now granted there should be some safety nets in place, not everyone can be or wants to be a high performer, but that doesn't mean we should make every room with padded walls. People who throw money into the market without the slightest bit of research should be punished for their lack of planning, same way people who jump off a roof without thinking are punished by injury.
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But there'll still be humans. Just not necessarily physically at the mine or factory. All you really need is a robotic chassis that has sufficiently good AI to use hands and follow basic instructions, perhaps helped by a guy in a VR suit back on earth or in a nearby spaceship. Perhaps aided by simulations to ensure low latency - things in space should be easier to simulate without the outside world interfering much.
> perhaps helped by a guy in a VR suit back on earth or in a nearby spaceship. Definitely not "back on earth". Lag is an issue with VR as-is with mere milliseconds of it, and you'd be calling for minutes of latency there. And "in a nearby spaceship" would, definitionally, involve getting humans most of the way there; might as well get them all the way there at that point.
Obviously doing this for robots on Earth is tricky and largely pointless, given it's probably easier to just reduce the latency directly. For remote mining on asteroids or something there's not a whole lot going on in space. You're not going to get a random pedestrian or cyclist suddenly popping out in front of your robot. It's far more practical to model and simulate it entirely in e.g. a game engine, and then record it.
At least, that's my guess where things will go.
The point about the spaceship is not distance related but that building life support structures into everything is quite expensive, whereas building them once in a spaceship and then extending the human presence to all surrounding structures would be a lot cheaper.
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Out of curiosity, how do modern systems handle DST outside its seasons e.g. “12/31 21:15 EDT”?
I think on most Linux systems a time string in a specific timezone is just a visual representation. Internally, times are kept as a number of seconds from 1/1/70 UTC midnight (with leap second adjustments if needed). When a user wants to convert to/from a timezone it is a simple addition for the timezone offset. EST adjustment is always 5 hours, EDT always 4. You could in principle warn users that they are asking for…
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I'd volunteer. It would be the adventure of a lifetime (literally). 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.
"No way is anyone going to approve a one way trip to Mars." If you would have the rockets and equipment and a place in a small state to launch the rockets: who do you need to approve it?
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On the ISS you can produce higher quality optical fiber than on earth [1]. A demonstration fabrication unit is already on the ISS, and NASA has recently published prices for using the ISS for commercial tasks such as this. I suspect many other manufacturing methods can also benefit from zero gravity, and as launch costs drop more of these will be explored. 1: https://upward.issnationallab.org/the-race-to-manufacture-…
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…
Launching the raw materials to orbit from Earth might cost $3000/kg.
While Earth is great for being able to sustain life, the gravity well rather sucks.
Launching the same materials from most other interesting places in the solar system would cost a lot less, (at least, were there people there to provide some sort of settlement)
For instance, presuming most of what you need is silicon oxide anyway; launching the raw material from the moon and transporting it to earth orbit easily costs MUCH less fuel than launching it from earth.
* Earth->LEO: 9400 m/s * Moon->LEO: 1730+680+3260=5760 m/s on rockets alone * Moon->LEO 1730+680=2400 m/s with aerobraking (smarter) * Mars->LEO 6300 m/s with aerobraking * Asteroid belt->LEO between 1060-3360 m/s
Moral of the story: Don't launch your stuff from Earth if you can at all help it.
Now, once you have a somewhat established moon settlement that can take on projects it gets even more interesting. Unlike on earth, Lunar gravity is so low that things like a space elevator or a linear accelerator are practical with even todays technology and materials science. Combined with aerobraking on the other end, you could ultimately ship materials or goods to earth for cheaper and faster than china post ship from china. ;-)
The only downside: first you do need that settlement on the moon, and that's one heck of an initial investment. On the other hand: once established and marginally autonomous, you can intuit that -despite harsh conditions- such a settlement could be quite a competitive location to establish mining and industry.
Reference (assuming this one is well made): https://www.reddit.com/r/space/comments/29cxi6/i_made_a_delt...
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Those journeys usually had an economic motive, e.g. find a quicker route to Indonesia, and accidentally discovered new lands (to Europeans).
During much of the Earth exploration phase destinations in Asia had more food and money than Europe (also easier to survive a winter)... I don't see this ever being the case with Mars.
Of course, an industry established at a moon settlement could do it for even less. :-P (1/4)